Glasfryn Project

2.
From Parker’s price guide for new and used cars
to ritual or not so ritual decapitation
is a hop and a click, a crick, is a frozen shoulder –
screen set back at an angle, the workbench
higher, you’re alarmed to say, ergonomically
speaking, than good or lawful. But anyway
it hurts. Yes it hurts. What you have in mind
is love, though, not murder. Certainly you’d be advised
to follow those tendrils out through the backdrop –
mackerel clouds deploying as the dawn comes up
(no end to that flummery). As long as you’re online
you can’t be, that’s how old-fashioned the set-up is
in this place. Forget regrets, flowers crushed
on the altar, a scent of somebody lying close,
their breath on the back of your hand – all of this
dissolves at the first touch, like knowledge. Is knowledge.

From SHIELD (Parthian 2010)

There was a certain amount of muck and gore:
the lawn’s still heavy with it in the early morning.
La madrugada – it sounds like a cross
between a profane canticle and a woman walking
slowly, very slowly to her last tryst
with someone she couldn’t quite save, though she tried, she tried…
I doubt if my neighbour knew when he spread the grass
and clipped… Happily, the sun mops it dry
occasionally and he lays his towel out like a flag of leisure,
as if there was nothing missing. Reality
is like that, it doesn’t carry very far.
It isn’t too much reality we can’t bear,
but too little too soon. Some animal’s been at the binbags
again – tins, bacon-rinds: everything turns to mess
in a trice. Which is why we honour the mistaken
no less than the ones who never aspired in the first place.

From SHIELD (Parthian 2010)