from Spandrel Routine
accustomed
Anything which is anything
besides air is not let in the
carriage, and the whole body’s
racked with a whistle. Some
fresh touch is moving in for
the entourage, wasting it like
a ripple across a butt that the
sedge hasn’t troubled. In one
world, I happily set the
planet to coast, as the
masks make a descending
noise and the manual goes
out the window. I would
be ready to be beached
on my own island, to hold it
like my chest in the so cool
chaos, staring out and making
do with this upright piano,
this mile of cheese wire. In
the other abode, this bubble
pops and my teeth unpick
the paper rim. Up among
the sleeping, the arteries
make a standard shudder
and keep their end of twining,
bringing you back to you.
disenchanted
Like a tongue of straw flowing
still over tightened molars, its
stuff is protected: Run for a bit,
like a fantasy wedged right up /
in the extractor fan and then stop.
And the horse stops, distracted by
writing on artificial trees or a
wrecked pair of rotator cuffs. It
refuses to say that I love you, not
in this syllable, nor in the next. Its
rider gets off, while a stranger buys
a stranger vodka, and it resumes its
exercise by the side of the track.
It gets on with my life, like the rat
in the archive. It’ll revive hard and
dull, as a transfer line, as a lantern
passed to an extra by a stagehand
to behave as a spontaneous prop.
Hold the red. Hope at the end of
the day. A device lifts your voice
and drops it as a dot, or as the matter
in the dot. There is nothing here but
us systems, clicking out the very
pillars. We could repeat thoughts
of crocodiles. We can put the cart.
set | for b.
As if we don’t have a hand in
this. As if the filtered screens
playing on sunlit grass down
stairs were washed by their
own oil skin, and smokeless
and surd-like and prime sat
their slow commission. This
boiler room shoulders any
pressure that would actually
make these walls we talk for
airports for light. As if we
could hold a candle to them.
Roll up, and the shutters roll
down onto a monogram and
the open alarm refuses to be
leased as we approach. No
flies on a small case of the bank
taking over the larger, as our
due extract of paint runs out
of road. As if we are a pair
of friends of the reservoir,
harvesting ties and signs off
the spring’s bed, for goes at
composition. The drafts are
done, and conditional fine
things shimmy in the beams,
deserting our fingers, until they
fall like out there, over Morocco.
Jack Belloli has written about contemporary poetry for Poetry London, The Scores, Prac Crit, 3:AM Magazine and elsewhere. Other poems from this sequence have appeared in amberflora, Blackbox Manifold, paratext and Tenebrae. The full sequence is forthcoming as a pamphlet from Broken Sleep Books, in late July 2019.
