I get up, wash my face, and catch a bus.
It's hard to think of prison on the out
what men are doing in that burst of time;
just weather emptying miles down the line.

*

Always write out on what's to hand,
the cupboard, for instance, staring at you,
or prison paper, its varicose lines,
the small print, and instructions on writing.

*

I'm asked to write a poem for a girlfriend
but explain it's better coming from him;
a man stealing through a garden, his crotch
wet with shower spray and sweat, time on his hands.

*

The only bloke who asked to see my work
and I forgot. His thick split lip
and bit talk of looking forward to that
made my looseness another small betrayal.

*

That letter, a couple of weeks, months, years
down the ladder. It smells of somewhere else,
and leaves the standing world impossible,
like slippers tucked behind the door, waiting.

*

Sometimes I think words are the enemy.
Words that forget them, words that choose them.
Words that fall over with no echo, no
bottom. It's the element they swim in.

*

I'm asked why so much poetry is shit.
I suggest, in defence, it's the modern condition:
surface slipperiness, knowingness,
detachment, and I don't buy it either.

*

I read the bib cards: two years, ten years, life,
as if the doors froze shut for all that time,
and men reappear blinking into light
renovated, healed, saved.

*

Behind backs, the hearsay, misheard story,
the way words cover the knuckle of action -
best to learn the language of the body:
yellowing bruises hold the attention.

*

Hot house flowers that slowly lose their colour,
fat on the fore-arm, hard on the knuckle.
I look, don't read, don't touch, for these take years
to cultivate, each one a private garden.

*

Can't shake them - these hundred year old ghosts -
food, sweat, semen, commingling above
the throat tightening bleach,
hold me to the salt-lick of the living.

*

Some, given grace and tickets, would not scram:
you sense life has no love in it for them,
or they want for nothing. This man, in softer times,
would slip out the front gate, bring the milk in.

*

To disappear, to leave your face and learn
a new language, to drink, fuck, out of hand, to mouth,
to slip through days conspiring into night,
to understand what is wanted badly.

*

Inside, a fish tank stagnation of light,
outside, dirty light rusting on fences.
At night the orange lights stay close to ground
and feel around the darkest places.

*

Sometimes rooms I never knew existed;
the stores where towels are carefully arranged,
compact and faintly genital, all stamped
and counted - keeping hold, lest things should slip.

*

A prison says: I'm not you. But they are.
Myself, I stack books, paper in a locker,
put on my coat, through the gate and out,
look up to drizzle hidden in the wind.