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
In our latest interview, we talk to David Biespiel about his latest volume of poetry, Republic Café, a long poem that explores the radical intimacy of public trauma and what it means to inhabit the reality of the body politic within one's own skin.
Some stories should be left alone because there is no way to defend them /
and no way not to see ourselves in the darkest versions of others.
it might be said that whoever planted their heels /
against the uprooted soil and lit a match against /
a mute sky / disconnected night did not /
set fire to but merely blew a spark
A dog growled and barked. Good dog, / I heard, unsure if it was my voice / or my dog.
The dementia fractures her /
the same way ice splits a rock.
Pascal drops a quarter in the slot,
and the Gypsy Queen shuffles the deck.
So many people in the world. Truly, is no one superfluous?
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.
