Nudge Nudge

Any nuance, any gesture gets me back to this,

Back to the human, back to thinking how it

Comes about I’m here and why, etcetera:

Does it matter? Destined to be dusted into urns, we evoke

Ennui in others. Evening creeps on pads of silent feet on city roofs.

Fat ugly autos prowl the suburb, driven by fat ugly folk.

Get out? Graffiti says ‘Why look up here? You are the joke,

Hell isn’t others, it’s yourself’.

In 2010 all poets were aged thirty, even all of those long dead.

Just joshing. That’s my business: I go fishing for bright words,

Kick sounds and ideas round, score goals, get into touch.

Life is after all no graceful sentence but a word.

Most spell it out. A micro-story.

No amount of saying yes negates the fact that no is underrated.

Over time, the mouth that is the origin of trouble

Proves that statues have the best time. No use

Querying their accent. They have earned their right to silence.

Reach no further for the why and how, etcetera,

See life steady see it whole, the gemlike flame that burns us up.

To burn, to live: we tidy up our mums and dads,

Usurp their thrones, their little plots, a little while. The children smile,

Veins full of juice, skin taut: they pole vault over us

While counting: vault or wall-niche, what’s the cost?

Xylem feels like that when phloem tips the wink in passing:

You-tube action, up they go, while we go down to sink cells,

Zip from zenith. O the circulatory zing.

Michael Sharkey