By the beak

unvisited

[bythebeak]

It's my 10 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

[bythebeak]

[bythebeak]

big mouth

[bythebeak]

clean-sweep, start again

[bythebeak]

Christmas Special

Bristles twitch as he snores, spent from all that carving and cracker-pulling big chest loaded with man breasts, rising and falling.

Remote kept locked in a comatose fist, quits sleep to channel flick off the Queen’s Speech. I imagine her coming in with hands on hips: clearing empty wrappings and Bombay mix. Smiling at him, and the first Christmas without kids.

[bythebeak]

Engagement

If you recollect correctly: You’ll see I read a poem I’d written years ago, before I met you. And not just because it came to me, but

because I thought you should know what you were getting into, even if you didn’t know you were getting into anything. It seemed to fit.

It’s observations about clouds were like the day behind us, when we’d spoken about skinny dipping in the reservoir but instead got lost, repeatedly.

It was a good poem. It was old. From a time when I wrote poetry, not just statements. From before. I like to think I read it well.

And, anyway, it worked. Then we talked about the things we had achieved, the things we wanted still. Like  getting married after getting off this hill.

But, when it came to The Proposal proper, I faltered, I’ll admit. I felt silly, watched, outside my own skin. What you got was not a proposal, but a swimsuit. A chance to join me, to jump in.

[bythebeak]

Ages and ages hence

You will be in the background

of a newsfeed, or on the table next to me, between buses along city Road or hiding from the rain in the Oxfam on upper Street. Or perhaps when it comes to pass it will be me, I will be be the one you see in the headlights of your minicab, or shifting aimlessly between the office and the last sun in Bloomsbury.

However it may ever come to be,   somehow, at some point across the years our eyes will meet and only age, time and everything but distance, will stand there: unmoving, with us stuck between.

[bythebeak]

Killing flies

Her thumbs came up a sticky brown: red around the edges, with bits of wings and legs, mid-grip, falling off.

She made some noise of disgusted revelry, a smile arching beneath her nose.

She wound the window down and wiped her hand clean.

[bythebeak]

A birthday poem

It's too hot today to write you a poem My literal hands smudge the screen; The tube is airless and there's no sun, Which is basically a lie because how can one place so dark be so hot?

But it's your birthday. And it's a strange thing, getting older, with fewer poems, less exchanged. The miles between. The songs that take you back and forth and back again to vague traces,   misspelled.

Above again, I tried to squint and keep squinting at the sun we are both right now underneath And thought of all that, and all that came was this. Here's your poem. Have good one.

[bythebeak]

Yma a Hwn

For the first time in my country today I felt a principality inside  the accents of the carriage way and named­-twice places  alien as asphalt.

[bythebeak]

Teenage Pregnancy

Fuck you, Wrexham, I never loved you. I never needed your smoky bars, I didn't want your siriad caffs.

And fuck you and your blinking streetlights Your, beautiful, helicon streetlights beckoning to Minera and beyond. Fuck You.

Fuck you, Wrexham, I'm not seventeen. I'm not q-ing at both doors of clubs I hate for music I can't stand. I'm not getting pizza and walking home. Fuck You.

And fuck you, Wrexham, she's fucking left. She's inside dry and I'm out here wet - she's fast asleep and I'm wide awake.

Fuck you, Wrexham: I'm pulling out.

[bythebeak]

Practicing Fly Fishing, July 1998

Casting onto the front lawn the long shadows of a summer evening. My wrist guides the rod just the wrong side of ten and pulls it back, with pain-staking ease, time and again to two, or there-a-bouts.

You shout out the rhythm One, two, three. I’ll waltz without moving as lines arch slowly and then land in a heap.

[bythebeak]

Trying to Read

With apologies to Hannah

On Saturday, you came without my slippers or breakfast and burrowed on my keks, looking up my nose. “When we first met” faded into Federer wins in straight sets and Sparky’s face smothered yours.

I protested with a League Two placard switched to Bell’s Scottish League and marked Right to Silence with a cross at three-thirty.

You stopped, blushing rose pink, wounded and I could’ve bridged the gap before the gulf opened, but my eyes fell to the K-League. You left, bum bouncing, and I shouted for a cup of tea.

[bythebeak]

Christmas Special

Bristles twitch as he snores, spent from all that carving and cracker-pulling big chest loaded with man breasts, rising and falling.

Remote kept locked in a comatose fist, quits sleep to channel flick off the Queen’s Speech. I imagine her coming in with hands on hips: clearing empty wrappings and Bombay mix. Smiling at him, and the first Christmas without kids.

[bythebeak]

Strangers on a Train

When you look up from your bestselling book and see it’s Lincolnshire you’re passing through think only this of me: I’ve been using one corner of our shared train window to steal glances, and make eye contact with you.

[bythebeak]

La

For RA

It’s his voice, they said. Really brings it to life, really get the caesura there, when he reads it, they said. You know what I mean? they said. Yeah, I know. I said.

Put in print you must be nothing. The brace of vowels finding assonance and the sibilance of your guttural northern wit must just be music’s happy accident.

But it’s the page that makes the mouth, that translates the syntax into song, and tricks the cadence into seeming scouse. It’s not his voice, I said, you’re wrong.

[bythebeak]

Our Optician is Hounding my Girlfriend

We can now take a photo of the backs of your eyes

from this we hope to see your dreams in situ.  You worried us. So we have begun  to follow your keystrokes home, including the poem left at your front door.

We know all about the poems inside. We have intercepted your internet to the point  we rewrite your searches as you type:  It’s because we love you. You are our lense.

Just last night our agents dreamt, too, and as we tailed you from the tube  you turned, our eyes went beyond the space of regulation four passersby, or eight feet.

We are the window beneath your eye. We anticipate each other, almost to the letter.