A Legacy of Spies, no. 2

“When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions.”--Shakespeare


the birdwatcher’s black ops, numbered notes & a confession

  1. i have always loved early in the morning 
  2. a tongue slip of language inside the warm leftovers of night
  3. the swirl of ice in a glass of whiskey, fever and fern
  4. the wet drip of the softening clang in the dark heat
  5. condensation on the lip, reality otherwise
  6. refinement as if simple Coca-Cola 
  7. to allow my heart to appear more refined than in fact
  8. we men of deceit, the head and heart 
  9. in fact, fact-less
  10. just another locked machine 
  11. the ice whelping in a spin of code

  13. like a god monkeying with a human heart
  14. we fool ourselves in the night with a smoky potable and a gesture
  15. condensation nipples finger and a perfumed fog rolls up the shore
  16. the dead fish, the rickrack of bottle & net
  17. the sound of bones in a glass
  18. metric of poem in a sleeve of exhalation
  19. was always that way then
  20. perfidy in our personage when we signed up

  22. I knew love would come and love would leave 
  23. we would die one day too on the beach shore or alleyway
  24. banging on a tin door while we still could
  25. the looking glass war of a life

  27. a story born of broached passwords, let me in Wen
  28. a flickered gesture late at night, chin against wall
  29. part of a larger body of work 
  30. pulled up from the depths of an elongated voyage 
  31. we are still entangled
  32. chickenfeed and cipher
  33. love dangled as bait on the other side of the sea 

  35. expats kept metre to themselves long into the morning
  36. poems in a drawer, small wedges of dissonance 
  37. hope scattered in a crumble and spit across a defector’s life 
  38. the minute in a shoulder’s turn becomes the last year, a blink 

  40. droplets wrung from crags of a solitary reckoning
  41. twitch and tongue and torque
  42. the god damned Ts

  44. blotch of sand, smudge of heart-stain, the dark snow-bitten window
  45. spy dust and mesh
  46. an expression of man 
  47. shadows by the door caught paper casual 
  48. in the rain cow-lick bite of wind 
  49. the knock of a sudden twist, sublime 
  50. betrayal bark of light upon an heroic nose 
  51. Achilles regret1

  53. alas when I left the station, the world collapsed as did my collar in the rain
  54. for my children and your defenestrated nations, everything someday lost
  55. love and grief decoded, for your eyes only

  57. and a name slipped away with the currents, the tradecraft of the swallow toward the sea


  60. 1Variation on a section detail, no. 1