Six Political Poems

Glimpsing a  hint of something 

a multitude of scales 

of individuals  

different types 

                       she’s sculpting her anger and disappointment into a brightness 

                       and releasing it to join the others and strengthen their intervention

Living by building walls,

afraid of the dark and the different,

whistling Dixie.

They take the signs emitted by their masters far too seriously

and then kill for a heavily guarded and 

aggressive timidity.

Teeth of the worms of the teeth in a scarlet pit;

               blazers and shining buttons and cocktails

and teeth clinking against glasses and worms and the teeth of the worms

               and auto-satisfaction in the smiling pit, ringed with diamonds,

and the crisp shirt stained pink against deep pink flesh.

… pick up and shift it shift it over there over

there shift it drop it off then pick that up and shift it 

over there wrap it up then pick it up and shift

it over there there over there shift it pick it up and shift it 

unwrap it break it down and rebuild it across those four 

then wrap them all up and shift them shift them 

pick them up and put that one here put that one there put

that one here put that one here shift them put that in there 

put this one in here in here in here then that one there on there

are you trying to put it there there make a career out of that

pick this up and shift it over there pick pick it up and put it …

Waiting flames, scarlet and vibrating yellow, licking tarmac

in the heat of expectation of nothing but shining signals

of intense intention, masks and raised flags declaratives 

of a desire for lives lived according to a genuine dialogue between 

necessity and desire, instead of under orders, rising &

flickering in variations, forever around the edges & anew

in every trembling eternal differential duration, rising &

singing in scarlet fire and shuffling across bright ground. 

Under sensitive fingertips is red-brown rust raised up from the colder, 

smooth black paint of the post they’re clinging to, sky shining far away, 

damp, aching and obscure (and there again, both closer and just as distant, in the

gutter-puddle). A cold surface of skin lightly brushed on occasion by thin denim

registered at the far edges of a cramped daydream as a bus approaches; an

aching hollow chill at a deep core of need needling a perimeter of transition to

others and outside and that cushion of anger and warmth a metre or so away.