Youth
His whimper in the depths of the night
Not yet a beast, not even two decades out of diapers
Oblivious to most things, including his beauty
and my love for him like thunder
brewing, soon to crash
The winding black hair on the inside of his thighs
The careful release of his air as I swallow his semen
its slow warm journey down the back of my throat
and finally him, spent
displayed upon my white linen,
legs spread, mouth gaped
A fucking monument
Considering youth
is just a beach seconds before sun set
swept hair and white teeth
and considering being young
has nothing to do with any of that
perhaps I shouldn’t panic as it dwindles here
or resent it exploding in all its glory there
upon my bed
The saliva of his cock stretching to his torso
The twitch of one finger,
The crescent moon of his thumb nail
The flaking skin between his toes
And now my ear
listening to his thunder,
distant, out to sea
Even my sleeping compared to his seems contrived
Here’s to things we love
Oh here’s to Brighton
A town that says ‘do your worst’
Says here’s to the hug that won’t let go first, taking the sting out of signal failure at Three Bridges
Says here’s to the archers and all the weekend flotsam that washes up beneath
Says here’s to the orderly queue of shit even deeper below, a feat of Victorian engineering
Says here’s to a grubby sunset and the whirling twirling starlings
Says here’s to 11,000 a year at American Express, crisp and shiny in a Primark suit
Says here’s to chips and curry sauce and the crunch of leather jackets
Says here’s to pile-it-high roasts with all the trimmings and the gurning turning chefs with nicotine knuckles
Says here’s to the Steiner school kids and their lost ambition
like mist drifting across the downs
Says here’s to saying sorry 100 times in the Kemp Town Coop and the calming absence of choice
Says here’s to the wind between the tower blocks battering your London hair
Says here’s to a sun drenched nap, half way back to Hove
Says here’s to setting sail in a mobility scooter, “ahoy” says the fat man blowing along the prom
Says here’s to giggling at the turnip palace as you pass the joint, resting your head on a soft white thigh
Says here’s to an overpriced painted rock and a passive aggressive sales pitch in the hallway of an open house
Says here’s to watching over us wise old channel like a tear in the sack of an eye ready to roll
Says here’s to the beach of misshaped hearts
Says here’s to falling asleep on the couch Sunday night and missing the rail replacement bus
Says here’s to getting here
Says here’s to never leaving
Here’s to the things we love
Boy
Boy
Waking
Eyelashes
Stroke my chest
I know he breathes
Leaving
His waving
Hacks and strokes my roots
I know he’ll be a house again
Bold and reaching for his place
A yard again
Lantana tangling like our history
Ode to smack
Crushing razors
To a silver paste
Suck it up
Slide
Thud
Shudder
Purr
Back to numb
Returning home
No longer sore
No longer raw
No shore
No end
To this sawing
Carpet ride
God the beauty
The beauty god?
Is this it?
Is this you?
If not
It will do
January before I leave
I can’t see my beauty for the blinding whack of yours
I can’t hear my voice for the thunderous purr of yours
I can’t see anything but you on my sheets
We’ve got the same blood fella
It rocketed through our veins at once
The haze of our encounter is how I imagine an afterlife
The eternal ecstasy of you in my sights
The universe was finally something I could hold in my arms
You brought it to me, into my room
The same room I wondered how anyone comes to hold all they feel
You talked of loved ones with a wide smile
Cocked your lips and nudged mine
Cast a spell
That only after I opened my eyes to see yours exploding could it be undone
You left a hundred years too soon
I was just about to whisper
Please stay
The immortal wakes
He didn’t lie with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed, slowed to just a mumble in his big ear
His yawn a tunnel through time
A window too
Took respite in a cave to ease his arthritic thumb
For many moons and one sun
For most of the Neolithic age
The immoral wakes
Remembers centuries as minutes but what is time?
