So much talk of the dope of a new Spring that I can barely steady myself long enough to fuck at my mouth with the wet sex of a wine cork. Or flutter in that strange staccato that pulls me from the bathtub to my clothes. Or through the doorway, out into the wattle and clouds, drunk, a freeway paved across my tongue from that One. Last. Cigarette.
So much talk of renewal, and birth, and rebirth, and the violent carving out of words into the air around dinner tables and bedrooms. Words that fall across pages like these and lay dead: stripped and gagged and bound. And as birds do, all these things take flight and I want to set the cat amongst them all. And once outside I see the ending of everything. If this chill murders me as I sleep above the traffic, what then will I become?
So much talk of hope sliding against our mouths and it is this that I carry with me to the river, and wash, and flatten against the rocks and leave to bleach until the sun dies. So much talk of some future remembered, of next year, next Spring, spring, love, and uncoil for me. And of the heart of things, which can’t keep time, and which can’t keep time from slipping. And of the music that wells from the water and what of it.
So much talk of the everywhere, of the knife tears we leave behind, of fence posts and brick and of sand becoming glass under the rape fantasy of warfare. Or the mirror we use to destroy these things, or the songs we learnt before we were born. And then we’re back to Spring, the candle smell of poetry, the coats that we have grown over Winter and that we peel from our skin in strips the length of our tongues.
before