chrysanthemums steep,

blooming in blue porcelain

It is because I am the dog

Waiting at your door

Dark eyes, darker while I beg

You for more.

Glistening teardrops run down

The frosted window of a packed train carriage.

Two more hours of standing, stagnant 

If we were referring to an 

autobiography

        which perhaps we are

then also we are referring 

to a name.

considered the thief of joy;

that which provides the ultimatum

in constraint between stimuli and response.

A light filled room

Linen sheets on a single bed

Oak tree coming into leaf

For the year I’ve been back

It has sat alone at the fireplace

Early noughties: flip screen, numbers reading ABC

Raw, bitter, gnarled roots

A well run dry

An amber brazier burnt to the wick

Death did not come suddenly for you,

he bloomed like a poisonous flower in your body.

Under ribs of chestnut brown,

a swallow plucks the ancient sound

from an artist’s lips.

Homecoming is an elusive feeling, and airports are curious borderlands.

Socialism is good and capitalism is bad -  

A truth universally acknowledged,

I’d ask you if I could.

You’d answer if you could.

I’m not broken,

I’m bruised, 

Oh, Mother, do you remember

that tiny red projector,

decades old, that you still treasure so greatly?

I was the last within my class to stop believing in God 

Which is, in many ways, entirely odd

Time / spreads out / and space

so that all the / constituent parts of existence

Indulge me; hear my faint, fading whisper.

I will tell you of the dying seconds.

“Don’t turn down that street,

don’t turn down that street,”

I pray to God.

I

Has he seen azaleas before?

II

They’re different shades of pink, just like the flowers he gave me

through the phone when we were long distance.

We march across to Trafalgar Square with indignation

At the cold tightening our hands, shortening our breath.

‘I’m sorry, I’m atheist.’

I say to the man who stands on the corner

Babbling about baptism at me, leaflet in outstretched hand,

I build to break,

and to keep myself from breaking.

I build towers with stories 

that pierce the heavens.

I want to apologise to the flowers 

that I picked before their time. 

The grey of these days intrudes every step, 

with cold as a dagger taking away confidence. 

Do I see you in my mind, 

on days of being supine and bedraggled? 

Cadmus had wept to see the Spartoi bloom.

Where father was craven, the sons were cruel;

On Monday night in the real world / Illegitimate cigarette smoke / Curls into commas /

The stars are shaped / Like a question mark.