Some soft, gentle poems for you. Enjoy
{Big love}
King Durian
A poem fell into my lap. And I cut it up wrong
Like durian fruit. Into one-eights, halves of it wasting,
Hidden. Upturned, cornered Away.
As on a screen, a figment I touch through glass
That I taste through a YouTube video. In the cream of it
The commenter’s foul spite,
The envy under fingernails, thumb-prints
Like the green on the durian’s back,
Sun-spotted, bleached rough
Like sour sop
Or more commonly, the spines on a garden pineapple
It’s local flavour; a punch of acid, or a kind of baby sweet
This I’ve cultivated passively
Hidden with my hands
Toasted out the pores of my skin
Blended into smoothies
And taught myself to prefer refrigerated, the froth it milks up
To imagine in the aquamarine,
The colour abating in the shaking of hands
Abiding, in the holding
The cups of souring fruit, fallen like harmattan leaves
As leaves,
Careless in their landing
Wind about an indifference,
As poems do,
As an irreverence, to seeing things as they will
As they are
Run amok the natural world
Landing into a dust
As leaves do in a season’s end, like pictures
Are blown, spilled out, immortalized
Like screens.
And a garden here is only half-lived when left alone
Half-realised
Its history an algorithm blooming into, nothing
A fraction of worth for all local and un-engineered
Tastes
Fruit.
[Loves?]
On Today
A bird
Vanquished thing, building another nest
Beak weaving seedling into another
Plastic wire timing place
As memory, as in that as, today is
A bird
Today is, a bird
Tomorrow doubts true, she has no witness
But today is
Timed in our wire
Today is
Hairy arm out, and nest out the window’s crack
Rimless black eye as counterwitness
These circles are no room for tears
They’re inhuman and subsequent
Motoring and, ,
Counting a tomorrow to defer, always
As if promised
Could a tomorrow nest an egg
Weave a bird’s song into a story
Perch the lightest feather on its beam
Or let in the light of a sun.
***