by Fran Lock, with commons image above
/ wait for it.
/ spring to come, reconstitute the stubborn world.
/ our bodies, tailored to containment.
/ fault-line forcing an afternoon.
/ the brute verbatim of work.
/ makes of the mouth an immoderate pocket.
/ disavowed pay cheque, burning a hole.
/ but wait.
/ the sticky quilt of extinction. skin.
/ city, gestating a ghetto.
/ we are sentenced to shape, sewn into solstice.
/ shortest day. of remission and decline.
/ like chance drawn tight. off-stage of itself.
/ i brush my fingers over the broken typeset.
/ like kiss me, hardy. where the hardy in question is a big galoot in a bowler hat.
/ on the trail of the lonesome pine.
/ wait for it.
/ the landlord, unravelled. the landlord, annulled.
/ o empire of enthusiasm, we too have been dreaming of one thing.
/ anonymous, uncharted love. the slang hanging out of a poorly seamed phrased.
/ wait.
/ for spring, gauntly apparelled in pleasure.
/ its eyeful of phwoar! and roses.
/ sparks fly from our splintered hustle. everywhere we go is green.
/ so hang on. pierced by fatigue, tetchy and determined.
/ tearing an elegy out of the stretched blue air.
/ the shadow leaps over the self that throws it.
/ once, it was late july, declaring its funeral surfeit.
/ armada of black gondolas along the boozily cordoned road.
/ once, crescendo of torches, a taxi contending a window.
/ discrepancy, entrenchment, screened on an overcast day.
/ and the eye becomes barracks. mortally fortified. once, until –
/ we sprung from ourselves like small fires. falling up.
/ we worried at summer like dogs. like –
/ traplight. possessive and vespering. the flats.
/ my point is: this too shall pass.
/ and the sabbath day damply hoarding its offcuts of illusion and reproach.
/ hold steady.
/ outsourced and scheduled.
/ where sick bodies yield more profit than healthy ones.
/ where dead bodies yield more profit than live ones.
/ where bread and spectrum! is the order of the day.
/ eating our weary distinctions into prayer.
/ trapped in the catastrophe.
/ that also passes through us.
/ pain, contractually normalised.
/ be still my book of hands.
/ hold yr nerve.
/ one day we will move through this city like st margaret in the bowels of satan.
/ we live, not to escape or to forget.
/ but to irritate, mightily. no, it is not enough, but wait.
/ not for the powdery never.
/ how winter comes inside a glass balloon.
/ trickle-down choristry and golden flakes.
/ not reeling like a punctured drunk around the lustre of a word.
/ like tariff.
/ among the pinched, compulsory faces of slack hope.
/ not here, where we are wastes of aid.
/ an aimless nail driven into loss –
/ a labyrinth we carry in the body.
/ but also yes, here. wetly wrapped.
/ in the penalised sheets of childhood. hooded and choked.
/ and still we rise.
/ between theory and encrypted form.
/ the canal in this light, red.
/ like a seam of burning coal.
