The Canal Annal

The Canal Annal

For most, last year began at the deemed dawn of the year

and ended with the coruscating home-lit lights

31 to 1

An unconcerned flip from one page to another

Chinked those stately flutes, felt the heady, yellow glow

Backlit by punctuations of white-orb flashes

halo discs discharging from the lens

A giddy, momentary

innocence

*

Mine crashed me onto the shores of a certain late September

Don’t know how the tide hauled me upon

the littoral where I landed

But I was there: greyblue foam and marine debris

pressed up against the small caverns of my ears, mouth

and through the skins of my lids I blinked into a pink convex:

as if tiny baby fingers webbed across my irises

—was this the close of a margin?

Begin again

*

I found myself raging into a sullen and taciturn

October

bull at a gate, matador of orchestrated mayhem

had the china littered over every which place

I felt vermillion for the very first time

Knew the precise weight of veins

that were loaded to the brim

with searing, sanguineous red

I was awake to it all

perceived I couldn’t leave the same way I came

but the pen was only so permissive as it was wide

after some many wrung-out months

of fighting in a circumscribed circuit

I grew wilted, tired

Recurrent visions caught me: circles, not lines, not streaks

not, not, not

don’t want to swap out water for vitriol

My gall wants the potency,

my haulage wants something to fall on

Supine in a bid to stare, long, at stars

to absorb me in some great celestial contusion

*

Cause if you’re not really here

then I don’t want to be either

I wanna be

next to you

black&gold, black&gold, black and gold….

*

Tell me, now, in tones tempered enough

that a murmur is a shout

: where have all the pieces gone?

Has the held assemblage become detritus, has it, have they

have they disappeared

into the dementia of a self-keeping universe

have those phials of tears been tipped off the ledge

and evermore

become discoloured tablesalt for a dinner setting where no one dares to

slice through the droll

with something seasoned, sound

I resound as I’m an echo bouncing off

unyielding walls

I’m like her who would even demand

for wan crumbs

that have piled into unseeming heaps

at the edges of ivory tables

if it meant I could scrape against the sides of your robe

graze my fingers across a hem that is full as it is luminous,

An outlaw

like the fringes of my own mind

let me un-stuff the holes that are here to be whole

— bleached cottonsoft fluff that flatlines everything above a sigh—

I show you mine as you’ve shown me yours

Re-trace me back, back,

beyond where the hairline cracks snaked out

ruby apples, mistaken sapience, a verdant enclosure forgotten

For what did I allow myself such a thickening ebony

of guile

*

Re-trace me to where a pure thing has noting to prove,

no lines rehearsed

nothing wasted as a byword

babe in arms; milk and honey running

from the final fount, to the start

I’ve heard we’ve been waiting for some noble arrival

but the golden chariots are shut up in our bones

every bloodied sequence, all grey-gummed tedium, every suckling mouth :

muted by metallic growl and grind

Re-trace me where those

afterwords of wonder

translucent symphonies

can be found, again

re-trace strayed

innocence

*