lanham street
lanham street comes and goes
like the spin of a spindle
the turn of a screw.
is a gift shop and in it
the men cry out into the foyer
from their respective shelves
and at night raise a glass
chin chin!
to the bookend that is life.
chlorine
He takes the stool to the shelf and finds the bottle with his fingers, knows it by touch, knows it’s bad news but he unscrews the cap and smells chlorine and sometimes it’s a liability, tonight it’s a blanket. It runs its mottled fingers over his scalp and now he is something within something bigger, eclipsed by things he cannot understand. Takes some comfort in his insignificance now. Sometimes life is just a day. He wakes up and suddenly it’s ten and he hasn’t eaten and the kids haven’t been taught and he doesn’t have a teaching licence, doesn’t know how to do it at all, he’s really just a kid himself. He scratches and looks in the mirror and sees his face and that’s a day. That’s a whole life: these moments. And it’s time to go to sleep for another, whatever this is, and he lies there and wonders and doesn’t know why; keeps wondering and not knowing until the timer goes off, until the door is closed, until the evening is knocked off the bedside table, finds himself not knowing and awake even as the night runs dry.
sleeping pills
Enough with all of it — the waiting for letters, the wanting for more, the fallacy of finding myself in answers. Not there in the looks or hands of others, in the purebred projections of people carved out like rhinestone in my mind. I recognise facelessness by touch now. I trace out the frames of open windows in the dark, old habits, new seams. Not there. Not in places. Not the ones that disappeared when I left them, whose carcasses call my name in dreams, and not in the ones that never changed, whose putrid echoes I catch glimpses of in the drive by at dawn. Not in carparks or balconies in the bottom of bottles, nothing in the temporal comforts of film, beneath the bony sadness of others, no matter how they bury mine. No more silences I will mistake as love. All these things I’ve seen at times as solutions — I can’t say how much I would like to still believe in them. But answers I know would require a question and now there are only cobwebs where I used to dream.