PAUL EBBS
Watching You Sleep
Another morning; night’s hot weight
Crushing you into the bed
First light inflating the colours on the wall.
I wait in the doorway as a bow string -
Watching the curves of your back - white in the blue
And fingers flexing against dream fabric
I refuse to breathe here
As you turn in the sheet, hair falling in a roiled wave
A red sea washing and breaking.
Coast to Coast
A half-moon of sea, wrinkled waves and the smashed glass of shattered water.
Freeze the spume as a statue in the camera light; a gawky black bird dervishing through the spray.
Thistle words crackling in my throat, as I shrink to a singularity.
Hunched beneath a wind-scoured sky through which you would soon be scribing a vapour trail.
The coast is a broken place.
Rock ground to sand, bones split with lines and the shells have all become impossible puzzles.
Dead wood speech snatched and crumpled; torn and thrown away on the wind.
How can I talk of mending, on this cracked edge of land? Where streamers of England are gradually torn from the fraying line and sucked back down into the black water?
Drowned snatches of island lost forever in the heaving water.
The coast is a broken place.
Even the air tastes of tears.
Afterwards
Warm fossils still in our flesh
Just the breathing and the crush of
Muscles.
My lips in your hair where your scent
Drives memories up like spikes through my thinking.
A shatter strobe of images fired staccato.
8mm flutters twisted from the whirring spindle of my thoughts
With the crackling snap of thin ice and scrunched celluloid.
Cambridge. That moment.
A whirring fan one stolen afternoon.
Gold against your skin - the necklace a new fascination.
Ripping stockings and urgent eyes, swimming pool car parks and a reckless embrace.
Then the strobe relents. Putters down to silence.
The end of the film melting on the spool and breaking into stunning white....
White like a punch through both pupils - this 'afterwards' becomes committed to that
montage, in the lazy flapping of the motor running down.
Night Poem.
Afterwards there are rucked covers,
Lost pillows and a bed at sea in a storm.
Before there was skin, hair in the wind,
Saliva blown from mouths, a dark slow river twisting
Through the jungle night. We kept our voices low,
In the hunt across the starlit stillness of water -
The ju-ju drums of our hearts beating scary magic.
I held you tight and squeezed you to sleep; you would need
your strength for the journey, I reasoned. And anyway, there were
Bright native eyes glittering between the leaves
I figured you’d not want to see them. So I pulled
You closer, sweated with you, tasted your hair
read the Braille of your spine and thought it would be sublime
if those words had been written for me. When I dipped into the pages
of this new book the pictures and the colours and
the shapes were of a bright, blue, empty sky – and I rejoiced.
But now you need to leave here – this jungle. So, ever the gentleman explorer,
I smuggle you out down river. To a grey harbour, where I will put you on a dawn boat,
And watch you steam down to a beauty-mark on the horizon's lip.
I turn. I breathe something in -
your taste is still in my mouth.
Dear Life
(dog fragments - file under traveling)
forget-me-not blue
chasing dawn across the sky
a crash of sun in arrow light
the plane a hollow foreigner
surrounding me in loss.
left behind something huge
chained through me and now torn.
the judder of ribs bumping across links.
there is rust in my mouth
where the iron curled
is this all that is left?
a memory of bones and
skin shot with tears
mouth jewels and eye stones?
tongue set in lipped rings,
the impossible braid of arms and spines?
***
hooked rememberings lurching a
basket brain into the balloon sky,
dropping ballast by the ton
freeing the saliva to mix and teeth to meet.
the ground dropping open like an idiot's mouth
feet kicking above space
or down into heaving sea
thumbing tears and pressing heart.
can this be the tangle of sadness
wrapping the two of us in seaweed?
the cloud of octopus ink words
allowing me to escape through deaf water
leaving you drowned?
then out into blackspace
kelvinzero spacewalk
i cut the umbilical and floatspin
one last look and the world snaps
closed behind a dark lid
vertigo creasing my insides into raffia.
***
crash zoom into the sucked dry husk
of the hotel night. three am goodbyes
finger laced sweatslick palm
only the whispering aircon
rubbing on the sandpaper air
taunts us with necessary coolness.
