2.
Our cities shared their poisons with us
                                                  Saadi Youssef



Cabbage white on the buddleia
Its humble energies of flight

Upside down city
A bird posed in the air

Where nothing is fixed in the eye
A crust of buildings

The difficult it is
Here, the original place?

Brick idyll    is only
What fails to disappear

Towerblock    Palmyra a column
Hesitates      the blue

And here and there each
Self-important head

Drought in the mouth's a
Discussion of insects

A sense of afternoon's
This sober ecstasy of clouds

Poetry in small doses
In oracle language


Emptily dazzled    eyes
The readers stand in front, each takes it in turn:

How to travel here without heads?
How to sing
                     without heads
Into an emptying circle?

It's a piece of a curtain
A bit of a tongue

NO HAND SIGNALS


To go back with
Dignity
            under the
Ground

Fell back    its
Uneven trajectory

Contented it
self with its echo

So the harmless
Days passed

And the bird    swung
down
                                    momently
Am its arrival
Whose claws, here
                               darken the page


Here I am today feeling empty and kind
And the light    struck away from it

Calling it here like a separate sound
Pressed the button marked Plenty
'He's out there gone looking for his favourite word'

'The poet's arrival in the city'
He's puffed with foolish song

'Tarnished famine brilliance'
Self-quoting
Went out to look for more words:

'blood clart police virgin'    he's on the bus
He's shouting into an empty phone

Live in a world of your own
A world that you own?

Sheep's head looks down from a shelf
Propped cowfoot

They're only doing their shopping
Each faithful dismembered carcass

I think there is more wealth than I can manage