poems.
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the sun sets over the end of the world and i feel my hunger flesh of me rising for its walk i want to love the way my mother eats lips spilling with joy fingers searching and finding around each joint dipping into the juices of the salt-stung tomatoes and of course i like everything intense i am a climber i see a boulder and i need to know how it can hold me and it’s hard to let go, baby, tho your…
new craters appear brighter to the naked eye some not even named yet that’s what we hear back from the ones we flung the furthest the ones who spent 40 minutes in that real place the ultimate no contact mountains rising as large wounds, high albedo in the western shine small islands of light beyond the impossibly rugged line of the terminator a rippled kiss on the far side of the moon, more…
the stars got stuck for a few of days now and they keep reminding me that i need human touch.
Friends— I was on a bus heading home for Christmas listening to the conversation on Poetry Unbound between Marie Howe and Pádraig, and I got so excited that half way through the episode I had to stop and write this weird little queer horny poem.
(i) Orion’s right shoulder is so large that if it were to sub in for our homegrown sun it would engulf the earth’s full orbit. (ii) Orion’s right shoulder, a red supergiant, will go supernova soon.
in place of a last kiss i wore your perfume to the halloween party dressed up as nothing but the bad guy in your story— i’ll have to survive november with no one here to save daylight your ex was jealous that i got to experience the medicated version of you i hope whoever comes along next gets to read the poem of all the things you love about them i never got to read mine nor did i start one…
I brewed a cup of green tea Wielding the tea bag like A censer, sending wafts of Prayer to some circle of heaven. Time slipped through my left hand Mudra, the tea blossoming into Bitter orange the colour of my Jumper.
pantoum for spring equinox
on the train i took the night i left / a couple fought violently in first class— / see, you said, there’s worse than us // you seemed relieved that i had moved on / yet in a two-day breath you were / announcing to a magnetised crowd that you wanted to sit / next to your lover and kissed me with an open mouth // how frail your body looked sprawled on your bed / the thought i’d break you in my…
i don’t tend to seek truths / in the placements of celestial bodies at the instant of my first breath / but today i can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some mapping between the small horizon and the big horizon / if celestial dynamics can’t be used as a dictionary to interpret our terrestrial ones
This poem was written during a poetry workshop as an homage to the gorgeous Self Portrait of John Lee Clark. Indulge in Pádraig’s reading of the poem and associated wisdom in this episode of Poetry Unbound.
when i complained to you that people don’t see my flaws i hadn’t meant for the world to rearrange itself into a classroom where i’d relearn my inadequacies like this morning when, after 2 hours of glorious sleep, i realised that i had forgotten to check-in for my 6am flight and got to the airport in a panicked frenzy having already explored twice the corporate cinematography of what could go…
there was once a mountain / whose rocks sprung cold waters and swirling tales / carrying fine golden strands of sand over my toes. // there was once a boy / in whose palms a lion’s paw dried up, stolen / for the love of a small mouth. // under the left side of the mountain there is a small opening which i only discovered after i started my pilgrimages. // there, under the tall pyramid, the sky…
it’s been many moons now since we stitched two photos together to make it look like // the string of bunting was riding the line of affection between us. // many moons now since you took the arm of my coat in yours // and were shocked to find it limp as i was wearing it over my shoulders; // you kept it though, cradled in your arms, // like a baby as we strolled down mansfield road in early spring…
in 1864 two sons of soil received land here under the new land reform which saw this land being given back to this, its people, who has been here for no one knows how long no one remembers what was here before though, by the spring, there’s a story of an old man and his hut whose cold hearth my grandad unearthed by chance their names are almost lost now but the land, the land remembers the agony…
longest and darkest night of the year and i spent most of it watching the annual physics breakthroughs learning about the background noise of gravitational waves that we black holes should’ve produced as we spiralled into each other faster and faster closer and closer to the speed at which i wish i could reach you before we deformed and collided into each other yet no chirp was to be heard no…
you held me tight as i hunted demons in my dreams like this mother with a teddy bear who declared “climate summit or death” or this bus driver back in japan who wouldn’t let me get out after my 大学院大学前 stop because a lady couldn’t find her wallet (she thought it was in one of my bags) and so i had to despair for over an hour as we circled the island back or the former lover who told me that they…
Hold.
i felt sick as we descended towards the city the city in which i had loved you we were passing through a turbulent cloud but i had started crying earlier in krakow listening to kyoto in my daily mix(and then later to florence in athens) maybe it was the tuna sandwich that should not remind me of you but the knot has been therein the middle of my solar plexus for a couple of days now since you told…
a diary entry
