1: How do I look?
A slip of traction
and the catch wires
form proscription
to the motive cusp,
slender. Climacterics
choke on the copula
tradeoff, switching
flatline hungers in the
pause, your pocket.
Preference labours
to make, an edit proof
defective in the act.
With what science?
New treatments
scripting the pinned
figure’s wing chase
bright metallics;
your own therapys
lashed in broke
assertions are the catch.
Urge the present
set for home.
Chromatic rates
of trade & force
aslant decision.
Clouds & clusters
sculpt faze ratios,
clipping frequency
breaks. Gyorgy,
bow the steel.
The white knots
hatch out chance
of a tourniquet.
Pearls & coral
buoy the wreck.
Acquiescence bleeds
a threshold, kills
the day. Relinquish
the language, make
room. I love you.
Sleeping, pay no
attention. Wake
to your dead rate,
a stripped heart.
Steering emergence
amok your streets
from scratch to render
cadence means
indexing renewal,
the dark manifest.
Zoned & keycoded
estrange homes co-opt
futurity, weathered
into shape. Grief
secures the encircle
ment routes, alarming
laborious shifts. Swipe
mouths at the gate.
I was never asleep.
Are you tired?
Transition bombs in
the shelters maybe.
We want the god
at hand. Brassnecks
& art shoes, frisks
of currency. Smoking
guns, new veers
& reels. Faces down
in the data stream
the screen is gate,
high scarp & degree:
say byebye purchase.
Cutbacks, good
schlock, old money:
bloodshot & curved
against the glassy brink,
how do we look?
The wall uncurls,
gives & tooths an edge:
I’ve cleaned my hands.
As our surface
rooms mother
conditional dues
the grievances
kick, relapse
permission to
the salvagers’
decisive coast.
A frontier
surrenders.
Abeyance cost
burlesque &
our conscience.
Any excavation
quicks the fugue;
sative zoetropic
skews at your
beloved skin
mean silver
dancing out.
Neil Pattison is a student at Cambridge. I met him when I read there last year, and remembered that he told me he was unpublished. Since then he’s read at Cambridge and there was a rave-review on one of the e-mail lists.
Page 481
