I’ll go to jail for this, the delicate disorder of your night knees pressed against the counter, the pencil-behind-the-ear query of the waitress you left behind, gluing the scene like twice-cooked araldite. I’m dropping this summer and I’m winning all the awards for all the ‘bad sex’ ballads you’ll write in the dial-ahead secret location of our local café. To which you’ll respond with a series of lovingly tailored suits designed to keep all action ever-pending. I’ll use my time in porridge to prepare for our encounter in the cocktail sanctuary. You know you want to run me over in […]

you stand in the doorway braver than brass & o! that electrowinning smile    I see your one s-orbital electron hover its halo over your head & grant you entry to ‘Home’    I believe we talk {mirabile dictu} & suddenly just cannot breathe    my respiratory enzyme complex expires & even your antimicrobial grace is not angel enough for my needs    you sit me down & put your face unto mine    regard me with your azurite eyes as you kiss all my fright & jump-start my Neolithic heart    I think I say ‘love’ or ‘oligodynamic’ & […]

after Martin Harrison, after Michel Deguy   The words are a silver lake, the wind blows a nova into your arms. When I wrote, buds of music opened in your reading.   There’s no escape, no one else will understand. The sound of my own sky falls on fields of withered flowers.   I return to speak with a drum of your death, the only sound (the years are a remnant forest) is a voice from the deep.   Someone kicks a stone in the street. I am falling, what if the rain could fall, make your grave green in […]

im not singing any songs i just hum along and hope you find the faking beautiful by the glassy sky passing lonely times one time i came down and saw your shape in the rain bubbling with acquaintances your hair dropping like monet down from your face i walked with you halfway home and at the streetlamp you were singing i cant have fun while youre not having fun and you dont seem to have much fun when im around your antipodean shine repeating in my eyes like wizardry in the downpour and i said if you kiss me now […]

in search of a line to begin a poem, that paces the same tempo brought on by blood, the well turned sun and congeal of mud after rain.   You reach for Adler and Freud and find denouement to match the purple mouth of sage flowers. Pam Brown’s suburb is nearer the first apple buds but no way to introduce new ground.   A sharp start’s the thing. Kinnell in the daylight yes you cling to the parsley gone to seed, gone to straw to seas of tea-tree mulch long drawn over.   But you seek, in a futile scratch, […]

What is the peculiar
consolation of a sky
like a violet lamp
above a crunched-foil sea?
Meanwhile, your mother
does not love you.

in the women’s museum there’s a phantom, who knew the emperor in real life. white or whitened, it’s hard to tell. but she’s one of few, a very pale percentage stolen from her family and mounted at the age of five. she is eight hundred years old and still sleeping in a cot. the nuns are forbidden access to the ladies of the office. lured by archaeologists, they poke around the garden while meditating on sundry crimes and misdemeanours.   downstream you google the windswept skies stained with mendaciousness. every day there are one hundred mundane or minor concerns, too […]

to turn / to the sky, a sulphurous crest of bird flight / the recursive kernel of a story in the making   to piece together, from effect to cause, from flight to wing, a shutter of time, to now unwind   Newton’s watch, clouds rotating with the swivel of fingertip, that kernel dropped   adopted by the loam, a line of code, a rogue equation, numbers spiralling, the rapid dispersal   of roots, viral affects, shock of the soul accumulating intensities, unpatterned   across hashtags / a convergence   of birds, in the expanding shape of a letter code […]

Now raising children as a lifestyle we look so much like American poets, except they had more Dexedrine and less automation. Amazon, for example, brings Richard Brautigan to my door, and I tell him to leave; I had ordered Tom Raworth in a sling. What did it mean to dally in Denver anyway? I hear they never even spent any gambling winnings. Not a lottery ticket in Hell did they buy. These useless Americanisms tarnish my name anyway. What nationality do I appropriate to naturalise this saturnine but saturnalian turn? The West is in a state of Brexit and we […]

Manhole covers in Kyoto are beautiful—embossed trees, flowers, intricate patterns— so I start to photograph them. I consider doing rubbings or linocuts.   Later I learn there are others, we are called ‘manholers’. It’s a huge trend.   More than 3,000 people attended a ‘manhole summit’ in western Japan in November. The Japanese sewage industry is releasing collectable cards of covers specific to each region.   And there are those with a specific interest in ‘cover bonsai’, the plants growing in soil accumulated on and around covers.   I hear David Marr on a panel at Gleebooks talk about his […]

vaguely obligated i filled the forms & scratched your name on the ceremonial sherd – an old-fashioned branch – & fed it to the lukewarm slot. the bulb in the waitingroom wavered across overalls & children with a birthday cake the man beside me wore a clip-on tie & trembled i don’t know long, not sure the clock worked can’t read analogue i rolled a cigarette & thought the summer you in your threadstore dress the blue the stars that dappled their feet in waxing dusk standing i fumbled for a match   Jonathan Dunk is a critic, poet and […]

We sat on the porch that winter and
talked of murder, imagined bodies trapped
beneath the breaking crust of the field.