for branwell

This is the story:

From gullet to belly you were

sogging wool and wet ash,
indigenous teeth,
frenetic haste

a twist in your spindle core.

It was the
water, nothing more,
perhaps more than that,

perfunctory, lung-colored,
running noxious from the graves
which scarred the churchyard:

All Dead, and All
Dead,

drinking the flesh and the
dirt of the dead.

This is the story of You.
Candle-wax drunk, with
opium mouth,

Embarrassment (from the dissenting
chorus) and embarrassed

for yourself.

In eighteen forty-three:

her resolve decomposed,

Lydia removed every
trapping of clothes
to bury her nose in your armpit.

You knew
a brief reprieve.

Murmured later:

Reports that she
did not speak,
for some roaringly silent days
or weeks she feared

that her voice would betray your hovering mouth.

You were not born Catholic.
You dreamt her husband slipped
and broke his neck.

You were not born secular.
She sent you money in envelope,
unkissed, impassive.

You broke

sheltered by the beams
of your bed.

A string snapped in your

consumptive chest.

You died without seeing,
through your nebulous vision,
the future.

I cover the waterfront,
baby, I hobble
and trip.

These heavy
grey days resemble only
some songs.

And the starless sky
with its cold white moon
sprawls still.

Untitled


Slumped against the window may I, oh please, watch snow,
and question nothing, but feel a woolen and a vapid,
languid bliss?

I have written love letters but have never sent a-one.

And as it falls, slow as velvet moth, and where
it lies, at rest, as my body will lie, heavy and light
in its stasis,

may I turn crackling as prodded the log in the fire,
may I spill easy as the liquor gone to vinegar on
the shelf, for me, will you do this, do this?

Stir clockwise my aging spirits, breathe me to
flush with the bellows,

lay a cheek to my womb, as well you know

a woman will grow threadbare, beg darning,
cure ills, set fractures, accept a hand of warmth,
acquiesce a weary truth

courtesy dullin thomas

this poem was written by stitching together words from my anthology of poems by dylan 'dullin' thomas. here he is with his fiery caitlyn, probably immediately before/after a huge row:

When a star cries flesh
to ribs and neck
blood in sun, a weather


bad coin palmed desireless


cunning bottlecork enemies


silly cotton
sea-dandy
lies down bloodily
bowed


luminous intimacies:
runaway-Queen-Katherine
hymning chapel thighs

labour and love
were a hedgerow of simple Jacks

dumb to tell the lover’s sheet
the word of the flesh
the flask of brother’s blood
broken things of light
undone pain a process


into a great flood.

Love Letter

Expect thunder
and oysters,
expect rheumatic gloom,
you wistful loving
head-full-of-wool,
you woman of stockings
and womb, may I

might I? Bury my pug
freckled nose in your sweater,
I will be your dolly warm
lipped and with

blue veins a meandering
topography.

And of your
little leather shoes,
eyes of cracking ice,
hay-hair and
round bell cheeks

I wooze and plummet.