The Afternoon When Nothing Was a Metaphor

 

We are walking through a yellow field open to the blue sky

You are chewing one of those long bits of grass

I am eating a banana

Loving the now-ness of the moment

Trying to remember if banana peel is bio-degradable

There are cows across the field but I reckon they are

Too far away to chase me and kill me

I tell you this and you laugh, as if I’m being droll

And not actually genuinely terrified of cows

I mean, banana skins must be OK to throw away, right?

They’re nature

But… is it because they’re from abroad, 

And maybe English soil is weirdly racist?

The tall grass brushes our hands

You are being light and funny and your smile

Looks good in the sun

We have no particular destination

I decide to throw the banana peel away

It arcs into the grass and disappears

You tell me that it won’t rot properly

I say, it will, probably

You say it’s litter

I say, where is it then?

You can’t find it

I think it’s only litter if you can find it

The cows are closer than they were

I close my eyes and enjoy the warmth of the sun

On my face

And the feel of your fingers brushing against mine

Hemingway

 

I’m trying Ernest Hemingway, I am

To be like you

To be a man

To speak words like the whip tough crack

Of leather on a madman’s back

To be as simple as I am profound

To grow the kind of beard

In which a lesser man would drown

But

The words that dance out of my brain

Are playful. Daft. And, I’m afraid

They’d run a mile if they met up

With the rough and twisted gnarly phrases

You carved into the wood

I suppose your thoughts might start the same

I suppose it’s in the drafting

That they shake the whims and notions away

The road you make them walk

Hones the muscle

Makes them strong

And I quite like the road

I’ll walk for miles, I’ll do the time

But it’s the journey and

The stuff we see along the way

That, for me, brings out the song

I know. I’m sorry, Ernest Hemingway

I’m not tough

I haven’t got what you might call “the stuff”

My words don’t have that discipline

And I love some of them too much

But don’t give up on me,

You old man. If you could see

The crossed out lines

And scratched through phrases

That scar this poem’s first draft pages

You’d smile, maybe, 

A little

Through your tangle of a bearded face

And find me on that long, tough road

And meet me

In the broken places

Star Stuff

 

Come with me and dance in space

Reach out and touch the constellations

They paint the sky like

David Bowie’s zig-zag face

The solar winds rip through

The fabric of our clothes

We are pirates

New Romantics

Kissing

Turning

Tumbling

Against the void, burning

We fall though time, 

Made of stars

Your pupils wide

A black hole forms within your eyes

I’m stronger now

My veins alive

With the moving reds and purples of the night

And we explode, and wine cascades

Down our throats like velvet snakes

You rise above me, silhouette 

Hair tumbling like Medusa

A visualisation of an echo

A pop art painting

You, repeating.

The floor dissolves and we fall through

An orchestra rises up to swallow us

Ripples of electric pink and blue

We loop around each other

A Mobius strip of call and response

Melting waves of sound

Fading to a single point

After-image dancing and receding

And the rising, gentle shuffle

Of silence

Above us in the sky

The wolf star 

Burning bright