and we are granite...

[alexandriten]

Sometimes, Peter Armstrong

the clouds become a profile
which disintegrates, as random images
come to mean something, you chase shadows,
knightwise the eyes tries to follow them
through rectangles of prose.

It's all a butterfly
wired to a clown's crap, I think,
the cloud's grimace and prose alive
with off-centre eye defects.

How lucky then
that to some of us, a thing is a thing,
plain as a suet dumpling -
though wine and piss fall
equally in a parabola
and it's hard to tell sometimes.

Commemoration, Pete Brown
Quicky before my pencil wears down quicky
about Sunday morning, well
All night wed sat I on the landing
outside the partyflat wed been thrown out of
reading poetry to whisky and you
going up and down crosslegged
in the lift talking to Singh
waving beer and Buddhism at him
who was Sikh and small and didnt drink,
and finally we drove across the Thames glaring
at its neonbanks glaring
to another party getting in by drink
and finding friends and jazz and beds and what more
and at dawn sausages in cut/loaf/slices
and tea not tea Tea,
then driving off getting high on day
beneaththe bast mourning morning
of Battersea powerstations looming tombstone
in a shroud of smoke and the Sundaypaper advertisements
outside the stations'
about the LAST DAYS OF THE BRITISH
IN INDIA later we all collapsed.

Dead, Pete Brown
I suddenly think,
if youre not here youre dead
I imagine you
your face full of dead mirrors
a flower growing from your grey thighs,
laughing