When you stepped into the station
To report him missing
It was not like TV
You expected an inspector
Creased with concern
In a room as lit and as quiet as a leafless winter
Handing you a cup of tea
Fluorescent tube buzz and green is altogether different
Hang on, I’ll just check if we still have those forms
The faded posters stare
Five year old haircuts and typefaces
The bent anorak vomits on the floor
Gun holster hips and black boots move with the mop
Name?
No, your name?
How tall?
What colour?
What pattern on his shirt?
Do you have a recent picture?
Hold on a tick
Sorry.
Yes, Lil, good news,
Someone handed in your coat
No, no,
There was no purse in it
No, we checked
The constable’s handwriting is poor
Like a doctor’s
Yarns of ballpoint cotton laid out
In some ancient art of divination
There are two esses in depression
How long has he been missing?
Has he been in trouble before?
Wait here
I’ll look him up
Radios speak and choke
Choke and speak
Bent anorak rocks forth and back
The styrofoam steams
The air is green with disinfectant
Keys and chains bell the come and go
Calculator keypad door lock
Vests and pants of many pockets
He’s pretty clean
We’ll put out a bulletin
It’s not like TV
I’ll make a photocopy of this
Here’s the number of the station
Let us know straight away
If there’s anything you’ve missed.
Beautiful traveller,
You know all the names
Leaf and seed
Clasping pod and reaching tendril
In all the languages,
Right down to the failure of nomenclature
Where the touch of bracken
Upon the fine spun pattern
Of your fingers
Whispers ellipses
That epidermal shiver
Beautiful traveller
Our oldest teacher
What is the word for this
Kind of love?
Beautiful traveller
I breathe now in distance
What is the word
For love of this kind?
I wake up with a toothache
Violin lesson pain on the lower west side
Nothing for it
The infection will drain to my heart
And I’ll probably die
Better phone mother and apologize
I didn’t make it, ma
I’ll email some notes for the eulogy
And a list of people
Not to invite
Actually, ask anyone you like
I go out
Pace the day like a beach towel in the spin cycle
Colgate grit crunch at the place
Where molars meet
Bus
Bus
Bus, my salvation
I saw one once crush a man in High Street
Apologize to mother
That’s no way to think!
But oh so easy
So so easy
I get the five sixty
Free food jazz bar shout me a drink
Pethidine grapes
I’m no connoisseur
But it feels like a pretty good year
Double thumb bass dude rifling in my entrails
Triple crotchet something something
Snare
Look at all the kids in here
Rhythm from the toes to the tingle tips
Where lipstick smears
They’re going to make it, ma
Lazy youth today
Look they’ve nothin’ but the music
That A diminished gonna drain to my heart and kill me
Just like that
Imagine that
Dropped into a kidney tray
All my fear
All my despair
With a delicate hi-hat ting
I’ll give it another year, mother
And call you happy birthday
When Nana had her cataracts
I asked her what she could see
Shapes and light, honey
Shapes and light
This is what my camera sees
And I’m starting to wonder
If I might be blind
I shot a wedding on the weekend
They made kissing shapes
And dancing shapes
And flowers in the dark
Lace stretch and billow straining
The last drops of waned gibbous
Through cloak of cloud shapes
Shapes and light, honey
Shapes and light
Loud ensingled aunty shapes
Puffed chest swaggered uncles and
Dandelion kids begging for a breeze shapes
And light, honey
Smokers on the balconies
Torching effigies of their various panics
Gravity tugging at dangled ties
Chatter bubble shapes’
Feathered edges drifting silent
Seeking Venn
Shapes and light, honey
Shapes and light
But you get used to it, she said
You just close your eyes
Run your fingers through it
Every now and then
I remember the smell of my first computer. The Commodore 64.
The year was 1983, and I had a boyhood fist-full
of bush-fire compensation dollars. Tuning it in
to a black and white TV in the corner of a caravan
ash black under the fingernails
Moon Patrol
Fort Apocalypse
Galactic Attack
Attack of the Phantom Karate Devils
Attack of the Mutant Camels
Missile Command
>> What do you want to play today?
Trying to hold my brother still,
Mother tending the bandages.
Peas and carrots in together boiling.
Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, that same year,
Defied his computer’s warning of a US missile strike,
His absence of retaliation saving us all from annihilation.
Not that we knew it in our quiet corner of the world.
Washing on the line, propped up with a stick. Tree smoke in everything.
Petrov’s satellite thought only of missiles
At the sight of sunlight glinting in the clouds.
