Three Poems from a Longer Sequence


Relationships (all possibilities from one self
journeys all the ways out to each of us)
we run for the red bus not knowing its number
it is fun how your body's contortions pulls faces
                                                            beneath your clothes,
we watch the sound of the siren to recognize the service
is this ours, I mean, can we be injured by what we feel?
The cup of the city spills, shatters – it is called perspective
                                                            it is everywhere –
the way the tip of a cigarette in the dark could be a light on a ship
I found you, the only one to keep my fact file warm amidst the bricks
no cop, I should say, could police our language in any crowd
two cogs bit in to the code called love, in a system
                                                            only we could log onto

 


which was what I read, looking quick
in the physical self-help section
at every cure-all under the Sunday Sun,
his dark materials sold as a loss leader
like underwater swimming reaching coloured
plastic fish for air, it occurred
at the dada chequerboard game
of the checkout how strange it was
that we took everything out, put it back
– then paid – rain cracked the taxi windscreen
like Pollock's frozen thought of bankruptcy,
in the rearview a darkened microfiche of my face
beginning to transfer to the other side
like a spent, fuggy hologram

 

 

they will be there with the same accent as me
I heard them where my body was, as I set up the balls
they monogroaned three pints through a tannoy on a ride
called Descartes' Bumber Cars
then played three straight frames (I smiled towards them)
thirty-five red-green repetitions of aphorisms
the dull ivory click of balls – a stonehenge of the moment –
local words like poker in the fingers
being a veneer, a potential bluff, a set of rules
it's all available said the radio in "L-L-L-L-L-Liverpool"
I thought of how the most vibrant boy at school
lived in the oldest house, mock-Tudor
& for the first time in years the big-L city, maytime metropolis, that
life-belt to me
did not diminish this city to what they meant it to be: circuit-training
in a cemetery

 

Copyright © Chris McCabe, 2005.

Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. He has published poems in a number of places including Poetry Salzburg Review, Angel Exhaust, Great Works and issue 62 of Shearsman. He currently works as Assistant Librarian at the Poetry Library, London. His first book, The Hutton Inquiry, was published in 2005 by Salt Publishing, Cambridge.