Alan Gillis

I don't know you, you don't know me,
but if we want to carry on we need
to make like mountaineers who tie themselves
together to survive their clunt and grapple
...

This is not about burns or hedges.
There will be no gorse. You will not
notice the ceaseless photosynthesis
or the dead tree's thousand fingers,
...

Car like a comet, breaking all the lights, we speed
towards waiting rooms and vending machines.
The anaesthetic takes time to empty your head
so it becomes a stadium and the game postponed.
...

They say that for years Belfast was backwards
and it's great now to see some progress.
So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes
from the earth. I guess that ambulances
...

We dip, drop and dovetail in a cabaret
with crushed daiquiris and spellbound
maracas clippety-clapping the way
words click together and channel their sound
...

Three seconds passed, another one dead,
I walked past violets and wind-flowers,
cowbind, eglantine, moonlight-coloured may
and ivy serpentine snaking as I railed
...

How the mind drifts, as we mosey along
through brief nights and long walks in public
parks or by shorelines, by the riverside's
crinkled ferns and fronds, traipsing past
...

We take the air, it has no surface, it has no depth;
but the air won't cease to put another crease
upon your changing face, in the corner
of your eye. As our cindertrack turns to twitch grass
...

Little head, tired arms, speedy mind,
let yourself flow with the thrum of the engine.
Driving through the warpled night we can find
our way home, and then worry about heaven.
...

Not a cloud in the sky and it's raining.
It's the brusqueness of things,
and the drag of things, that hurts.
The most beautiful woman in the world
...

Forget about

it for you'll
never win,
...

Emptied, precious, querulous, frail,
a box of butter biscuits by the bedside,
dun pills in a pale plastic tray,
your grandmother lies in her tiny bones
...

The girl from the satellite
town holds berries in the fast stream
supermarket queue.
She carries her longing like a stream of song,
...

I

We met at the tail of a check-out queue,
and when she turned her head she spread
like blood through snowflakes, all melt and fire,
...

What pleasures we might find
pass on.
Nothing to be done. Like air
they are not long
...

The ambience of night creeps and swirls
in a haze through me, to sift and curl

in your ear as you drift into quiet
darkness, when I recognise it,
...