Poetry

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It sits nestled snugly between the sixty six and the ninety nine, mocks the roundness of one hundred, spurts into life borne on every last gasp and death rattle. A baby clutching cot bars sends smiles or sometimes wails at its absence/presence. It hangs behind each present and each punch, invested in every ululating note of sex and singing, in the hollow bowls of stadiums brimming with the thick air of voices. It stalks the edges of picture frames, hovering between the whitewashed walls and loud floors of galleries, haunts the poem from the right of the page, bears the blue ghosts of cigarette smoke skywards from beer gardens glowing like ships, borne on the navy ocean of moors under moonlight. It blooms behind the closed eyes of the communion rail, wraps the prayer wheels of temples with the holiest mantras — it is holier and more holey than the holy — resting best in the blindness of desert caves. It prowls the freezing waters of the furthest fathoms, the saucer eyes of creatures in the deep, is raised to the sky by sunlight kissing the white tips of waves, then pours from clouds as they stroke the hillsides. What is it is what it is, resonating the world in and out of existence for us, strange abscess in the tissue of everything we are.

Benjamin Dorey