betweensmiles

. I His daughter's eyes          never seemed to tremble                    -her mouth was a bloodless white line. II Charles and Emily cooked after the holidays had passed and she laid down cutlery. While he cooked lamb with rosemary, new potatoes and peas, followed by rice-water and coconut milk through a quill. III Silent phone calls fall on a litter, made of bamboo poles, – calls about specimens and the skins and skeletons of wicker chairs that clutter up the spacious library. Melissa didn't come quite as easily   the second time around His name became sacrament,   the thrust, her atonement and her voice came dow

Creepers sweep the arched roof and the brick exposed walls of a cottage, becoming like a jungle temple in the sticky summer air, moist and humid, it sinks into legend autumn red now, thick, like veins, they stretch an exercise in constriction, "we'll choke this creature dead!" each leaf whispers, evil in the winter wind, as they sleep and dream of ruins. and down at the lake, below thin surface tension, (more solid now that at any time before) fat slate fish glide, catching currents, holding on, to be heaved, their dorsal fins like fanned tongues lapping arctic rime.

happy? Life is a progression of severity. A road of hairpin turns, And cliff-top cartwheels. Who would not want that drug called happiness? Not I. For it seems a ridiculous notion, like making love, because its all about keeping your clothes off, and keeping your mind off of her.

Brought by scattered movements to his attention: all at once passed warm and cool, into a place where shadows stretched their arms and rail-sparks ceaselessly flickered, on-off, on-off.

My left a girl - that works the while on paper. My right a woman - so small, the books she reads engulf her. Each work on, unable to stop inside this dull but lasting memory, each more than had their fill of such futility.

Coughing locomotives spit up soot, lonely tarmac now, that metal shells should choose to run down rails. Empty but for dollar drivers and rocking trailers that lag behind, full of bitter cooking apples swiped from unsuspecting trees. Full divinity violated by harvest vehicles. Shonee stands beneath shelter tin roof. Legs cold rigid. Sopping grey matted hair. A glint in his eye like violence, but altogether more entertained. Smoke lungs fogged up. Breathing out into cold air, he looks to time on his wrist, sucking life out from his arteries. Piya, all black-tinted auburn hair and heels in high abandon, sits quiet. Having seen large stomache

Perched merrily;                        a starling sings outside my window. Love is caves of ice, corpses in dried mud, roses where eyes should be,                            its twittering limbs, all a dance for touch, and                                                   a kiss, left on the lips so long                                                                              that it burns. But Love is not just physical,            love is a glance through shelves of books, something hidden amongst them,                       breathing in the dark, inevitable and vast,                               its fleeting, skittish and hid

* compound safety, sitting lazily in the heat of the garden sun, she watches insects, insignificantly swathing along the paving stones of her patio, incising-out lumps from dropped strawberries, and navigating their peculiar way around deadly blobs of cream, she reclines a little further, and props her book on her chest, looking over the brim of her leopard-spotted sunglasses, she spots the outline of her husband, bent over, weeding the borders, patrolling the edges of his little hobby ground, looking for elements of nature unwanted. *

*** its cry is a needle in the thick arm of the night, plunged deep into un-awakened minds, prompting soothing, the biting of nipples, the familiar ache when woken, the head begins to thump swollen bags under swollen eyes the red haze hidden below a smile directed at the cot in the corner of the room ***

*** unabashed next door the sound of a gramophone at 3am, playing 'Bird' jazz, that chaotic seamless thread, the bedlam of blues tunes in rewind this old man had style, now he has no voice box, cancer another history croaky electronic crackles, his sound ***