Fuchsine

As though the overcast might tweak

an airman’s maps, his foretelling — 

as though in chains of stop-start

ischaemia, I count myself unstressed,

I walked along the human promontory

rough-tongued as sugar paper,

walked from the metal-bashers’ shop,

vinegar and cayenne

sprinkled, spiked my glass of milk.

Well-set icing blistered.

Ice set into cat’s-eyes.

I walked through the empty lot

the enormous empty lot

towards the store beckoning me, soon I

turned my back

on every now forgotten unit. Get yours

I said. Get yours.

And I kept mine in ghost capital.

Such was our material ease that year in

plenteousness, in full flush.

Sumptuous but interfusing, basking

all the while June

was leaching sweetly,

bite like molasses.

The block the far side of the apron

squatted with capacity.

Happy to take things as seen

I browsed, I window-sloped,

honey lanyards brushed my lips.

Then I too was stopped by the incident,

the episode, the voice that spake,

lushness hit the doldrums.

Frigate birds collapsed on ice,

wings like stick pyramids.

I stood dangling my bunch of keys.

Saw in the lake’s heaped frozen

waves a new car

exhibition, restaurant, luxury housing.

This then was the block whose feed I

hung upon,

suckling on the live stream so generous

I could overflow,

creeping to within earshot,

stealthily advancing within reach,

this then was the source

marooned in transitivity,

flushed pink where sky spins and grips

or tries but soaked it slithers off,

its dazzle-shroud sagged

sopping with new storylines,

slid down in folds, pleats, bales of

episodes.

Lines aspired to mottoes, mottoes

to a motionlessness

tethered to reflections on void lagoons

where intermittent light spelt 

far less:

blemished forms of love

loving fault must needs be filled

but the field is made of faltering,

we walk on thin ice,

images that relay genital parts.

Look, each of us knows

what we could do with any of these.

A peasant with his crippled back and

upright broom

dusting off the sun-gilded runway,

a banker’s shouting ontic features

crabbed and tentacular,

crabbed and tentacular.

Like everyone turns in on himself

I saw the gathered looped and spooking

out their children, these too

stretched in their fire cavern,

talk would shift about the board

grinding thick lines of violence.

Activity lights

flashed, cycles juddered to a pit reprieve

behind star-blasted rock

pooling oil.

Still within a smoke scarf

three sit and talk and think to send a call

through wintery clearances.

Across the asphalt my bone vibrates.

Tap Tap.       Buzz.

Calendar beetles

tap inside false ceilings,

failing brands

collapse into the flickering of a hearth.

Clear light annuls

red crackle, time-stamps every flash

expiring assets show in.

Look, to make my call

I found my mouth,

licked the barrier streaked with fuchsine,

nibbled at the pith

between the tree and bark. Red daddy,

aren’t I big enough to walk,

pick up my legs, my pace

Look, I hack at overgrowth,

too grown up, well-fed for

jelly mould cars and download junket.

Magenta freights a weary sky,

heaved limbs abdicate.

Who hankers to walk grass and thrift.

Ankles pricked by gorse and heather.

Who walks on creases now shale

pockmarked with spots of tar.

My ghost is trying its weight

on stepping stones, look, it’s peeling off,

weaned into the asphalt river.

Ahead I see this huge container.