Implausible Fiction

The sky opened today

with your exhalation.

Lips against mine,

filling  my lungs with your unspent air.

We dim-darkened together.

Your dry lips,

I feel the wetness behind them.

We whisper like lovers-

kisses, not because, no

I’ve never made love to you

I feared the hooks, the barbs, the lures

No gills, gasping, arching.

Not because I feared you’d pull me up

to the surface to flap around on your deck.

Kisses, not because, no,

I feared I’d bring down your ship

with me fathoms deep

and drown us both in inky,

bedouin dreams projected on bed sheet screens.

Not that any of this is real

except that I feared.

I see you paper cut wince.

It might hurt more than this,

calculating clever-less.

I’ve been collecting your clouds for a while now

The ones you gave me

so the wind wouldn’t blow them all away

I’m keeping them in tightly lidded jars in my studio

mixing pigments with them

One day I’ll paint that burnt-out farmhouse

of your fears with them so we can resell it

and move somewhere else

stop us sloping towards that space

where things have sunk into the soil

and the sky keeps getting lower

the chitchat of rain becomes a deluge

so no sunlight can fit between the big fat drops

We plunge through a blueblack deeper than sleep

I’m drunk through licking pearls

and drinking smooth stones slow rounded

by the river which rushes

though not near the rushes

where water pauses in it’s elbow

to deposit indifferent silt

From your words edible syllables

trickle through my fingertips

Your desires bind me with

an allusion to a movement barely glimpsed

eclipsed like a recurrent dream I can’t remember

recalling only the sensation again again

as the sky sits on my head

getting ready for a drenching

The fragile presence

of a long accepted

and celebrated absence.

Found only amongst

tombstones, old paintings

and books by read authors.

A door to unhedged,

unhinged vapours

Which our clever hands

can’t knock upon.

Signposts we hide

from, as if

they might recognise us

and give slow chase,

To this;

A total silence,

mummified, preserved

and marked in dense stone,

An emptiness unbreathable

so concrete.

My naivete smiles at your

sombre façade.

The colour came later,

Past the dark cluttered words.

Tonight we spoke like a frequency graph,

Like a landscape without edges,

Extruded strokes of light to my lips like fingers

stretching through the architecture of your words.

To cocoon the sounds in my ear longer

I scavenge images to furnish this room

that holds you in sprawling pieces

with feathered edges that overlap and repel.

I smear the walls with my tender vision.

This passage doesn’t permit complexity.

A blocked aperture half-closed

by the debris left by a fragment fallen

from the frozen eye of the storm.

It obstructs my view of your dislocation.

Someone coughs in the background.

Your voice lowers to a soft tendril,

I hear your body turn in your sheets

As you describe the darkness

that stares back at you.

In these implicit movements I accrue

the inescapable graduation of weightless light

that reaches from me to you under a heavy winter.

Colour will slide in the morning

over the outline of your refuge.

(like an unfinished house)

Like music climbs through those sounds.