Diver

How To Jump From a Building and Land Safely

in my arms:

       I have never seen a swan dive instead I would advise you to emulate a swallow or a salmon 

You are slippery but I will catch you.

Snowmelt scavengers

When the snow melts away

Pours in newly forged and only temporary rivers 

We fish out the debris 

glued with time to hillsides, hooked on crags 

Jellied scarves in slush; Turkish delights 

We bite down with shovels, find paracetamol packets 

The scattered kitchen midden of long-lost property   

Palm-open gloves held in the hollows of rocks 

like an offering 

The sacrifices of skiers —

their mobile phones and gaping sunglasses 

their own bodies sometimes 

Crystallised castaways who never made it home 

Made peace with the native

                       terrain instead — coursed down into the country of the blind-

sided speeder

We find it touching, every time

It is somewhere between forensic and archeological, our springtime traverse for someone else’s treasured thing

Ringbinder songbook

A part of childhood I’d like to revive:

rather than be a driver, 

I want you to 

make me a songbook out of a ring-binder folder — 

tut at 

          the sound of the printer stuttering,

reluctant 

             to spit out the lyrics of Area Codes 

To let me learn by heart lines about ho’s 

Journeys tucking talents up my sleeves 

Dizzee Rascal’s Holiday, 50 Cent’s (hors d’)oeuvre 

On hot-off-the-press A4 

protected relics in plastic wallets 

All those papery person-forming things like birth certificates and lyrics 

A shared songbook: for a clashing opera of Jar of Hearts, In Da Club, Retrograde, No Scrubs

Spit it out, printer, even if you’ve cried too much that day and your ink dries up and the words are 

sometimes unreadable sometimes turquoise sometimes pink — a chameleon contraction of cells to 

parkour across the colour spectrum… try to bring it back, sing it back to me. 

Beach bin-diving

This vitiligo driftwood: 

patchy beige and black 

like a parched leopard-skinned snake 

in the grass: 

objects are chameleons 

tree roots and weather-eaten trunks 

look like ginger or Jerusalem artichokes 

in the eternal throes 

of yearly colonisation by bluebells 

and then wild garlic

(and shrews snorkelling endlessly for insects)

           the forests reek of it 

           a heady acidic secrecy 

This must be the place

where branches are surrendered to the sea; 

or not surrendered, but carried, inevitably

And later become seaweed-strangled castaways

on beaches; in the cove where I bin-dive for treasures

I found it disentangled, bone-dry and slim 

I was holding mussel shells and phone

but I took it on a whim 

              this Moses from the reeds 

              Nile-child from the sea 

Now I have pressed albino bluebells 

a drop of cobalt blue sea-glass (rare, possibly from a Vick’s Vapor Rub or an old medicine bottle)

an olive tree I ordered online and a Japanese Acer from Aldi 

Quite the collection, like Madonna and her children (the singer not the saint)

But this leopard-skinned driftwood — 

amphibian, natural stray

object of fugitive intrigue, 

what to say — quickly — before out of mind and sight it slithers or drifts away

trouble in paradise 

Inverted rockpools: from above the land is

a sunken garden

hung festively with 

serpentine rivers -- 

         eel-esque; crude-oil black 

under full drinker’s-moon

A strange blue rectangular pool

milky-blue; confident in its eerie hue 

Sellafield plutonium swims its way back to land

in the guts of mackerel – a toxic homecoming.

I am perched like a blackbird or a booby trap (crafty liminality)

You know a bird in the hand is worth –

                                                      you razed the bushes 

                                                     burned the forest 

Now I’m ash I’m plutonium 

I soar like a hawk, or a drone 

Houses like parade floats, 

I pick them out in the gloam:

mustard-Masada’s, hot-air-balloons – 

                                             wombs with a view

 Your blood-orange babies

inhabit a sagging raft. 

 Your hands are Jerusalem artichokes –

knotty, complex as nets 

You trawl me, I almost die – 

        you’re getting at that low-hanging fruit 

                                 figs are rotting all around me 

You’re feasting 

I’m fasting 

         you bastard

Guilt sits in your gut like a Chinese takeaway 

they say, a fish rots from the head down

I’m in your palm:

flat red twitching fortune fish, bewitched

you’re on my back 

but I’m an albatross 

around your neck

Put your head in the sand and I’ll be a sea-worm in your eye

I’m this fluorescent sky

       in violent flux 

My plasticity amazes me.

I’m a slow-moving tuna fish in a sea-farm, a squirming fruit de la mer, I’m a fried sardine. Crisp-skinned, staring. I might have dull or darting eyes, putrescent like forever-shadowed rockpools, but I see everything. I’m salt-of-the-earth and the salt in the sea, in your sweat, your tears, your semen. I’m the saltless sigh of the sea in the pre-dawn liminal space which you were not supposed to share with me. Are you so oblivious? The darkness lets you know it – You Are Not Supposed to be Here. It seems now that I can never vouch for my aloneness… Your watching eyes spark nervous eddies in me – yes, like all vast and powerful things, I am deeply paranoid, I am unsettled by the simplest glance. Like all small shimmering delicate things, I am afraid. 

Kim K

There’s a 

glazed

closed 

a

coy

clandestine 

 look about her 

The camera is a male gaze

like an idol or a kore

pertly holding a pomegranate

in her lap

she is made

her white-jeaned ass like a Dali-esque melting moon

the camera simply basks – gleeful

while she takes no note of the glee

Are you for sale and if you are would 

you be a barbie or a bratz doll or

something more brittle like china like Miss Brill 

fired and shining ceramic

Who spun her?

Is she self-styled, self-

constructed or

do her really dark diamond         earring losing moments

mean more behind the         scenes than on the screen

They speak slowly and         sit on white suede sofas –

nouveau riche chaise lounges       And when they cry the

camera is unceremonious            it is in their faces         

The whole world is a stage            and she is complicit

                                                wearing white like               Olympians

dark eyes like flies                  they perform 

for our sport and              they are today’s

 sophists            We watch 

their shadows        on the glowing 

cave              wall

When I turn off           the television    

 I think              I hear 

something               crying