#john stammers

[contremineur]

John Stammers, The day flies off without me (in Stolen love behaviour, Picador 2005)

[fluttering-slips]

The Day Flies Off Without Me The planes bound for all points everywhere etch lines on my office window. From the top floor London recedes in all directions, and beyond: the world with its teeming hearts.

I am still, you move, I am a point of reference on a map; I am at zero meridian as you consume the longitudes. The pact we made to read our farewells exactly at two in the afternoon with you in the air holds me like a heavy winter coat.

Your unopened letter is in my pocket, beating. John Stammers

[contremineur]

This, though, was a coming into the world. It had not occurred to me to think you would know how to do such a thing. You showed me the proper way of it and so you are changed to me and I to you, the way that creases remain always in a sheet of paper that has once been folded.

John Stammers, final lines to Mary Brunton

from here

[contremineur]

John Stammers, final lines to Perhaps you have dreams (final poem in ‘Panoramic Lounge-bar’, Picador 2001)

[poem-today]

A poem by John Stammers

Like A Heatwave Burning

It was the hottest summer on record; we flew into rages at the drop of a pin. The heat made cacti of us all.

I woke up hot crazy at one in the morning. The day’s sun had heated up the sky so heavy it felt like being ironed.

We sat on the curbside like hot bananas and Jane read me the Miranda of our future lives together:

there would be no future lives together. I’d never heard the nightjay squawk so damnably shrilly in the still, still stilly.

My eyeballs made sinuous rills. I sloughed on my sandals and loped onto a streetcar named expire.

Tyres welded cars to the road. I got out my character and began the tasks of a lifetime.

Pine trees collapsed in a dead swoon all over the place. Believe you me, honeydew features, it was hot.

John Stammers

[thesunlounge]

John Stammers - Idle I’m (Colorama Coloured In Remix) (Wonderfulsound, 2011)

[ecstasis]

The day flies off without me

The planes bound for all points everywhere etch lines on my office window. From the top floor London recedes in all directions, and beyond: the world with its teeming hearts.

I am still, you move, I am a point of reference on a map; I am at zero meridian as you consume the longitudes. The pact we made to read our farewells exactly at two in the afternoon with you in the air holds me like a heavy winter coat.

Your unopened letter is in my pocket, beating.

John Stammers

[dk-thrive]

the way that creases remain

and so you are changed to me and I to you, the way that creases remain always in a sheet of paper that has once been folded.

~ John Stammers, from “Mary Brunton″ from Stolen Love Behaviour (publisher: Picador, 2005)