Days Gone By

Androgynous, ambivalent:
this perpetual twist-shifting, down the chapel
on a polluted October blustering impossible morning...

She condenses all thought, all feeling, into similes
like butterflies caught in a web of clichés -
it’s easier that way.

	Albert walks meandering thru’ W12, proud as
cactus hairs, a twine of Verlaine in his cock pocket:
prole voice pole-vaulted thru distant clouds 
but he has never seen one up close – 
airplanes, cocktails and dark sentiments don’t mix:  

Albert is a man 
with his feet on the ground.

				Anodyne & alert
				she sucks his dull prick

The penis, a hairless cactus plant 
in the desert of her lonesome old soul.

But the poetry of penetration is a complex issue
and the rubbing of dry tissue,
a mere catharsis
and Albert,
a man with his feet on the ground.

*	*	*	*

in algeria, on a clapped out remington rand, 
with syphilitic ten year old boys 
lounging about in his back yard,
he explored a netherworld 
his beatnik friends only dreamed of...

but that was way back when
before the shepherd’s bush
of altered realities
shrunk into flatline banality

*	*	*	*

In the cloisters of 49 Adelaide Grove,
after the short dark walk from White City,
he enters her: a stranger, an envoy,
a messenger; he reads aloud
passages from People’s Friend,
rocks her to sleep with his laughter.

Drifting off, 
on the magic carpet of her laptop,
he calculates
the days gone by.

There
in the clock gland,
in the clenched fingers of his right hand.

Sometimes he imagines 
the spectre of Edward Munch
painting a giant vampiric cunt:
the image makes him smile,
even though

he is dried out, desiccated -
a misanthrope
hung by his own rope.

	She smiles into her knitting
	and he is compliant,
	silent tap tapping
	on her laptop,
		a spew of words,
		a senescent recalling
		of these days gone by.

*	*	*	*

algeria is a dream of dark red blood:
mirrors speak of 
	vulvas and vestibules,
	labyrinths and monsters.

she winds the clock, but not back.
peeling away labial lips
she smiles, 
like a score of young sun browned boys.

*	*	*	*

And then they are a fusion of cock and cunt,
an extinguishing of all distinction.
Into nothingness they fall,
clutching
each to each other.


And then there is that insistent voice, 
throwing questions at your feet:

What flowers express
days gone by?

And you know the answer:
it’s as clear as a Fassbinder film -

Lilies, 
white lilies.

*	*	*	*

Hands soft as bread,
Albert walks thru’ a monochrome forest.
He arrives at a clearing
and e-mailed to him 
in crystal clear chromatic colour 
is a Jpeg file of a florist shop
spilling over with white lilies

and attached to them:
the love note he never wrote,
which he had hoped would express...
days gone by.