Fried Genghis
Where light’s been known to clatter landwards,
profusions dance in subtle brash to crimes
made flesh. That flank the clasp, then opt instead
for gifts in yellow. (If you could port that colour
from its sorrows, which the credulous are wrought to do
with claws, burst, its certainty creams for days.)
Dances which are picaresque, masking
from inside their faces. And what is dancing really
but a field? The ways that thinking looks when thoughts
are snappy, with freshness wafered through
their stitches. (Some wounds only heal with juice.
So use your wounds. Disband and start in earnest to a craft
unknown, but yet it sails, with name a memory.)
A vicarious elbow or a crowd in arms, will you cry
at the signs? When a clown, and by kind
I don’t mean elf, but she who plays,
who shows her juju and is lauded. Even loved. Who
yes, may darg in doldrums, but in her clast
a truth is snuck. Ployed as an eel, but taught in fibrous fruits.
Were you ever drank in love without wreaths?
Know that love is what your body does
without you? That winding shackles, even automates?
She who knows spoons that glow, then gentles those
who’d otherwise disgorge their spasms. And this
would be that brine, that spell. So breathe the basking
and its flickers, breathe the supine, breathe the alizarin fuse.
The Pearly Queens Of Unsolicited Advice
A life in three richnesses: colour, depth, and connection.
Be they with the early demons, or the pipes and planes
that fold at the spine, where the night-self tides
unending. Or with you, who can see in advance
what these entrails... Will each fresh attempt be eager?
Will our elliptical claims return laden from their voyagings
behind the hidden planet? (Observe its lack of stardom.
Sense its massive drawback.) With no blueprint to give
but the doings, these several traces. The whole crew,
dukes up, with little flowers in their pockets of earth.
__________________
Sam Wilson Fletcher was born in Lewisham. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in the Earthbound Poetry Series, Blackbox Manifold, Tears in the Fence, Magma and elsewhere, including the recent Seren anthology, 100 Poems to Save the Earth. In 2022 he’ll be poet-in-residence on expeditions to Antarctica and the Canadian Arctic.
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