late-night monologue

31 Jan 2012

Iain Britton

 

be like this – be transitory

 

a gateway obstacle

 

to the next apartment

 

where a sigh escapes in a roll-your-own breath

 

 

where a stool takes the sudden shift of my weight

 

and a late-night monologue

loads

 

 

a listener’s request

 

to practise walking

 

down a long tunnel

 

 

gutted by ancestral burnings

 

<>

 

I offer my version

 

of events as they happen

 

 

you aren’t sure about the rain

 

its coldness

 

the integers         parenthesised

 

on your arms               or the inked letters

 

of a name

 

tattooed in sunsets

 

 

recapitulation is all talk / dredge work / more talk

 

you’re into the habit of quickly

 

shutting doors

 

<>

 

but who’ll step up         make

 

altar-suggestions

 

of stained-glass jabberings reflected on the mount

 

who’ll request a right

 

to what I’ve hung drawn and arranged

in every room

 

<>

 

a water-colour shoves a church

 

through my window / monuments

 

crumble into drunks
xxxxxxxmixed gender
xxxxxxxxxxxxangels in shabby clothes

a crowd xxxxxhacks at the air to get a look in
they knock at places with rooms to let

 

you pick up another man’s junk

 

we are witnesses to things as they happen

 

we make apes of ourselves

 

leave slag heaps for neighbours
turn our backs on backs

 

we avoid confrontations

 

zeroing-in

on the mischievous cackle of a river

 

______

Iain Britton’s upcoming collection, Druidic Approaches, can be previewed here. It will be published by Lapwing Publications.

Image Copyright: Foomandoonian