d-osullivan

[d-osullivan]

Genesis

All silence is made to crack at the end. God, in deciding, danced by with fissures, spliting each object from its willingness. Not all mirrors will revolt when we meet. No tang of chlorine, caged, somehow, in the spaces of my nose could make a bed of memory to rest on. I haven't swam for years. I wouldn't swim to see myself again, eyes, chest and body blooming and balooning. Some memories, like the hole that lingers in my ear, can announce like silence splitting, that nothing cracks like this body from the hush of its wrapping.

[d-osullivan]

Liverpool to London

The meaning she kept asking me for along the stories get lost somewhere in the conductor's tinny chattering,

his voice spliced for us both with smooth accentation into grey brick and the minutes that we each waited.

I wouldn't tell her the truth, that nothing sets my queer blood off its kilter than the tracks pounding

away from that proliferation of flora and all those patches of fields with all that green grass without it's meaning.

Each field passing into new buildings, I could tell her, fall like dead leaves and I can mulch myself too much into

restriction, like she does when she grabs a can of beer, evading all the questions of the cracking sound that got us here, talking.

[d-osullivan]

Waking

To capture the water at its weakest is what scares me.

The truth is a question that has been pickling for months,

when does the bone end and the morning light sputter?

At this angle it is as if I am on a conveyor belt.

Physics has stopped its workings, I am still yet we are jolting and

at each stop. The puncture holes have outlived themselves again.

Morning yawns out its philandering while the paralell of my hip bones

wish out obtusely with emergency. The light only ever harbours it's joy

as the skin allows itself concavity. The mornings, as always, will happen.

[d-osullivan]

Lamp Post

The moon has stopped short of itself, surprised by its own gibbousness, surprised by the short clipped haze of it's ancestral ties to this tree arch. This severity tumbles headwards. Not even a wind chime. Not even. Who are you to call me anything, dull breeze? Bare scraper of the leaves? Unfortunately,  for this sky, the question mark of moon has hooked into the blanket of it's unlit skin. No sound could ever language itself into an adequate reply, not in this quiet. The street become a vacuum like a hollow-clacking bell, its tongue having lost itself in its own circumference, having lost itself in the windlessness. The blistering civility of words could do nothing to match my soft steps, to match the haloed glare of leaves pawing out towards the pavement, to single out the wobbled lines of green and shadow into a trajectory.

[d-osullivan]

like the storm couldn’t manifest itself

you can feel it on the buzzing rain, at the

juncture of skin. on and

in the wind, in the empty skin        

- like a sail- like we were going

somewhere.          open to all of the frequencies,

the deathless possibilities.

close as the low hung sky and the water fizzing!

recently my hauntings have been reserved -a ghost             oh

 so deathly afraid of glass-

I have set myself alight,

ran into the freezing sand to relieve him of his worrying.

[d-osullivan]

Straight

Is this even an alright thing? Resenting you and your rock-voice downing along the ears of memory? I hate the jealousy of what you inherited but what I have been left without, that voice, the way you feel. I know that, reaching, as it is, is what's allowing the moon to be an egg and that’s  what's fogging up my glasses, cracked along the brimming eyes, really, that or the rain, as ever. Can't unsee the mocking sliuce. I'm not remembering not waking not even in the same room as you, without even the idea of breakfast. I'd embrace dry toast, so there. God! what it must be to have a voice as yours is, feel as straight and tall as mountains, to be not falling, to have not fell!

[d-osullivan]

Twittering

Songbird, bluebird, why? At our latest remembering you're asking if it was me who didn't see through the windscreen you'd cracked? The small bones are relical, a familiar, familial exhumation. Somehow, recent events are as long through history as these jagged bones are long as coast. They are inked, as if we have written of ourselves on the carcass, a sound like a confused medley of humming and tattoo gun, etching their grim cheers into the story and into the echo. Siren upon siren upon siren, our skin pinched and punctured, their lot cast into arriving and arriving while we must in our protested blindness drive on.

[d-osullivan]

A Coven of Bees

This is what we are, singular, and, as usual, the honeyed heft of morning and the singing bee coven chants, allowing us our awakeness. The weightlessness is burning. The buzzing vibrates its prayer. Milk? Or Lemon? On the side? The ringing and the thrum, low behind the eyes, beckons at a me, one of me, just one. One of us? Light slices. The sweet clags muckily, balanced en pointe on the deft, abyssal, juxtaposition, before my brain could full appreciate the banging pan of words at all, the crux. It is as if wanting to be, and the actual of being here, alone, was really not a horror, or an honour of witchcraft that was left to me in our deferential, deafening oneness.

