Rolling Notions

water in winter
a rat slips into ripples
silver under clouds

A tall woman rustled towards me at the ball. Her wine swayed ruby in a thin-stemmed glass. Drums ruffled. A papier-mâché mask patterned with tiny red flowers and green tendrils hid her face. Two words were tattooed on her neck: ‘Love’ above and ‘Death’ below. She bent to kiss me. I pulled away from her midnight lips and woody smell.
‘Love,’ she whispered.
I showed her my pocket watch, scrubbed by the rubble of time.
She unfurled her fingers and stroked my arm. ‘You have twenty-five minutes left,’ she said, ‘use them.’

First published by Mslexia
Image by Matt Benoit

He left art on a path.
Passers-by kicked in the cheek,
bruised the chin, dislodged a
nostril, finished the work,
strolled on.

 

How small I am compared to America,
a microscopic speck.
Am I here at all?
That’s me, I see, passing down a corridor at four a.m.
So quiet now the world’s asleep.
There’s no bustle, no scuttle, no wait for the elevator.
Just me and a moth, a velvet-winged hawk,
hug the cold wall.
I glide down the passages bearing my past,
a stethoscope, and your fading, jade ring.
I’ve been called to Five North
to save a patient.

 

Sometimes I sits and thinks.
Other times I sits and drinks,
but mostly I just sits.

Neal Cassady, The First Third 1971

Grubs lodged in mire
are blind and white.

Shrimp ghosts in benthos
glide over sediment.

Tapeworms and roundworms
string pale through entrails.

Spiders in caverns sway
on bleached fronds,

and clods cake bones
when eyes are gone.

Corrugated iron is everywhere, so are sheds. But not all walls are pink, and the detail in this piece of sheeting distinguishes it from others.

Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.

From: W B Yeats ‘A Deep-Sworn Vow’ (1919)

Walls can speak.