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GEMINI
Someone is still having the same thoughts I had
in the house of childhood, the same dream
I had for months, and weeks
of being in the flare of carnival
Somewhere between touch and silence
in a pool of echoes, before words arrive
a
measure, not dissimilar to my own
of finding faith in streams of light
that seep through cracks
in the floorboards
and
a feeling, a wisdom, of hooded joy
of raking secret windfalls where nothing speaks
but the other north.
Someone is still having the same thoughts I had
in the house of childhood knowing the moment
I could never hold—a scent of home,
the
perfume of ghosts clinging to the tip
of redwoods and rainfall, caught in the fatherless air
almost archaic, a voice
now stranded in the vein of my palm.
THE WITCH
Her
teeth were eroded tombstones in a derelict churchyard
And her hair, seaweed strewn across a disused beach
And her eyes were sliced courgettes, mouldy in the
fridge
And her ears each an upturned question mark
Her breasts were volcanoes, dormant
Once explored by Arabian travellers
And her nipples were dollhouse chimneys
And her mouth was the scar on a pirates cheekbone
And her nostrils were paper-cuts
And her tongue a lizard, dead in its skin
Her feet were those of a suffragette,
chained to parliament gates
And her knees were bee-hives in mid-winter
And her laugh, a Red Setter when the post drops
And her shadow was cancer in the blood
Her blood was an ashtray dunked in water
And her footprints were tremors before earthquakes
And her glare—trout crippled by fishhook
And her eyebrows, half-smoked strands of rolling
tobacco
And her sentences were bullets in the wall.
James is a poet & poetry curator who lives in the UK
and hosts a night for the Poetry Society in Covent
Garden. He will be traveling-- and hopefully reading!
-- in NYC this fall. |