After Skype
Night after barren night
I shiver at the ruins
of my disappointed hours.
In this aching flat
I survive without epiphany
over weak tea and Propertius.
Every day I make you new
playlists of ambient music.
I think the sky blames me
for it's exhausted colour
but I'm too sick. No more artisan
cocktails in New England
peculiar rain or autumn crocus.
I can't think of the sad seafood
at the Boston Harbour
because each loneliness is particular
your laptop gives me vertigo.
I wish you'd bite my shoulder
like an apple or let me abide
in your household memory.
I need to touch you again as if
you were a lightbulb surging
with electricity through a summer storm
or hold you like a poppy
holds a bumblebee
as the humbling earth
riots around us in
delight of passing time.
Night Shift with Stars
When I stand in the sullen silence
of a cigarette, glancing at the listless
stars, set as they are like screws
in a fixture, I consider how the arrow
of Orion held taut towards the static
heart of Taurus, will never misfire
into the pointless void, nor strike
its astral mark – then I shudder
at the timeless lethargy which holds
both animal and tool in rigid pause;
glimpsing in the unresolved tension
of the arrested sky, the futility
of my own life's torpid labour;
and wishing for an moments weary
epiphany from the motionless
galaxy; I exhale and return to work.
_____________
Jack Warren is an environmentalist and poet from the South West. He has worked as a labourer and bartender for most of his career however he currently works in conservation. He holds an MA in Poetics from the University of York, an MSc in Applied Ecology from the University of Gloucestershire, and his poetry can be found in Magma, Anomaly, the Cardiff Review and others.
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