my language was my mother

so this is how she dies then
bit by bit, limbs giving way, neck

taut, throat choked on a bone or
something, something in the belly

pulling back, lunging forward both
at once until she’s done, her eyes,

fingernails, skin, tongue, turning to
purple, taking to death as a precondition

to extinction; I’d always thought a
light snuffs out from somewhere

inside her and she’s gone, a blotch of
blackness but it’s more than all

that; there’s parts taken away
one-by-one-by-one from her, from

me too when she goes, consonants
clanging at first, then blurring into the

aaas – eees – iiis – ooos – uuus and the
rest of it until she and I touch our own

liminal space of nothingness just like
that: there one day then gone – poof –

a draught, the south-westerly prising
open the nothings on her worktable, the

book sat upon its back, pencil-marked
in places where she stowed away her

thoughts for later on or thought she
did, its flyleaf flapping, the pages ripped

from the spine before they were read

before the anointing

eyes swept forward, chin parallel
to the ground, shoulders lax, engage
your core: you’ve acquired your bearing
over a millennium; don’t tip your head
forward, sit still to allow the pouring: sesame
and olive oil infused with the orange of
flowers, of jasmine, rose, cinnamon, musk; let
your body bathe in the slick of continents you’ve
waylaid, laid, then carefully overlaid until
we’re all palimpsests, until
we’re paradoxes indigenous to landforms written
over or overwritten, until we’ve lost our tongues
to other tongues, to all tongues, until we’re
tongueless; your gilded spoon is the hollow
where hunger’s sat eternities or all that comes
along with it — desires, dreams, dispossessions,
yours, mine, dredged up in shoals along the
coastlines you’ve cruised then crystallised
upon your diadems, the rings, swords and
sceptres you sport; the bathing is an act of
revoking the past, the unction, thick, amniotic,
running down your face, neck, torso, groin
a symbol of blood, of bloodiness, clotted
in patches now, scabbing over lesions and
wounds of nations you’ve held dear – so
dear for centuries – until all fragrances have lost
themselves in themselves; in the holy emulsion
live histories and geographies, the vernaculars
consumed and regurgitated; the sacred communion
carries in it incantations aborted in your
many wakes, set rootless and adrift on the
pacific now; your first gasp at the decant marks
the freighting back-and-forth of fear and of
heartache, aches, postcolonial aches someone called
them in passing and subcutaneous, subsisting, still
wedged in there somewhere; the chrism & ampulla
are carriers, bearers of cries that never carried, or
were made to carry; sit still to allow the pouring

~~

bone journey

there’s an art to arranging
bones, laying them together
by way of size, shape, density,
to form a human body;
you need to be careful where the
sternum crosses the chest or
the rib cage cloisters sit, bearing
the weight of what pulses
within; you need to trail blood streams
before deciding if they bear the smell of
love or human failure; you
need to walk slowly at first, navigating
the tendons or ligaments that
bind the flesh of insurmountable hunger
and of longing, weigh them all against
the number of breaths exhaled
and inhaled in one day; walk gently
upon the brittleness of the skeleton
that props up an entire bulk,
makes it look more human than it really is;
if it’s the head you’re after then tread
carefully, count all your steps within,
sometimes aloud,
sometimes sotto voce,
in keeping with the rhythms
of your measure, for should you miss
a footing you’ll plunge backwards
into an abyss of darkness; it’s a matter of
circumnavigating really – one…two…three…
four…five… and so on,
slow, ever so slow,
as if your whole life depended on it

