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.

i would, i would, if welcome i was, for they loathe me every one.




uncannily clear his eyes and ever
will be his hands a particular
quick clean

sadness which speaks through strings

and it is greatly
and much
as it was

reeds
yellowing scum
wool yarn tied
at the pond

sealed now with hardened wax
trapped
in sap

theirs are years dissolved as
honey hers in a dust blue house his

in what is his

sanctified enough for
both of them torn
far from candle and a
ouija board

wicked thoughtless faith
one pays in pain

now smell the struck
match measure
the heft of the hematite

turn the looming
latch crawl into the night

crouch

beneath blankets a petrified spider

stare in terror at your chest with
maddening mistrust
do not expect

that it will reign gently just and
such and such

heed scrawl on an
apple's parchment skin
browning bloody curl

do not defect

not for the world

a poison blows from the
bellows leaned
lazy at hearth
 
below the cupboard of
liquors ageless and

acid with sorrow

Canada

To little
girls they attempt to teach grace from
an early age. Lips sticky with the wax of
fake orgasms. Roses upon completion of display.

If your bedroom
is your mind, do you mind?
If you mind, mayhap you
should rearrange.

On application of the hypothetical
law, mine is a Persian rug of
mockingbirds, seven bared
breasts. Memories

are flecks of silver and
light caught in a lens,
only the past is material,
tell me where it all went wrong.

Tell the heap of flannel in my chest
how it could win Helena. Whisper
to my tires that they will reach Canada.
I fell into a love for her.

If my bedroom is my mind:
(I note the absence of Helena.
Tentatively, surely,
she must appear.)

For now I nurse a nausea,
track a pulse in my thigh.
Rain came. An acid bramble
bloomed in my stomach.

I dreamt of
free fall.
Death was imminent until
the river.

Of little
girls little is expected. Sex speaks
a language in time.
They find they are fluent.

Tell them where it all went wrong.
Whisper to their tires
that they will
reach Canada.