40

(Silvia, Hanging Bank, 15th of May, 2020)

For now, you are denied 

the world

The sun rises, indifferent

Useless gold

poured

Over biblical pestilence.

In nature’s lab experiment

Freedom has a negative valence

You negotiate the cage

Gage

How long you can stand still

Unused 20-pound bills

In your pocket

You lust for freedom

Boil over

Like milk forgotten on a hot stove

Read out loud from the Book of Sleep

Fingertips trace a secret architecture

under-skin tensegrity

This spring is a gilded lady

Bone-sick

The streets are empty

It feels like you fell into a dream

A child again

Whacking at hawthorn with sticks

Scouring the black forest underbelly

Where pine-needle snow

settles in soft dunes

and firs with ghost limbs

are allowed nothing but verticality.

Crowded church spires

aspire

to new life, but only at the edges,

where light bleaches the dirt road. 

You tear up the spine of a pine-bud 

And crush it in your mouth

Inside you too is a living forest
The shape of your mind just never made sense

on its own.

Truth

(Silvia, Hanging Bank, Sunday the 17th of May, 2020) 

When we smashed the inkwell of truth

We mapped-out the vast realms of 

The Kingdom of Things That Will Never Be

Here Be Dragons  
Retreat
Save some dignity.

We hid the map in Plato’s cave

Eros granted you parrhesia,

Pinned my tongue firm to the wall.

His hungry dogs stalked

the shallows

Grew weary of their own bark

Too tame

To go

for the kill

Gentle beast – cried Psyche

If I caught up with you at the end of time

On a dustbowl red Earth – when we have long forgotten

How to breathe

If caught you 

and shone candlelight into your pale eyes

Would you lie still?

In the aftermath of truth,

I hang loose, inert

A strip of silver nitrate

Full-up on light

Sobriety seems as irreversible as

Blots of dark ink on the old pine

Of a child’s bedroom chest

Time’s cycles

launder on repeat

Weaken the dye.

Every poem

Not written

Is another

lie.

Christmas

You find me in bed
into your arms
I feel the velvet ropes that tie me to my mast
and I hear
I hear the syren's song
let me encircle your thigh, your shin
tighter
don't let me go
skin on skin
hull to water
eels with mysterious mating rituals
are you even real or just scent and temperature
your manliness - sculptural
yet inviting, soft enough to mold into
biceps brachii, extensor, flexor, radius
I want to inventory the muscles in your arm

Why can't we be lovers?

You arrive late as if time were not irretrievable
in cool blue, momentarily scanning the room
but not believable
in your search.
As I cannot reach out for you, I pretend I have no arms. No eyes.
Yet all my cells are undercover spies
Mind zooms past conference props: chairs and people, pens and fingers, water pitchers,
chins propped on hands, sound glitches
In this madding crowd
I want to sway in your light
Undulating reed
To be seen but not seen watching, wanting
When the amplified pitch of the feedback loop triggers a whole room, you don't startle
The crowd laughs
But they could cut your profile in marble
We sit
Like two arrows at a crossroads
pointing in opposite directions
Dancing in and out of each other's invisible sections
boxers reading distance and closeness
we both get that sex is an 'It' ness
I poke your arm and you touch my face with the edge
of your palm, as you lean in for a whisper
I know my scent is trapped in that space
Yet I don't know my own scent
And I don't know what your skin smells like either
You are text written in invisible ink
I stalk the stage, I unmute myself:
Why can't we be lovers?
I am calling out to you in a roomful of people
Why can't we be lovers?

Little Venice

By Sil (7th of July 2017)

Little Venice 

Belongs to cyclists 

And city boys 

Who ping-pong their freedom away

Fake status satiety

Seek temporary safety 

In money and uniform.

In the glass theatre

A vertical, potted 

Gauche summer 

Directs a play without words;

It moves its actors in reverse 

Nature, reduced to a trimmed-back 

Farce mustache

Has no scent.

We're braving the edge 

Eyes, adrift 

On the frogskin face

Of the water 

(A prince

Left unguarded,

Unkissed even by death)

Carefully unpicking 

The stories 

We tell 

From the ones 

We don't.

Desire makes

Halfway station 

Between promise and 

Caution 

Conspicuous barge

Painted in lurid letters 

Its owners 

Are water haters. 

Silver Spoon

I linger in your spaces

Walk and walk,

Possessed by beauty

Admiring your painted ceilings

The sandstone arches;

When you build

You build beautiful walls.

Once I thought us, siblings

Born under the same moon

But Oxford reminds me that

You’re the one 

Born with a silver spoon

They’re playing the first chords of

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Within Plato's lackluster cave

My heart  -

A cat writhing 

Under truck tires -
Spits as

Young orchestra players sway with grace

Sheldonian angels

In the name of the Father, blessed.

Your tribe wear privilege ever-so-lightly

As if it were an expensive coat

You wouldn’t mind leaving behind

In the Bodleian Library

Shredder

(Silvia, London)
There is no you in you,

Just miss-target, lassoed desires

I envy your skill 

at fighting fires

This is your city

I take to the streets

In a pink scarf and red lipstick

Modern girl with a match-stick

Lingers on New Bond Street

At Sotheby’s the flower arcade

Never fades

That’s the best money can buy – perpetuity

This isn’t about finding you because,

Your sort shun opulence

I bet you smirked when Banksy did his shredder trick

Intellectual “Fuck-You, Your Majesty”

Hey, Mr Status-by-Stealth

I wish you died

They’d bury you wearing your usual grey

Next day – I’d keep those damned gates locked

At Friary Court

It’s late autumn, evening without afterglow

Did I tell you I have a child at war with himself
Together we paint a face on the moon

I’m 38 - my path loops back home

The lights are on