by George Bowering

I stood by the counter that held me up,
looking at this and that, then picked up
an old wrinkly brownish apple, hello,
how long you been here in this fruit bowl,

who are your friends, I’ll be your friend,
look at me, one leg shorter than the other,
one eye with clouds across it, fingers asleep,
toes unconscious, hair dry and empty of grace,

I will be your daily partner, you stay there,
I won’t bite you with my porcelain teeth,
this implanted machine in my chest is counting
the days left to you and me, I once found

a chunk of wood made of stone, older than we
will ever be can you imagine the secret pain
shooting across the back of the hand that was
holding your flesh, I can’t stand here much

longer, are you afraid I will eat you, or
longing for my sore teeth to complete you,
or should I prefer to eat a peach and try to find
any new poetry in that non–event, all of us
so far from our trees?

by Jeremy Reed

Post–ICA: umbrageous plane trees outside,
a green re–diagnosis of July,
giant starry umbrellas lining the Mall,
his talk so modern it was an arts lab
of subjective colour blocks ends in gin —
a twisted martini axis, no drench,
the fizz riffed like a parachute —
‘gin reinstates reality’
he said, ‘lubes normal back in place,’

forgot the rest, bottle green V,
aqua shirt like a Farrow & Ball scheme
soaring up the combo to meet
introspectively folded blue eyes
colour of thought when thinking into space
that shapes it, cracked a raunchy crisp
‘shape of Baffin Island,’ I tried,
he ‘Casablanca,’ nothing personal,
boys on his mind and one leaned in

for a title page signature —
the J resembling opposite platforms
divided by a slanted pole
and good enuf, his glass never empty

like the poem, ‘no resolution, open end,
you only drink to have another one
without noticing the space in between.’

Propositioning
Legs extended across creased cerise sheets,
one hand incessantly correcting hair
is the focus I remember,
oxidised, uncorrelated by time,
a vase with a single white hydrangea

I’d nicked from a Regents Park bush
Indian summer in the window
as pomegranate aurora.
I thought I’d live a billion years
on drugs and visionary endorphins,

ate nothing but cereals, my thin
wrongly attributed to heroin
by intuitive street dealers.
Most of what happened I forgot
in the happening, made my own

convention of aberrant types,
men peeled my looks like bandages,
it felt like propositioning
to stand still in the street.
You told me looking like you do

it’s obvious. Everything picked up speed.
I opposed emotions with solitary
configurations of my life
written on rain. You stood by me,
of course I understood your pain.

by Jeremy Reed

We meet and evaluate a decade
recalled impartially like blank airtime,
sampling scratched timeframes, like lunch on a lull
in the Haymarket — was the eighties that? —
a silver–rinsed sky, pointillistic shower,
the jungle smell of suddenly wet jeans

like soak stain canvas, cashmere eyeliner,
a positive DNA match with looks
as a Soho map of coordinates
we review now like a plane gone missing
into a violently black triangle,
and sent back later as a burnt object.

Our memories collide or separate
over enhanced juice–zesty lemon cake,
but all virtuosic retrievals lack
the nudity they were: the street’s the same,
it’s only time that’s altered its sell–by–date,
that’s now a sort of virtuality

themed for us by the pop smash ‘Tainted Love,’
that got into the air as radio,
quirky Northern soul collider with straight
that hung on infectiously as a sign
of generational change under the street
or running full on to escape the rain.

by Ron Padgett

The handwriting of a very old man
wiggly like the hairs on his head
and the even more wiggly ones
in his memory of the eyebrows of his grandfather
who did something we can barely imagine —
he fought in the Civil War
and had his first shave outside a tent in Georgia
two years before a man with a gray beard
leaned over his field hospital bed and kissed him on the lips
and then signed the letter “Your loving son”
in as graceful a script as he could with tears in his eyes.