New port to new port
A train skulks up the water’s edge
Creeping through gardens
Crouched low against the fences
Stealing knickers as it goes
Utterly bastard groovy, indeed.
My mysteron-marked hands
Maybe it’s my age
Moulded in the chicken-headed rock
With the pawprints of large beasts
Repointed with place-names
And fingerprint whorls of red dust
Arsenical mummification
Leaves purple and white thumb smudges
Across the corners of the marshlands
Where a crocodile-back finger swims
Anhingas ready to strike
And the spine cracks into fissures
Traced in river charts of the narrows
Guides for the intrepid and the blind
Through these impassable gulleys
My journey to the west took me left
Until the land ran out
Across country from the mudflats
Wondering where the rock caves are
It was a shoe
And a man with a bandsaw
While all movement stopped
At news of an unexploded badger
On the tracks ahead
Burnt white goods have fallen down cuttings
Casting off their masks of caramelised faces of pain
Into a grey city carved from green rocks
Where the hairy-faced piss against granite boundary stones
My passage grave oesophagus
Trumpets from the slate beds
As you rise from the ground
With a light on your head
Heat strengthened laminated inside
A fractured map in the bowl of a skull
Take the weight of your shoulders
Crackling in the burning black synapses
A spectrograph flickers Raudive voices from the damp
Snow mist over the great laid slabs
A milk scar echogram of Greek song
Smears our eyes to the passing blur
Three screaming long-eared bats
Squat like sheep at the foot of a streetlamp
Two voices separate into plainsong
Where runs and roads and rivers bark
One unheard accent points a map
Finger to finger
Into the gulf
Without a roof
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