***
We nailed moments of intimacy like bunting through the
Twin Cities streets. Look down from the sky and see
the chains of our hands and arms and lips and tongues and
breasts and mouths and words and smiles and tears and
silence and footsteps and whispers crisscrossing the town
strung from lamposts and buildings.
you could trace the routes of our love looped through the dark streets on
the rainy road. reflected in every window.
***
hanging onto you for dear life.
hug the words close
they fit perfectly into the feeling
locked and jigsawed and entangled.
if i close my eyes
i can feel exactly the locations on my skin
where our atoms have exchanged
places.
Lyric.
the song is a tunnel,
bricks of melody circumnavigating
behind a dark intro
ahead a bright outro
but around me now, it’s a tunnel,
locked in the stanza,
the bars hold me inside
the quavers make me shiver
can’t you see my heart has been iron-mongered into a treble-clef?
and the bass…
It’s below everything, a muscle-sound below the
Skin facia of getting to know you.
in the hollow throat of the song,
Right here between the lyrics,
Rushing airstrike low over white paper
Falling through the spaces of words
The shelf of the ell,
The whoosh of the o
Squeezed through the hourglass point of the vee
To rest breathless on the teared, long-lashed eye of the e
and always the bass
a boiled down note, the very tincture of what sound is,
evaporated noise and the clinker of music left at the bottom of
hearing's furnace - is what there is now.
No Promises
a lace of stars
across forgotten black
your tongue a shiver in my mouth
i fall into your bones and am caught
here i listen to the earth's last turn,
the frozen air around a silent planet,
rifting the atmosphere's glacier - cracking
open silent clouds of ice.
beneath that weight of stilled water
i lose every other beat of my heart
to the dead words glutted in my dark gullet -
behind frost-nailed lips.
Significant Other.
Where do I start to print the page?
Its cold whiteness hacks at my eyes.
Here where emotion is senseless I try to make some sense of this.
Be adult and selfless when your significant other is shouldering hot and slick between us.
A rough twisted knot revolves below my heart -
Soldiers driving on though harsh night,
Punch after punch and the boxer’s sharp eye,
Pit-damp fear as the gas crawls over the lip of the trench
Crossing your arms in front of your face as the windscreen shatters into ice.....
Five stolen hours of sleep - you tiny in my arms again.
an accidental visitor,
Gloriously still beside me as dawn stared through our window to check we were both ok.
An arm across you and, at last - an absence of regret.
Until suddenly you woke, realised what you had done
and escaped at 6.13.
Skirting.
Quick legged and wearing -
You have to dance where the furniture of words clutter
The rooms around us; and the music is rearranged carefully, painstakingly into slow discord.
I want to stop the orchestra.
Now.
Throw them from their stools.
Push them from the stage, to the clatter of feet and the gasps
Of other dancers.
Smash the quizzical grinned faces of violins
Sever the chicken necks of the cellos.
Stuff my fists into the yellow mouthed questioning trumpet
And car crash the zebra crossed piano.
I want silence!
Silence whittled down to the barest breath.
Your head cupped in my hand.
And then begin the tap of our feet on the polished wood
Tap. Snap. Tap. Snap. Tap.
One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three.
Tap. Snap. Tap. Snap. Tap.
Dancing. Skirting.
No words.
War Paint.
The brush swirls in the deep red
A horse tail running from sunset
Hooves flickering in dust and escaping the sunshine.
Edible colour thick like old blood piled on the bristles,
A wet wedge of succulent crimson licking the wall,
A damp shine reflecting the window highlights.
Spots on my hands; hoof prints
Patterning my skin with a trail of stiff spatters
The tunnel-hollow beast scouring the desert for water.
This room. Where we had our finest moments,
And our most frightening times, is almost born anew.
I have been painting away the walls that absorbed your tears,
Covering the old wall with the red of war paint,
Geronimo stands shoulder to shoulder with me now –
He points at the escaping horse and tells me to follow.
So I paint myself with War Paint. It is cold and stiffens the skin as it dries
But it stiffens also the resolve to do battle. War Paint is to scare,
War Paint is to beat the heart and let the enemy know that even in death
I will be coloured by life and pride.
I follow the horse.
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