THREE DAYS

so it’s like, we shouldn’t press our cheeks together
like we think / we know
because say i saw pen on my sock
this morning i looked and finally
let some noise pass through
lodge / into my ledgers,
take heart there
& i thought that there was something
in the words it slipped down but then all of this

my padded fingers slip on
to the handles swing above us
we are shifted i mean
shifting through
the undergrowth & i am

i have fallen over i slipped
#~#~#
yeah but it’s fucking cheap they’re all so frightened of him.
and i want some lemon drizzle & the pub & you

HERE. east oxford smells like cress now
burnt rubber snakes its way up st clements
smokes out the morning from my eyes
& now the day is rotten limes
in the way i speak to you, love

(####take heart, i never hit
the right keys))

so the notebook bloomed
when my cola leaked & i must wait
for it to dry. you try to make sense of it,
the brown from the red, i mean
but i can’t see
that you’re right.
all my thoughts come in full sentences.
i am trying to pretend
they do not. three weeks in muck &

three days away from you
they have nothing to do with what i mean?
but the radio, what men say, #hahaha
somebody lives there & kicks the ticker
when they should edit,
circle me deeper
they only know grammar, & even when you are waiting
we slip on my surfaces, talk for days
about how i should learn to eat again
with half a broken jaw & you will be here
when i sleep, three days from now

& the days past.

& i am always a gutted thing with hands
too cold still to work the phone.

POETA EX MACHINA
for Veronica Forrest-Thomson

my voice makes the machine work
the tape clicks inside
but it’s just ether now

if a voice is a long way away
and you are here, on paper
only it’s like writing a maths

(a puzzle-box; i know
how better to move its body
when i move it with me)

problem – the voice animates
and if i animate the voice
and if what animates me is

scraping carrot cake off a wooden fork
with my teeth/tongue, reading you out
lying prone, saying loudly what

i want to repeat with myself
and also with my body
computing words / understanding through

gauze, and these little things
put away in boxes. stamps in thick ink.
i would like to hear your voice.

if what animates me is you.
if what animates the box is me.
and the different stories; each floor

is its own house, each room a world
with rules i can spend my whole life
playing a game with, looking for pain

& pleasure there. a string of tape with dots
in but the dots are holes. they mean things.
and the absences sing through clicking

and i scratch a diagram on the table.
and i would never speak for you.
still my body. puzzle-box. what old tape.

who knows that it’s the power and the pain
the act of twisting one way / instead of staying
still that means: this is what meaning is

that it’s grappling with a wall that makes
the house. that it’s the torn nails. that it’s
what hurts, and hurts badly. that the voice

rang out once, and will not again, but still.
still there is something that moves. that sets
the problem going. and somewhere / in the air

i would like to move, first. under my fingers
and running through my lungs: i wish you
were here too / is the solution. but not yet.