MY GOD
you have no idea
of the distances i would travel
just to disappoint you
i will even wear a fashionable shoe
my god
just watch me
and another? i ask
go ahead you say
and another?
no that’s too many shoes
we shout
we throw bits of the forest at the forest
we walk
the so-called trees and the sky
a so-called kite and a cloud
my god
the so-called sky but first the trees
if you hold my hand
hold my hand
it could even rain
a walk in the wet leaves
my so-called shoe comes off in the mud
my god these yellow socks
i love them
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CRISPIN BEST lives in London and at www.crispinbest.com.
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Read more by Crispin Best:
Two poems at The Quietus
Two poems in Hilda
One poem in Poems in Which
The door always used to swing shut, by itself, for years and years, with measured haste. / Now it stands utterly still.
You tell yourself you’re immune, always, but then D appears, if not exactly out of the shadows then like a river of milk flooding the kitchen.
Water cress. Watercress. From the cognate in Middle Low German and Dutch. Waterkers. Pliny the Elder, in his History of the World—why aren’t there more books of this name—describes its roots as “effectual,” or so says the O.E.D.
it signifies some terrible and unwanted part of myself has been skillfully excised and that now it rushes off, most likely to be run over by a fully loaded tractor-trailer, screeching...
How hard the mountain tries to become the wind. How hard the wind tries to become a flame. How hard the flame tries to become a mountain. And the mountain, how it pretends not to notice the moon’s secret moves, what a torn moon rising from its mirror.
I’m not saying we both wake to a darkness and go to bed each night knowing we’ll wake to the same darkness the next day. I’m not saying that.
Land stretches, lush and flooding, and a man rows a boat across a field into the night.
Ought to put you over my knee. That tough love you never got from your damn fool daddy.
I must have. Stolen cash from my boss. Torn the legs off a cat. Sworn at the Afro’d server who put pickles in my sandwich. How else explain my son. Who walks with a cane.
Somebody is up there, somewhere, looking down at us, also seeing us in pieces. We are like shadows passing among the roots of the trees. When we reach the other side, the world has changed.