~~

isle of wight & green onyxes

… jadeite, jasper,
amethyst, choral, lapis lazuli,
opal, opalite, sea-carved with careless
precision into angels, angelfish, angelus,
it’s an island of colour, colourful
bounty, contour, conformity, churches
washed by coastlines, quartz, agate,
paraiba tourmaline, perpetual skies
pulsing, pulsite, petalite, breathing
that bit more, breathing amazonite, and
the farther I draw the closer it grows,
growing out of the unhurry, its citrine
pools of sunwork, of waterways, shoals,
pike, perch, plaice, plankton, jellyfish,
feather-fungi, as though all this were
all there was to it all, and the gulls here,
rose quartz and mother-of-pearl,
unmanned, loping the airways, feeding
on shrimp, on weeds, tangled, turquoise,
sea-fires fronting ferries
farther and farther into firmaments of
blue sapphire, tanzanite oblivion, all
weekend I’ve been here,
driving from coast to coast in search
of fun and phenomena – lain low, in
hiding almost, waiting, afraid to stir,
be stirred, rippled to possibilities, my
ocean harp, my wrist, my palm, the crook
of a one lone finger, svelte, so svelte, so
supple, birthing waves, birthing auroras,
pale peridot, sometimes chrysolite,
sometimes sunshine sluicing coasts
of chrysocolla, apatite, granite,
nambulite, as though sandstoned and
washed off meaning and memory to
sapper greens, limes, lemonade, and
this time I left you behind when I
came, sepia, serpentine, shunted behind
bookcases, writing desks, discs, time-
machines, I deleted all texts from my
mobile, I kept the emails, the notes,
notebooks in word, threadbare, lapped
in, lap-topped, hidden in a folder I’ve
named ‘unnamed’ and shelved

~~

laws of conservation

I’ve been in mourning forever,
grieving I’m told has a shelf

life, so does love, it decomposes
into something slighter,

something more human, the vestige
of loss taking different shapes

and forms with time, turning to
peat, soiling the palms for their

indiscriminate scooping and handling
of it all so you can’t tell one from the

other, it’s a process, this, of fertilising
angst until you’re done, vaporised

to fumes; our physics professor once told
us matter is never destroyed, grief is

matter, it’s much the same, I’m much
the same, I’m sat suspended mid-air in

the spaces somewhere between longing
and despair, their odours obdurate,

coiling about my person when I move
or lay myself down on the edge

of a day, it’s an act of pointless
ablution, this forgetting and forgoing

because it’s not water that must do
the trick of washing and waking here

but what remains of time and of me in
my constant cleansing of my crests

and contours, my neck, chest, midriff
down to my ankles that are rankling

still in bits and bobs of memory and
memorabilia that I sift, stubborn like

soot, like sorrow, hung in threads
and filaments and what was once

organic, in its purest form of anguish,
now maps marked in lines and

lineaments living inside me

~~

and you say she’s gone for good

(for Jane Kenyon)

the cyclone
took your home and your
wits last monsoon but
that’s not true – you
were done after that
when she deserted you
on the patio overlooking
the avenue of poplars, tall,
spindly against the sky,
where you first touched
her lips with yours
and felt their tenderness
I follow you to
your hearth that glows
with butt-ends of cigarettes,
the potato peels you dump in
there every evening, and
the writing paper
turned to balls of crepe
she said she loved you
or didn’t she? but you
did and that’s all that
matters now when the only
sign of her is your face,
her wardrobe,
her scented handkerchief
(it was scented), and
that half-drunk tea-cup
……………………….on the dining table

~~

bone island

I take my bones each night and
lay them one by one upon the cabinet
by our bedstead, separating flats from
longs or wedging the irregulars in between
to prop up the assortment of human
bulk; once I finish with the bones I
tackle the organs; plopping them one
upon the other is not enough, you’ve
got to cradle each mass in your palms awhile
like sculptures carved of jelly; listen
to their sounds, quiet sometimes,
sometimes prophesying their
annals of love, the minutiae of survival, or
what we call life, as though that were a
phial containing myrrh and wormwood
tossed together in driblets when
all it was, was a fistful scooped up
from the backyard somewhere, seeded,
taken root, routed, bearing the detritus of
loves and losses or what’s left of
you and I now; did you know
the spleen is the toughest to house?
there’s nothing much you can do except
splay its purple largeness over all others, let it
filter the remnants of what was or
is now, safeguarding blood with memory,
buffering reserves of pain and heartaches, or
holding moments against the pulsing of the
day-after-day-after-day; yes,
laying them all out is a task but
putting them back together is an ordeal;
you have to wait for the magic fires
to strike that first spark, to string
them back together into being
as though a lifetime weren’t enough already;
as though pain were felt in parts, where parts of
you and I were always left behind and wherever
we’ve walked, and with whomever we’ve
been spent or broken; we’re islands, have been
forever; and no, there are no sharp bones in
the body he’d told me once; well, that’s
some relief as we would’ve long shred ourselves
to bits then, before letting others do it

~~