THERE ARE THOSE

WHO SEEK

TO HARM US

With thanks to Mr. E and No Reading Alone, Chris at

FullCaps, the Oxford Creative Writers and my sister.

© DB Fishman, 2010, 2011

Late at night

When large dogs look

Like men in shabby costume

Their eyes wide and lolling

Tongues drooling

The purr the pulse

The thrum of traffic’s

Talking breath

The Game

Boys

In a wood

You put your back

to the bark

Exhale and then the

Paralleled forearms

Compress your chest

And you’re holding

Holding

Until existence winks

A blip of nothingness

And you’re caught

Swooning out of

an absence

Snatching your breath back

from the air

And then the next one

tries.

2010

Woven Warmth & Weft

I used to love the pooling Of the auditorium, the ornate Sweep of balconies in the television Holding seas of heads And that relaxing exhalation - Nothing like a full blown laugh - But the first joke of the night To land, the performer’s smiling Pause; audience settling in Swimming in the scarlet and gold and That relaxing exhalation The communal Sound of a smile 2011

Towline

Like a spindle of iron through a block of tallow

The work, the work, the work.

2011

Squander

Vision falling from focus

Stood by the copier

Waiting

These are the moments

You’ll regret

Near the end

2011

Morning Owner

The great arena

Of the canalside

Apartment complex

Encloses its space with

Floor-to-ceiling

Windows & deep

Rooms of widescreen

Plasma, sleek and dark

Materials resting

In the basement

Garage for

professionals; Its

Balconies

Hanging out

In air and sun, it

Catches the sharp chink from

The workman’s hammer,

Shooting out across the water

In deadening repetition,

Perfectly, and holds it

Ringing ‘round the glass arc,

searching

For comprehension

2010

K i s i m a

Stood beneath the bypass, overpass

As it crosses, bisects the canal

An oasis of artificiality carved

In concrete

columns amidst grass

Clean lines and geometry

Rusted girders delineating space

Rabbits amble in the shadow of

trainlines and traffic

The cars passing overhead like waves

2011

New

Walking through The slovenly tumult Of hillsides Driven far beyond City limits Eyes catch on Any glitch In the tranquility An aerosol can In the black ash of An unsuccessful Fire, rash of rust on Buckled, broken form, all Gaps and tears To scratch at Under this Verdant Stifling blanket Of signalless Air and Distance

2011

Me, I’m Nobody

I take a seat — pedals Mechanically control elevation As he binds the white collar on me Solemn silence intact The gown drapes all across Blinded, the benediction sprayed Holds the air before falling

to skin Then the caress of the motor, the Embrace of blades Locks falling, black, shiny Curves of raptor claws So much thatchy loft Insulation white clumps tumbling The fuzzing clutter that gathers

over time, before The razing of the field for a new crop And the applying of the oils Fingertips working the scalp A quick dust-down, a Wave of air, the Baptism over Stainless steel: A rebirth.

2011

We don’t do the shoes now

Stepping back into The non-places between Everything smells of cleaning Fluids, warmed & close; Radio-suitable singers keen Entreatingly, ignored, buried Beneath the clamour// A teacher gestures firmly, silent To packed rows of chattering classmates// A silver star of David rests on chest hair Beneath a smiling, precisely trimmed beard// Restlessness building as we sit on the tarmac I turn my head and stoop, gazing out The window, to the radar tower’s rotation On the bright purple sky The smooth, even sweep Of its curvature circling Cyclic enclosure, opening Catch and release. 2011

Moving Life

A cow walking Distended the word Crooked legs curving from A gnarled spinal length The bag of stomachs hanging Like some bloated hammock A hideclad airship Swollen, veined

2010

Stroke a Wolf

With a sliding, jagged leer and Pinned, cartoon eyes They cross-walk across crop On a radius of chain & Tear a gristled bark off before An agile skitter of paws

2011

Burnt Red Balloon Plastic

In the waning rays of sunlight The beat skitters & booms Out over slowly winding waters Looking up at a crow. The racket of passing train carriages Boxes out the space, Highlights the engine-machinations Of blackened underwings

2011

Hearth

Heavy limbs layered

across one another Draped arms & cocked

legs intertwined, a Woven nest of warm flesh:

blunted extremities & broad heads Brushing up against the surface,

Bobbing down into the dark & pulling up, gripping, tugging on,

soaked a bright red.

