there was this tree like a hand- a wooden hand.
some days i would be naked amongst the fingers
like a slice of why. i was a why, a young one-
woodland in my approach, hair tied up in sky.

and i would tip myself out of bed for the
crematorium, dawn winding round me in pink
shouting. it was a stranger with poison sweets,
the coloured bottles i took home for a disco.
 
i dug ‘em up and would have shot them.
sleeping in the orchard and waking
with a mouth dry as tiny apples,
the dirty black worlds in the trees.
   
and i talked to the snapdragons,
the boy who spat on me in his hood of orange fur.
they came across the fields slow with tongues
and square tipped nails, right in my tree
 
like soldiers eaten up by flames. one two three.
kisses making me clever for me
in different dresses. some with hoops but all
with bodices made from bone.
 
and i was shaped and compressed right in the face,
yet still alight. fingers passing through into another place.
hand-print cheeks slightly parting to suck in the sun   
and days like an empty child.

you have never met such a wizard as this wizard.
he is an extreme wizard with the marking of a
blood-dipped finger placed firm across his outer cheek.

he keeps onward threading his lightning bolts
through her fine sheen of shrug: magic everywhere.

she accepts the wild creeping snakes of burning matter
partly in her dreadful mouth. they hiss and pop
in the cold & olden cavern of her;

at some point he is planning to tear her in half
and kill her up-
hurtling right through her like a world.

See here beneath my spacesuit
to the spacesuit underneath
and beyond that the girl
with the skin like a spacesuit?

I wondered about you cutting it off
like a cord so I flew
backwards into the spaces
of your naked beauty.

And if I immortalise you
ever so quick before you disappear
in a kissing-shaped hole in a cornfield,
will you become available

as the brightest ever moon?
Words come and go, empty as selves-
though I would like to have touched you
even by this.

Like all tides I’ve become a girl
on a page. Pick up my squeals
and put them close against your ear.
The rush of air is the sound of longing

even now far away
from the sea.

1.

a child's
fingertips like 10 distant stars
reach toward me
lost
in perhaps. my inability

to use a sextant,
scrabbling round
to land you
on my H

to the sound of a choir
of freckles. i will lie
to you. how close i am
to earth! virtually
underground,
a white horse
chalked in blood.

have i failed to bring you
out of myself?
if i could love you
alone into me, i would.

i search the hands
to dig you out
with astrolabe,
to tend you right
through fiery hoops
as rain.

2.

rolodex of stars,
you have probably
already died
a thousand times over.
the light i see is only just
travelled here.

i wait in my plastic chair,
and write quiet essays
on bushido,
stuck in lists-
my two cold hands
like swans of ice.

I wake up to the rain, and am pleased 
for the garden, dry as a nun’s lips.

I stare at it, growing it out in my

brain. I suppose I am a dying breed,

I say, and wish I was smoking-

at least I was a nihilist, back in the day.

I suppose I am. I keep doing these

Internet tests and looking at stranger's

photos. I can’t see myself in them.

Pouring themselves out into progress

like little pilgrims, the girls miss

trains, their mothers and sisters on them.

The sun comes out. I am pleased

for the garden. Later I will sit in a

bar, talking about things I disagree with.

My flesh will be observed. Invisible

score cards will score my body

to the patterns of pop-stars. 

I could do without mine, in reality.

It isn’t me, and never was.

I am a tendril of light, orographer.

I refresh myself and put away

days, like balled socks-

crowing up to the yellow-toothed moon.

(found poem made from the line-end hyphenations in the first edition of 'walden' by henry david thoreau)

night-clothes
over-seer
manna-wise
wood-chuck

noon-day
elm-tree
hill-top
toad-stools

wood-side
saddle-bow
home-made
bean-field

low-lived
door-sill
in-dweller
beggar-ticks

huckle-berrying
pickerel-weed
piece-meal
butter-flies

sap-wood
drill-barrow
johns-wort
fir-trees

golden-rod
tip-toe
wood-chopper's
scare-crow

half-witted
empty-handed
no-body
-