On internal and external space
Taken from upcoming collection The Swerve

I watched a dirty bird  
Picking through a flock  
For some minutes  
Before realising it was not dirty at all  
Its feathers were blackened and browned 
It was, in fact, just ugly  
And I sank in contemplation of the individual;  
The cruelty of ugliness 
And the stark ductility of finitude.  
A one is a cosmic stutter 
A dense comma between comprehensible spaces  
Threatening the rhythm of order and meaning 
Through the frankness of its vocabulary  
And I ponder ugliness –  
This menace writ large –  
And beauty, this same menace  
On a warmer day. 

And I watched a sodden cabbage 
Squatting in the rain 
A loose fist held against the sky 
Righteously declaring disinterest 
And sphericality unto itself 
A limp green gaze turning  
Ever down and away; 
It is only when mud splashes its shoulder 
That it falls into synchronicity   
With the busy pecking and scratching  
Of the shameless act of being 
That flashes all about,  
And the envious eye 
Can rest upon it 
For a minute –  
This lump of satisfaction, 
Plump in pure distraction, 
Silent crown of the swollen earth. 

And in time, 
I saw the growth of one spongey tube 
One cell rippling and straining
Into an entire semantic field; 
An atomic proposition  
Encompassing horizons of meaning 
With its skin stretched around the sun 
And the conspiracy of spatial expansion 
Churning behind the muscle walls of its sovereign domain. 
Flexing in and steadily out, diaphragmatically, 
Its undulous warping is the billowing shape of language 
Pulsing in binary waveforms. 
Thus does the tremolo, pleasure and pain,  
Infiltrate space, dissolve and imbibe;  
Thus does the heart of the creature before you  
Bleed from the lines in which it’s inscribed.