unsung - daniel brocklehurst

Bend and scrape, with nipping nails
Portland, tram lines, pricking pyramids
with headlines, holding cobbled hordes,
head-aching hour bells, claustrophobia:
‘Everybody’s watching you
when you follow the line.’

‘With a flat, incessant forward climb
She drinks a round of bottled wine,
A static shadow moves, behind
Nearly morning, ‘nearly mine’.’

Bench-like, sat on a woman outside
(grinding writhes inside),
but then I thought I maybe shouldn’t.
Dying tree-like drooping down
over her corpulent face,
slick white hair, opulent rare,
couldn’t help listening, her groaning urine skirt for cats,
stranded, ripped and wrenched, outside a red-brick flat.

‘Fat, fluorescent concubine,
Drink the sound and hear the wine,
Fat, fluorescent concubine,
Smell the taste, sounds divine.’

It hailstones for a couple hundred seconds:
startling as she left the corner,
ending as I get through the door, swipe card turned around,
standing with her tongue on the glass licking a cross shape on the window
while wine trickles out of the crevice of her mouth.
Black eyes, and yellow cracks,
hair was falling like snow on the fag packets
of intelligent Neolithic man’s waste:

‘I know what you don’t want to know.
I don’t believe in limitless roads.
I don’t believe in howling ghosts.
I don’t believe in seconds, I do believe in hours, but not days.
I don’t believe in stealthy forms, but movements in alleyways where their
stealth is worn.
I don’t believe in rising day, but falling hourly, fright falls away,
I don’t believe. I don’t believe in suffocating fumes
But breathe, resonate, impulse, cry out, far and finger-wide, cry out!’