Obsessive Morning Sky
Rise as one, red clouds.
Squint clean into the early dawn
and glean what you can.
The celestial swept up
like post-party debris.
Roads glisten with brittle frost
under the moon’s bruised face
and a wash of starfields,
shifting smoke of the unknowable,
dense drifts of the white-hot.
A cipher in Technicolor,
the colour of collapse.
Start at the bottom and fade to blue -
the sun hauled up by pulleys.
A world of roofless people
fading to white.
Dead Arm Sonnet
Dead of night. Waking to a limb killed
by your own awkward heft
cutting the supply lines.
The breathless panic of discovery.
You try to slap out the absence
in your lifeless wrist with the motion
of an addict. The slumbering world is oblivious
to the retreating borders of your body.
You keep rubbing, expecting
the pins and needles, the heat, the ascension –
the way you’ve always been revived.
But what if feeling doesn’t return?
What if night spreads into your chest?
_______________
Tim is from Stoke-on-Trent, lives in Scotland and works for Manchester Metropolitan
University. He has an MFA from Syracuse and a PhD from Edinburgh, which explored mental illness in Confessional poetry. His poems have recently appeared in The Poetry Review, The London Magazine, The Rialto and Bath Magg, and his pamphlet, Lake Effect, is published by Tapsalteerie. timcraven.co.uk
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