Mature Age Student
The earth is crying like it’s lost
a fake Rolex
it believed was real
based on the glistening multitude
of assurances piled onto the Rolex
by the passenger in the earth’s taxi
who’d had no cash and used
the watch to pay the earth
in a time before digital transactions,
in a time when the earth had a second job
driving taxis at night to pay for night
courses in psychology
because education had stopped
at 15 years of age
in the earth’s small town but stayed
for decades howling
by the front door of the earth’s mind
like a dog with abandonment issues.
No One Says Terrific Anymore
The earth is crying
but in a slightly annoying way
because it showed in its teens
its hyphen-heavy poem
to a friend and the friend said
‘hyphens are dead’, forgetting
that the origin of bedroom is
bed-room, which is at least
the way it’s written in my edition
of Bleak House, now being swabbed
for traces of explosives at airport security,
where I’m hoping I haven’t packed a blade and a friend
just texted to say I should
say hi to the Parthenon for them,
which is dumb because I don’t speak ancient greek
or even modern greek and besides
my flight is bound for Dublin,
where the sky on arrival is beauteous
blue perfection.
On a scale of beauteous perfection
it’s potatoes au gratin in food blog photos,
delicate golds and light browns glistening
like a desert coated in margarine spray.
Quite a good score but not
the top, for consumer surveys show
the sky rates best
when it’s about to disappear.
What if I Don’t Leave My Body?
The earth is crying
because it once cried simply
from seeing a puppy at an airport
lick its owner’s cheeks clean
of feelings of inadequacy yet won’t
visit the Mona Lisa
because a stranger eating octopus
at a bar in Barcelona said ‘it’s pretty
underwhelming’. Same for the Taj Mahal,
Niagara Falls, Rome
(the carbonara wasn’t quite
transcendental), same
for most of the world whenever
elation wasn’t slipped into his hand
like the lost code of a juicy bitcoin account.
Uplifting Comedown
At dawn I watch the sun
ooze onto communist era buildings
like armpit sweat
and all it brings to mind is all
the diabolical ways
I might steal fries from a stranger’s plate.
You think I don’t love nature?
I do love nature —
but mostly for the picnics,
and preferably in pictures
where I for once am not
Caspar-David-Friedrich-ing myself
into the centre of vast ineffable
landscapes that somehow manage
to squeeze themselves
like expert queue-jumpers
at departure gates
into stanzas of beautiful poetry.
You think I don’t love poetry?
O I do—
it’s just that I’ve never read any
with the same urgency as reading
a text message over the head-rest
of someone seated in front of me
on a plane whose wheels are already spinning
towards their imminent redundancy.
Doorknob with Vital Signs
In a recent tweet I read it said
‘the simile is dead’. Dead
as dodecaphonic serialism. Dead
as last year’s five-year plans.
So dead that roadkill
will be assessed with the phrase
‘That deer is as dead as simile’,
a self-negating incantation which brings
not only the simile back to life but also
the deer, who wobbles
onto its hooves and trots
across the road and into
the forest, ignoring the absence
of signs indicating
an area set aside
for the safe crossing of deer.
The Earth Thinks Rich
The earth is crying like it’s just worked out
that the coins buried in the sofa are worth
more than the actual sofa
and actually belong to the bank
that provided the loan
for the purchase of the sofa yet won’t
make a dent in the monthly repayments.
It’s dreaming of investing in
a washer/dryer combo completing a few
of its seventeen remaining tasks
before settling down to a film starring
Bradley Cooper.
And just like that the earth wonders if
Bradley Cooper is also dining in
at a takeaway restaurant
eating French fries dipped
in melted cheese the yellow of
nicotine stains on ceilings
in apartments in East Berlin
after the fall of the wall but before
mass speculation on ruins
and the attendant stripping of plaster.
Small Wonders Sample Pack
On earth I am no more
or less alive than yeast
and Olympic athletes
but I remember I’m always
finding new things to like.
Like the way we agreed on stars
as appropriate symbols
with which to rate operas and seafood.
Like the way a single star
can receive a five star review.
I like how no one I know gets older
unless they’re absent,
aging privately and suddenly
like pears.
I like the way that language can be briefly terrifying
until you learn that the words
‘die American...’ ‘die Single...’‘die Quick...’
are only the fragmented beginnings
of sentences in German.
And I feel young.
I feel young
in the way I feel fluent
in a foreign language
when someone speaking it only says
the only two words I know.