13/01/2012

www.jmhooker.net

Poems Walking Home after Dancing

1.

Did you ever succeed in selling it off?
Did you ever succeed in selling off
bloodlines,
or songlines,
or little white lines
between your head and mine,

did you ever succeed in constructing
a time,
built here on the brick out of scratches of song,
Why are there shoes in my bag
if the rhythms have gone?

2.

This town is a crisis,
with dances
in glass palaces.

(The construction of sound or of space –
Building an echo,
If the room were a hollow,
a hollow, the room,
and the beats
imitations of hoofs,

There’s jazz in my head,
But I’m sure it’s a ruse.)

3.

We trespass in
night gardens over  the street,
which
the lamps show the fall – -
unforgiven
precipitate change;

revolution

(means only return:
coming back to set out,
this time
with a ladder.)

4.

I’m happy, and kick-stepping home
through the light in the street
after maybe a kiss
or maybe just feeling the pulse in my feet
and a hand on my back,

I don’t stop to think,
and I wish it would all stay like that.

5.

Just to wonder
how high
was the moon,

And to orbit the palace with
lights showing green through the mist
in the centre of town.

6.

There was a fox,
and a trumpet -
in summer you came here,
and laughed even though we were sad.

And that was the filter,
the music,
the dance,
and the city was open,
the city was real,

with the rhythm of home.