[d-osullivan]

Stasis

The beer mats here are symphonic. We have formed an alliance of sorts, the same way that they had, happily, horses in collusion with carts. I could never run as fast as that, not in this pacific atmosphere. Jailed within the cracking orchestra of glass it could be rain if it didn't shatter so shrilly. The whole bar is singing, a familiar old stasis; work flooded with sound. This is why the beer mats and I care for each other, we are both still unfurling like maps and of course not carrying anything but our same selves, not even a tune or a coordinate of memory. We remain awash with such grand things like a late pair of shoes or some jingling layrnx. Even if the world were silent you could still hear the glacial roar of card fleeing from the puddle of beer, from the throb of blue peeling from green, from myself fraying from swathes of globe into just you.

[d-osullivan]

Roadwork

The commas have ceased their ramblings, the roads are at a deaf stand-still. We are letting the grammar out to dry along with odes that couldn't celebrate sadness such as this. Language is a sweet mitosis, really it is how to divide yourself and divide yourself, when what you are is a waiting space between the junction of a full stop and the immutable afterwards of innumerable shelves and some generational inconsistencies like my one strayed tooth, the flatness of my vowels, the curl of a cuticle or a letter. Lanky as is this body, the exclamation mark is an exercise in redundancy, trapped in the effortless hoop of the throat- a power shortage in the lighthouse- strung out like a truly indecent stop sign.

[d-osullivan]

Grandad

Grandad's voice is moss that grows inside my ears, now like a muffled pillow, now like I've grown a thick

blanket of green that falls down the back of me, for ages. The weight of these words is mountainous. Strong threads,

a needle-point at times, sharp in strings of words, threads through the fluffy mulch as things begin to slip.

A baffled asterix of loss marks off the quicksand on the map where he used to live. What can his language do?

Can it make a ladder from between a verse at least? Can it ring me true of genealogy? Grass? Trees

from where he sometimes is whispering that I haven't travelled nearly far enough to talk of him?

He reads me back into the ground from the poems I collected from before him, never told him about.

Now I am laying myself down, burrowing deep, weaving myself into the threads of his history.

[d-osullivan]

Body in Revolt

Body sees itself wrong. Body is a

pair of bad glasses loose and slipping.

Body doesn't see itself, momentarily,

a happy body square framed straight lined

loosed of its thickness.

Body cannot face itself in round frames framed

wrong a bad bad manifes- tation of skin and bone.

The ideal body is a poem it tightensitselflike a

be- lt.

The ideal poem like bodies continue adding belt holes.

[d-osullivan]

At an Interview

On paper, in front of her, is at least a lot of me laid out. You could say it is a loaded question, or not, 'oh, really?'. I begin to unfold. She doesn't think I sound like my address. That I'm from, instead, a place very other, softer, 'polite'. It starts with a sound like crumpling paper, then coughing, then retching, little cogs and gears hacked up onto the table, maddeningly round, cog slipping against cog and nothing moves where my inner clockwork has sanded down the vowels of me. I dab at my mouth, mostly to cover what I can feel bubbling, when it happens again, now the sound a rope of elongated 'aaaaaaahs' that aren't mine. 'Yes, yes, I'm from round here, I’ve never met this voice before'.

[d-osullivan]

Old Waters

There is such a very living thing beside the tracks of

the train, from start to end. My palm reader told me that.

'Seeing your lines is like looking at a body at the bottom of a pool' she said 'swimming in waves from end to end'. I asked her

to remove them. I see the canals like a long string going by us,

praying with my smooth hands that the banks would rear up,

peel themselves free of the earth, thread themselves into my skin.

She left me with my blank hands, returning with the new waters.

[d-osullivan]

Small Blossoms

It could be another winter, breaths churned into a fog that clears the city traffic or has grass here shining damper in the low sun. I'm running again, for you, panting out into the cold air small blossoms of mould, hearing your voice like the gasping 'pfft' of my tired pillow, 'Go further, go further!'. I could fall down into the grass and swim as if I was dreaming again, but as I lie down to sleep, smiling into the corner of my room, I breathe out mould into a bouquet, ready for the summer and for you.

[d-osullivan]

Some Violence

and I think my bones into sprigs of sorts to rattle

tapping at the spacious limb of this really, really body.

again i've been skipping meals and watching where i grow

and in what allowance. we are at my grandma's

garden, face in the lavender and each of us a ringing

bell, sirening this hand from this body or that body.

we are not at our selves in their somewhat existence,

in my grandma's garden i can think this body away.

[d-osullivan]

My grandfather's voice is moss in my ears. He's been talking to me for so long now that I've grown a thick blanket of green that falls down the back of me, for ages. The weight these words is mountainous. In the fluffy mulch I can feel my home slipping away from me, draining into what I've came to believe is a bog. He tells me how far I haven't travelled, reads me back into the ground from the poems I collected from before him. Now I am laying myself down, burrowing, weaving myself into the threads of his history.