Author: James Lindesay

Beauty: nails piercing tattoos

A complicated thing, shame.
Public face of a passion
as the deed acquires a name
and so dies, in a fashion.
A body’s warmth, and the rush
of blood; that perverse ration
of scarlet that is a blush.

A Control-Alt-Delete
a reboot and restart
a wipe clean of the slate

A return to safe-mode
unbreakable source code
true meaning of the Word

An off-and-on-again
a comeback: anything
to gloss over the stain

Horizons
                look to the line
across trackless whites
of porcelain
                the snow
and its hairline cracks
                a craze
and a craquelure
of the body
                let go

With its fruit and wild roses
how the land falls before the lake
and you lovely swans,
and drunk with kisses
as you dip your heads
into the holy sober water.

Ah, but where shall we turn
come winter for the flowers
and for the sunshine
and shadows of earth?
The walls hang speechless, cold;
wind rattles the weathercocks.

after Friedrich Hölderlin

Over every mountaintop
a peace,
a barely-felt breath of wind
in the trees;
birds in the woodland are still.
Wait, soon
such rest will be yours as well.

after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A naked bulb
in passive space
a kinesis
of grace

shutters the beam
a shower of grain
in our darkness
the unseen

witnesses we
see we receive
the lucid birth
we leave

our colour drawn
from that surface
of cut image
and still face

Who are these that take their place
each side of you? One woman
is eyeless and yet she sees
(or seems to); what has she done?
The other is lost in praise
and rich furs. Her breasts have gone.

The images are restrained: scenic
languishing Virgins of the Death-Wish,
they are nude and rapt as arrows suck
purple out of notwithstanding flesh.

Their blood is a most becoming shade.
Dazzled as they are, and heaven-bent
on a scarlet cleanness, they parade
the slow smiles of their abandonment

to the mute adoring entourage.
A gathering witness, we observe
and sanctify this sticky outrage;
we love it; it is what we deserve.

Afterlife of a vision:
sales and inheritances;
loans, and the slow accretion
of labels; a provenance,
a good story, with records
to account for the distance
travelled. And so many words.

On this darkest day, amongst other things
we consider our blindness: to the winds,
to the streams of boiling iron beneath
and all around us, to the turning world.

So much weather; so much of us that sings
in the face of it. As the night reminds
us of daybreak, so we can see our breath
in the enfolding clouds; we are unfurled.

We watch and we think and we think
we feel but have no sense of it
at all, this rupture, this fall and
recapture, this ecstasy of death

We wonder, will it come for us
who did so little, tried so hard
to refrain, to remain untouched
by its distant intractable hurt?

We shall see and shall understand
all in good time, this waste of life
this cold and hunger, fire and gas
elsewhere: that it is all about us

Yes, this is supposed to hurt
the rank punishment of thought
the rationale of the boot

This is where we learn the art
of losing; something torn out
of us: a tongue and its root

Always and only the pitch
the so so so beautiful
big bold incredible thing

The dare to dream it bigly
go mad for it so very
long so very very hard

Unbelievable so great
let me just say I love you
as I thank all over you

So special incredible
give me a break yes bleeding
in the locker-room so sad

Orange, evidently, is the new black.
Pumpkins fatten for the knife, to be carved
and then discarded; the spray-tan is back,
ditto the pompadour. Who’d have believed
it could come to this: thin skins and bitter
pith, seething in a fit of saccharine?
Bottle it up forever, the utter
strangeness of it, or let the demon in.

Just imagine: raised in honour
of his money, of his reach
a likeness; the noble donor
standing flawless in his niche

Gifts for the gifted, for the free
here we turn our gravest face
upon the filth of history
we know, we have won the race

Be careful, these will become your poems.
My voice will become your voice. Will it be
light or dark enough? Will there be problems
of tone as you wear my skin? We shall see.

No doubt your tongue will explore my meanings,
take a knife to my throat; your words instead
of mine. Give them new life; the singing is
mostly what matters, music in the head.

Between the wall of shall
and the looping broads of should
lie layers lawyers liars lairs

An A-road to a dark wood

This is how the dead speak
radio-carbon ticks
in the dark, in a box

Litanies of base-pairs
unclasped and spiralling
down bloodlines, down the years

Shrouds of 3D-printed
plastic and plasticine
likeness: face of our fears

a groovy track in the black
of shellac 78s

a lacquer of cochineal
candy-bar nibbles and treats

a sheen of violet / green
wing-cases woven in knots

a specimen   one in a
million   pinned in cabinets