After Skype

Night after barren night

I shiver at the ruins

of my disappointed hours.

In this aching flat

I survive without epiphany

over weak tea and Propertius.

Every day I make you new

playlists of ambient music.

I think the sky blames me

for it's exhausted colour

but I'm too sick. No more artisan

cocktails in New England

peculiar rain or autumn crocus.

I can't think of the sad seafood

at the Boston Harbour

because each loneliness is particular

your laptop gives me vertigo.

I wish you'd bite my shoulder

like an apple or let me abide

in your household memory.

I need to touch you again as if

you were a lightbulb surging

with electricity through a summer storm

or hold you like a poppy

holds a bumblebee

as the humbling earth

riots around us in

delight of passing time.

Night Shift with Stars

When I stand in the sullen silence

of a cigarette, glancing at the listless

stars, set as they are like screws

in a fixture, I consider how the arrow

of Orion held taut towards the static

heart of Taurus, will never misfire

into the pointless void, nor strike

its astral mark – then I shudder

at the timeless lethargy which holds

both animal and tool in rigid pause;

glimpsing in the unresolved tension

of the arrested sky, the futility

of my own life's torpid labour;

and wishing for an moments weary

epiphany from the motionless

galaxy; I exhale and return to work.

_____________

Jack Warren is an environmentalist and poet from the South West. He has worked as a labourer and bartender for most of his career however he currently works in conservation. He holds an MA in Poetics from the University of York, an MSc in Applied Ecology from the University of Gloucestershire, and his poetry can be found in Magma, Anomaly, the Cardiff Review and others.