1.
The man with the yellow book shimmers out
Of the hotel, collar up and eyes flashing, unguilted
By the camera-flashes and the sly, strident questions
That expect no answer. I discovered him last week
And I love him now, for reasons of my own, and he
Looks perfect and unleavened as he hurries off
Down the street, hard-breathing and eager to
Draw grey, smiling curses on the blacks and whites
Of bigots who cry wolf and want to be admired.
I watched the spectre three years before, as he greeted
His father with a cough, lungs charred, blood-black, life
Already over but a spirit eager, still, to swirl a
Greater beauty and death’s cute provocations
Around the others, the others who see themselves
As unwild sons of truth and honour, who sought to
Rain on this Brighton boy as he names the darkness
In our hearts and builds sandcastles on its condemned
Beauty and swims in their jellyfish chambers.
2.
Twenty-five. He was gone quick, soul supposedly
Sold in self-parody, yet he’d already kissed
The Devil and played cards with God a century before
I started to see either of them for who they are. The
World is unforgiving and shrugs its shoulders so often
That I want to give up but then beauty comes:
God-flower, God-poem, whisper of Godlike-compassion,
God-laughter, the first divine note of that song,
The friend’s more-than-angels lips and the touch of a real hand.
And I try and grasp it all, as if this is what Iris meant when
She said the meaning is in the world for us to discover,
Not for us to create. But the thing is this: he so desperately
Wanted to believe in evil and I so desperately want to believe
In good and I’ll watch him again and again as he clings to that
Beautiful, yellow indecency and I’ll feel him consumed
Slowly by their dark breaths and I’ll inhale the paintings and
Take the photos and feel the minor chords and then I’ll wish,
Just for a lifetime, that I was him.