2011

Herald A crow Fat, bitumen black Coal-carved & charred, carbon Stood astride the old stone wall Lurching its whole body forward As if launching its sound Up, into the skies

Free of its own picking points One after another it hurls caws Out, over the square

To the waiting silence No response. 2011

Harbinger

The six-minute interlude between stops She pulls out the two pins to resume Their soft, insistent tap-clicking together Continuing to manifest the pattern And the international traveller Comfortable in age Leaning forward to her, asks ‘What will it become?’ 2011

Flatland

Heavy drops rolling off from icicle points

Trickle rounds the edges of stone

Rivers carve fissures down through landscape

Pulling sediment to seabed, to sea

Lapping at dissolute, eroding shores;

Winds sweeping across everything

Paring shapes to sand

And all that stands against this flattening

The tyranny of the water table

Other than evaporation – that’s just

Reloading the downblast –

Are occasional violent outbursts

from a planet still moving

And the upward, gnarled, meandering reach

of life

2011

Bacteria never Sleep

A reclaiming front of nature

Spreading out across the face

Of an abandoned office building

Tracing boundaries & filling

Casting shadows on enclosed space

Each pane an infiltrated cell

Of spiralling Fibonacci sequences

Returning, corrupting clear-

Cut Cartesian planes

An infection reducing

Construct back to life

Boundaries of sealed geometry

Cracking

to breathe 2011

Longpig

Stripped to the waist, chest

Bared to the busy street, its

Waxen sheen undefined but firm

Above tracky bottoms like

A bloodless piece of pork laid

Prone on the butcher’s board,

the scar

Running just beneath

The ribcage, a neat

Tucked fold, following

Around the form

Tidy, clean

And undeniable

2010

Necropsy Those of us decoupled from life interrogate, seek to anatomize death…

Looking like a clutch of LGBT film students In a hillside panorama over town Beneath the crow calls, we assemble For a demonstration, a dismantling The art of the butcher Science’s clear cut A clump of turf still stuck in the hoof The blade’s edge slips across Like severing silk under tension Water runs off the knife, sweat Across the long green gown Stood in the chest cavity’s arena The floor awash, holding A lymph node, indicating His own, knifepoint to neck And what can seem so big - life, death - disassembled Laid out for clarity in A Tuesday afternoon’s field Cut across the heart Its smooth rich sanguine body Quietly makes my mouth water

2010

All Pretty Art Flowers

Long slender bones Their top measures disassembling Into rotating porous aurorae Of pinprick petal shards Their frothed & foaming content Held potent, fomented

In their centres

2011

Moat It’s only natural that deep-buried lava, pressurised beneath the surface should feel drawn to the uncontrolled explosive release of a volcano.

2010

The Last of the Night The size of town that doesn’t stay awake this late Its empty streets make any loitering shadow

a sore thumb As the last of the night crawls on through darkness A light dropped, drifting in the abyss; It’s slowing swaying staggering stances Rousing warm, stupored expressions and Pulling its doors open to sharp night, clouding breath, Turnstiles locked open and a single taxi idling Before half-hearted V-signs and Bleary coloured rags raised Half-mast to the windows Of the train departing

2011

Sleeping Breaths

The steady, sweeping grey

Of desert dunes

Gathering & diffusing

Weight, shifting & falling

Everything ground

into the fluency of

And an endless rolling

sine wave

2010

11:35, Leith Hogmanay

Look, I’m sorry

If I offended ye

But, c’mon –

It’s a shit boozer Yer boozer’s shit Anyway That’s all I’m sayin’

2011

Comet

Maybe I’ll finish out my life

Like a windblown traveller, sat

On a charred flight case, under

The grey, crawl-drifting skies

Along a trailed, narrowing path

Of broken, smouldering wreckage.

2011

Musical Theatre Down the dimmed dual carriageway Bending low like a boulevard Full of Italian food, feeling Those ‘70s piano chords fall Like Hill Street Blues across The city, glittering in The dark like living glass And carried in the luxury Of discrete and tinted contours You sing, sat next to me On a swell of strings, through night We talk of death And whale bones, stopped In the sharpened, still cold Shattered by your hacking cough I love you Sister Safe home.

2010

The snowblinding of a perpetual dawn

Burning through light to absence

Like a chord sustained beyond comprehension

Leaving nothing but the palest hint of blue…