This is in response to reading poems recently by W.S. Graham and Barbara Guest. It’s a first draft.

 drift 

the purpose is just
this, to push your life at the edges
 


to step out, blur borders so yellow bleeds
into blue and the scarlet
rectangle balances
 


there
 


in your dry room, your landlocked thoughts
are on time-lapse
 


now
 


sudden lights like waves
 


another frame of mind freezes 
into one by Hokusai
 


you can walk around it,
old gesture in close-up,
from deep to shallow,
 


viewing-points around a body:
of water, bodies mostly are
water, you can only wait, drink, smoke
 


close the curtains
on that asexual moon or the tide
 


won’t ebb like uneven boundaries
suggestive of fear around 
subsidiary colours, by association
 


the purpose of drift is to push
at the moment leap blue
 


sharp edge of an ice wave grazes
one heel however its dimensions
are not dissimilar from those of parachutes
that land wild thoughts, some which 
 


will die, your unleashed ones
in an upside down turn of place
where you must breathe on your hands
 


then
 


reach into the hands of others
to pull whatever’s in there free from the frame.