These heights held fast by the heathen and church folk, all stitched into it

Like askew white fenceposts laced with strings of weed and flower

These heights held also by their fused children:

Dissenters and Freak Cultists, hairy and clear-eyed, with the rain

Dripping like glass sap from ochre jumpers and red beards

Fog keeping them all up here, floating in their beanies

In a mist that wraps fat tomes with a hundred words to describe it

The wet atom shades of a Confucian Limbo Land

Cold as brass and drunk on condensation

They hold the heights, or the heights hold them

And fried chicken shop steam against the glass is a slide of water

In a colony of chimneys built into the living vapour

Punched against the earth like rigs, venting earth smoke in slow escape …

Beef and black bean sauce for tang and then it’s

Back out into the dragon’s heaped breath

Turning streetlights into drowned brave submarines

That sink away with Morse code epilogues

We move like fog fishermen along these heights

As gargantuan dreamtime serpents glide in the shoals around us

Through prehistory that sends some tilting into white loud madness

As from the rooming house, the Slavic former prisoner of war

In all her insane license comes calling onto the main street

Like a dire bird housed in body fat and half-dead dialects

Up here, smashed bottles seem to dissolve

In wet crumbs along brick corners and silty trails

The marauders lost to drown in the depths of fog

And the green-black gradients that fall through the town

As spirits with faces of husks and wooden horns

Rattle their knuckles in worlds of wet gumleaf, in this petrified sea

Where clouds pass through fossils coiled like bone fuses

The orange jellied heater of the station waiting room draws us -

A bright hot collection plate in a vagabonds’ church

In this rookery where each glass of hot chocolate is

A tall and heavy

Shining signal bell

Will Swan

http://willswan.wordpress.com/

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