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
I hold him heavy against my breast /
As he drains me. //
The essence of male and female. /
This, almost unspeakable, ails me.
My brother doesn’t remember all of it /
and I don’t either. Between us //
most of that day is lost.
a man is swallowing his penis and turning into a flower. I thought I could sit down /
and burn a hole through my suffering by sheer focus. I got distracted.
That year? I smell it mostly in the smoke of one long joint /
after another in parked cars next to emptied pools /
on summer days, days that burned into night, believing /
one turn of the key and I could drive away.
in the auditorium of several neighboring windows /
I see a single moth /
as old and miserable as the world
Kaddish is Aramaic for “holy.” /
What could be more holy than a good person? /
My mother put a magnifying glass up to God.
So now you know why I have a habit of collecting broken lines of code / For necklaces or passwords from handwritten recipes like darts dozing / In a traveling case.
Thick summer air / that warms what it chokes, and chokes what it warms. / The locked cage of a lover’s arms. And above us, the / cool prison of the Lord’s regard. What to call this - / the hatred of the earth-bound / for the sky?
I wanted to know how “good poets” /
turn pissing off of the back of a boat /
into something worth reading
I see Heathcliff /
slink out of the forest /
in the morning mist.
