Embedded Files
Circuitous
Circuitous
The solid ground pities you
you with your skull sunk low in wine,
& thick-haunched bee with the notes you collate, which repay you
with otherworldliness in moments, hypertension throttled & heart stung
as you pace the park, shoe knot a circuit of promise which leaves you,
& the restive galaxy, pushing on a string
It's a base today, in the doorways
people are waiting to grind themselves to noise
& women are reduced to proxies
metonyms for disposable morality
deferred for modernity's sake,
open to nerve-ache, flood & to the West
& its infections
Sunlight is streaming through the antique glaze,
& My love for you is galling,
you state, over lemon polenta cake
I'm paraphrasing now, but it’s something like,
I am a bore-hole, & must be plumbed for minerals
& despised
Why not just say – the water born from the rock is cool
but you have been raped by industry
& in many ways unnaturally encased
Old injuries beep down the blackened feeding tube
clarty data, filings & distractions
for service providers comatose on cash
behind the blinds which have been pulled down all around
We pay up, & the soles I touch with my feet which
correspond to the street
really are responsible for the global tarnishing &
prophetic rumblings of the tectonic plates beneath
Airless
Airless
Employing sharp tactics, the thistled glare
berates us, love-struck & pompous
as we descend, leaping from the peak
Face-off with magma
Wet earth leaching & the
almond scent of gorse,
a slipshod embrace, an ill-starred precipice
In motion with rock, bud, mineral
all things animate to
clasp our anklets, make us ashamed
But I am not the dull natural lover disembodied
your soft blue anticipation
impenetrably curtained & prophesised
by old anthologised dedications to
the naked flame.
I am not the unlived hollow arm
taking flesh limbs & hooking you
sunk in my own wares or dangerously bangled
Night is a black cloth scarified with false light & diesel
but the pestilent air we breathe
is sweeter than the dream of transport
Our course the refraction of each other in each other's eyes
Cosmic punctuation! We re-join the dots to cut out dead Gods
& place our white hearts in fabricated chaos
Culture-clean & mosaicked with thoughts tired & unthought
We are there, stuck & peeping
at the hapless cycle of an ash-hawking sun
Samantha Walton has published two chapbooks: tristanundisolde (Arthur Shilling Press 2010); City Break Weekend Songs (Critical Documents 2011) and is working on a third collection for publication in 2013. Poems have been published in the Cambridge Literary Review, Hand + Star, Other Room Anthology, the Aubin and Wills Almanac, Scree and other small magazines and journals. Samantha’s read in the UK, Ireland and the US, at festivals in Surrey, Cork (SoundEye 2011), London (Greenwich Cross-Genre Festival 2010) and Scotland (Alloa Poetry Jamboree 2012), and has a recording on Archive of the Now. In 2011 she co-organised ConVersify, a three-day poetry conference and festival at the University of Edinburgh and the Scottish Poetry Library. In April and May 2013, she will be Poet in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, working on intersections between lyric poetry and the life sciences.
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