Placed

All the boys I've brought to my bed –
Dates marked in cypher in the journal I lost
In the strait overboard the Dionysos –
Make motion-blurred shapes, stored in my camera
And number as the stars God
Placed in the heavens and named every one,
Drop from the sky as do the sparrows, are clothed
As are the flowers found in the field.

England gave me thermals,
Saturated my underclothes
With that holiest of sweats
And let me look on down
To hill and vale – model and flock.
England honed in me an appetite,
A panting desire for the beaded confluence
Of sanctified lust, glory for moment.

The Orient passed by really –
As on a cinema screen, as on a flat plane –
That learnt in me indifference
That I could fuck and maintain
Suspicion that what's happening's
Just fucking it all up the more,
That what before would've been
The good things taste of ash.

And the country I was born in, the city –
Stinking white and the same – recalled
In me my childhood diversions –
To close my eyes, figuratively.
And how that things will out as they would
And from where, anyway, do thoughts arrive?
What's past is what has been, still tugging,
And who knows what will be?

And the escape from it –
Just two hours out on the dusty road,
With the brown of doubt and
The pouring out of privilege
Onto ground too hard-cracked
To absorb life-giving ambrosial –
Gave me time to myself to
Rattle my brain about my skull.

And what was it then that the island did?
Rising from the ocean to meet my bark
At the harbour, forming rocky bays
To meet my waters, graceful curves of beach
My wavelets to lap at?
For certain there was woven,
Beneath my skin bathed in alcohol,
A copper network of wire

And the net hooked-in, changing form
And temperature, to the very molecules
Of place, of this place that for sure,
Acting on my behalf, guided my fingers
To button flies and zippers
And which were not beautiful,
As my body failed neglected to cover it in kisses,
Bathe it with perfume?

And which of them slacked
In bringing offering? If only as
Silver sweet tongues flickering
I may not recall near half the names
But I ring the dancing fingers
The sides of chasms clashing
As astronomic conjunctions
The moments I came