Poetry

dry spell

today cast a dry spell.
wake up and use dreams for shampoo and
pull cool clean socks over hands and paint fingernails the colour of blindness
and why not? take the fireman’s pole downstairs.

on the coffee table in the living room
there’s issues enough of the Economist rolled
up to achieve godlike mastery of all knowledge,
so, slowly - sharply - methodically - inhale
each paragraph as flapping bats to the skull a suddenly airy atrium
that theoretically has the space
to suss the calculations required
to help absolutely everyone feel fine.

in the kitchen – opt – then, pinch,
for the most specked of a bad bunch,
torn like birth from the stem and
under the !risk of electrocution! skin is
dark demarara, damp with negative light
of the kind eyelids can leak
given time, cultivation -
sweet enough to sting.

on the street use a bare sole to intuit the mood of the breeze
and be sure to shamble slantways to its course;
be sure to count steps in one-two-threes and not twos,
so oddness with the direction of sense can mess like
the nerves that make so new and awesome that first
performance.

doing all this sort of thing, feel able
to walk through walls,
to feel good when others do well,
to be disembowelled by crying kids,
to give every yellow book to that dingy old Cancer Research back home.

-

an aide memoire:
a mind should do just one thing, and that thing it should do well.
a body, though, should feel more
than a body should feel
more than a body
should feel
more the smell of
the soil
the glare
the gale in this dell out of nowhere.
To cast a dry spell
you love outwards, pell mell.

Sam Rae