Oliver Roberts

I wait for you in the morning sun
the morning sun.
Here in the morning sun,
its light burning, burning
...

It was already noon
but I was awake.
You came into the kitchen,
a black band tied hurriedly in your hair,
...

I open my eyes
for the first time.
For the first time,
you are beside me
...

Standing in the space between when we touch and when we don’t,
I watched from a distance as we kissed.
Together we had formed a tunnel;
something roared inside its depths,
...

In the night’s forgotten hour
you closed me into your eyes,
their black shine taste in my mouth.
Walking blindly in the snow,
...

I watched him at the window,
gray hair peering at the dawn,
mimicking the morning frost,
his face cut like winter’s throat.
...

Dawn flickers with your glorious wet scent
and I burn beneath it like electric glass.
During the dark and rainy hours,
where outside, heavily coated people roamed the streets,
...

From the edge of the dark you came,
cutting through the angry tide with your naked sails.
In the luscious haze you shone like a lazy star
and rippled the night out towards my shadows.
...

I want to be there in the morning,
to feel you stir in the naked heat,
and hear you moving in the sheets.
I would watch your face wake,
...

Now that you’re with me things have changed,
even the word ‘here’ is not the same.
Now I say it more often than I used to –
I say ‘come here’ and I kiss you,
...

There is a garden in you,
a field of low clouds and smashed pebbles;
fertile night growing in soft, damp beach sand.
You sprout lost shapes from the shadows of our between,
...

You would dropp into my mouth like an old bell,
or wind from fire stopping suddenly in a corridor.
It’s along those musky halls that I found you,
your delicate steps measured the stretch of night,
...

Dusk passes gently over you,
wayward woman of my bed, ache of my heart.
You made me promise that I’d sleep.
I whispered that I would wait inside you until sunrise,
...

You take me up into a sordid heaven,
a soft space of wet choirs and fizzing stars.
There, in your eyes, I find burning angels,
and a pack of smouldering white veils glow beneath me.
...

How will you remember me?
Wet hands redeeming flesh,
my liquid smell spread across your body.
Those nights we spent hidden away like ghosts,
...

I have worn you on me like sunshine,
I have kissed you until my mouth was yours,
I have smelt your skin in the morning,
and known everything about the way you sleep.
...

Even if I told you today, you still wouldn’t really know.
If I said I wanted to take you away with me one last time,
press you to me and talk about it in the night and the rain,
or go to a place where we could just be two drops that fall,
...

Your face does not yet own a poem.
I saw it yesterday for just a moment and I know.
Who are you that nobody has written about you?
In your walk you own the coming of a storm;
...

Light waited long for you, alone and lost,
sheltering homelessly outside my house.
Hung with moths and cold, it held closely itself,
tracing yellow walls and the footsteps of the night.
...

I count the sounds
coming off your body;
the back and forth
and back
...