Memory is a river that churns ocean to ocean and cascades into the bluest of space
Thinks, as one thumb circles another for maybe a week
Ponders, without a clash of eyelids for no one knows how long
Imagining a tunnel through a cave wall
He might dig sooner or later
It matters less as he turns and sleeps some more
The immortal wakes
You can forget love, he told a beast that lay beside him injured from a great fall, perhaps from a higher cliff but not from the sky
that’s a different beast, one that doesn’t speak
The immortal slept through the crash, the thud
The dust cloud had settled by the time his eyelids like a cape on a bat opened wide and took in light
The beast could do very little but listen
The immortal wakes
He told the beast he had loved harder than the fall he’d taken days maybe weeks earlier
The beast groaned (so perhaps it was weeks)
He loved hard and deep like the tunnel he might dig
many moons ago
He didn’t lie with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed, slowed to just a mumble in his big ear
They walked across mountains and planes, her asleep on his back, in his pouch, on the crown of his head
Her mortal rhythm taps on his skin
Skin maligned with the scars of eternity
Scars you’d expect, basins of old sweat, slowly drying up as he sleeps
They leapt like leopards until they flew like birds, he felt love was like that
leaps monumental and over and over until you feel like you are a bird
Across oceans they swam one hand digging through the weighted water striding onwards
the other keeping her mortal heart tapping against the palm of his hand held just above the water
He lay with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed, slowed to just silence in his big ear
then the wind from the oceans, the very same oceans they once swam together, whipping across the earth
lifted the dust, the very same dust that surely settled upon his cape-like eyelids as they lay closed when the beast fell from a great height
became powdery blow on a brittle cave wall
he sent the wind back to the oceans with a scream that gave no one any rest least of him
until
upon a sleep he embarked to hold his memory of her in a thousand winter’s dreaming
The immortal wakes
he barely recalled the feeling of grief and why she was important
the beast smiled and asked, so you can forget pain but not love?
The story of love is eternal not the feeling, the immortal said looking at the beast’s one lazy eye holding up
One long sentence
years months days hours wide eyed and wet in the middle
flooding the golden grass with grim reaped tears through a voice from the softest cloud
down the farm wet shuddering despair full to the ear’s brim
every minor chord of gutting regret
struck
I could never promise you a future a four am without fear
I belong to two islands a thousand miles apart with an epoch long aching to wander like a dog in search of a resting place to wheeze and fling one final critique on life’s superfluous complication across the polypropylene carpet
now you have a thump thump thump into the two thousand mortal coils and under you
his arms will unravel
my lovely sphinx forever buried in my dna fur snuffling truffling like the mysterious dancing light the tor presides over and beyond
silently right there in the murmur of an algae hue we lie
in a crackling peace waiting for the wicker flames to rise
licking each other clean
the farm falls dim damp dark exhausted from marching rites through mud and stone
the earth strong and loud I squeeze his hand
burning
Something died
Something died between us last night
A spark that once flickered turned to dust
It was Good Friday too and we hardly noticed the loss of what was once just ours and what is now every tale of missed passion
Our eyes agreed to the terms of our end, now more fodder for sad songs
A trusted friend made an observation about the need for our sparring,
You postured, I slumped.
Protesting too much I saw you
Self-conscious enough to tepid all your reactions to fill your wise I
But I knew the nose of our wine, the only other man that could
We said goodbye to great heights only seconds before not years as you insisted
I cared not and smoked against your will
For love is something that leaves me bludgeoned
But the spark was cracking wasn’t it?
The old Italian in the restaurant saw it from afar and came running to enquire about our miracle
You assured him it was platonic affection
“Yes,” I should have said, “a spark not yet spoilt by love”
You can spend as long as you like promoting our ordinary alliance
I know you know we know of this thing
our thing
And even if it’s dead now it was alive once and I will talk of it forever in fear of the silence confirming a myth that keeps you sure of your own paltry psychology
Even just to piss you off
One day you’ll realise reciting your truth
No matter what the risk or how tragic it plays
Turns sparks into fireworks
Privilege
A white boy born into a poor family must find it hard to understand the idea of white privilege
A black boy born into a poor family must find it hard to understand racism
racism is pain unheard and unwitnessed
class war
privilege is a mood not a status
black deaths matter
Uncle Ben scrapped its Uncle Ben on the front of the 2 minute rice something about a century old stereotype
Quaker Oats scrapped it’s Aunt Jemima syrup and pancakes, comfort food looking a bit like slavery
All this because a black George Floyd managed to gasp “I can’t breathe” in ear shot of a smart phone when he’s neck was being stomped on by a white cop
Token change, all ads up, I guess
Even the British Broadcasting Commission cast more black actors in it’s period dramas, to represent
Hope it says to each and every little black boy yes you can swan around in a top hat and high-buttoned, single breasted waistcoat one day
no matter how historically inaccurate
All this makes me feel like real change has come to food and TV