Beers In Your Bedroom

Beers in Your Bedroom
(for Rachael K, for helping me save my life)

We have beers in your bedroom.
My fears would be intoxicating without you.
Outside, car alarms shout at shadows,
a woman’s scream stabs the night.

Inside, together
we are alive.
Your flat's above it all.
Door locked. Window open.
Glows from fag stubs, thin white dukes,
light a corkscrew path to morning.

Our tongues brighten dark.
These moments taste of unconcentrated truth,
Chaucer and tumblers of Fat Boy Slim.
We tape Woman’s Hour to play backwards,
exchange identities under skin.
Hail bloody fairies and horns.

We dress up in old lovers’ ideas.
Hang ours up to dry. See what drips out first.
Dissect entrails of aborted stories.
Whole scripts wait in a typewriter’s puckered spool
between shy, naked poems
printed only on sheets of dusk.

"Then, we unwrite the imperfect pop song.
Kurt Cobain and Kiki Dee sing
Don’t Go Breaking My Heart Shaped Box."

Our nights are so heavy with talk
we might even... break through these floorboards,
crash into the spiked streets below,
so I cuddle your sentences. Grip tight.
Sit secure in our obscurity.

We're the extra features on a DVD
those with jobs are too busy to watch,
but we watch them and talk
ourselves down in thick blankets of sun.

Let us sleep through the violence of minutes and hours
that wage war against today’s tired minds,
too burdened with action to slow down and think.
I drink to the courage
of these thoughtless grunts on the front line.
Raise my empty bottle.

We’ve drunk the night dry.
My voice lids won’t keep open.
You wrap my words up warm.
Still, I know that they would freeze
out there
at bus stops, supermarket queues,
or sat, without vowels,
at office desks and the water cooler.