Modern Love: Texting

We send each other text messages at work.
Discuss what we’re having for lunch.
Ether-joined by unlimited messages and pixel screens.
Two minutes after saying goodbye on dates
our phones jangle, vibrate,
‘I had a lovely time tonight ’.

The little xx means more from you.
You give me fewer than my mum.
I look and linger at them, there,
at the end of your miniature letters.
Save the sweet ones in a folder
and read them when down.

‘These are the reasons I love you.’
‘Do you want to go to the cinema at four?’
‘I’ve never felt this before.’
I smile when I see your name appear.

The lump is a plastic pebble in my pocket
heavy with the weight of expectancy.
Linked to everything, almost sentient
it throbs with the lives
of so many people a button press away:
Facebook, e-mails, Google
and you.

When people are gone: vanished.
Ephemeral ghosts that exist
but don’t. That breathe,
but don’t.
The wishing wells in which we shed our coins.
Our thumbs linger over ‘DELETE’
as though they’ll disappear from memory, too.

Punch. Gone. The love letter’s dead.
Think that’ll make us feel better.
When our hearts turn red again,
we’ll wish we had the numbers still
to say
hello, hi, how do you do.

[link]

that somehow bridged our first hellos
then at night, as we attempted sleep,
the closed brackets of our bodies.

That night we carved new words in city stone,
bottomed glasses:
vodka and Diet Coke as our mouths,
judging, but kind,
spoke tomes
in the quiet move of Zygomaticus major
and minor
and more.

First, of nervous probing,
a smirk as you laughed twice at my voice.
Then, gentle,
making motions that predicated words.

I focused on your lips.
The words unsounded through a kiss,
spoke against snowdrift streets.

I will not kiss you first
in case, pecked, it remains with me
a silent signature of your lips.

I will not dance with you
in case the drink blurs your face into my dreams
watching between Love and Like.

I will not tell you my hopes
in case you fall for those
and not for me.

I will not speak to you
in case your voice begins to merge
with the heart-drum in my chest.

I will not text you quickly
or leave you kisses
in case I begin to fall and fall.

See here.

This is one of the poems I wrote on the Barbican Young Poets Scheme. It’s a Fibonacci sequence poem. In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers are the numbers in the following integer sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. So we ignore the 0 and create a poem based around the rest of the numbers, each number being a syllable. 

See here.

All the days to tread till I meet you. All the miles walking together around kitchens, homes and showrooms clutching our Tesco/Morrisons/Waitrose-trolley-full-dreams. Swearing whilst our kids watch us, getting in a huff over what type of juice is good. I’m young; I’m old, still thinking this. Every stolen pillow is a memory out of reach on a shelf with steampressed showers, clammyfucked meek and sweet. On that ledge there’s your bottom shaped in tea leaves, stained mugs and all the silent faceless dreams I’ve had. In nightcoiled alleys you’re lamppost-flashing, winking a morse code language from a daylight, daybreak, future-never-seen and there at a place I can’t reach you’re dancing, smiling all-knowing because my feet can’t walk through time yet. Try as they might I can’t get the dance right. This could be five hundred poems, and it has and it will, every sky I’m under is over you, too; every time I sleep I’m eyetight, thinking of you clearly. All these drinks I’ve drowned, toasted dearly, dear. Every moment spent ticks towards our meeting, starbound, trapped, heavy, heaving. Kissing. Like this. x. And this. x. And this. x.

See here.

As someone said in a review of Modern Love, [the book will be] ‘all too familiar to anyone who has ever had to change their relationship status on Facebook back to ‘single’.’ I’m happily un-single right now, but there’s something about the way we love/shag/whatever in the post-MySpace era that intrigues me. I wonder if it’s at all different now or if it really matters at all.

There’s no point giving you the filler pages in Modern Love. Here’s the acknowledgement, before the contents, that opens up the collection:

For family, who in time we find as friends
and friends, the family of our own making.

Max x

More info soon.

Okay – so the last poem:

The Ezra Pound Shop

after Steve Walling

A compass that will lead you only to water

with a preference to the Baltic Coast.

A pack of old cards already marked

from a decades hard gambling on the ships.

A box of old kippers that smoke themselves

before descending on the offy for cigs.

A book filled up with lurid illustrations

of paintings of landmarks by Cezanne.

The diary of a baritone

who longed to be a cello.

Every reward card you have never needed

because who in their heart could ever possibly pledge fidelity to a sandwich?

A do-it-yourself-stained-glass-window-kit

with several accessible illustrations.

The long way home after a bad night drinking

and no pairs of arms to fall into.

I send you a picnic on an isle of grass

somewhere in central london, a bell

from a church somewhere from childhood,

a swig of lukewarm beer.

I send you too the beach and your terriers

playing tug of war with the bladderwrack

as elsewhere an old man tugs at his beard

watching the sea for some answers.

And you could be that quiet man

sat on a bench with a book you’re not reading,

a bench with dedications on a high

lonesome hill. And still I see you crossing

the bridge at rush hour, watching the boats

as they get under weigh, not lost exactly,

but what?