Sun’s Poodle

I need to work this shit out:

I want the winter to be my friend.

But in the winter entreaty’s lexicon evades me

and I carry summer’s kiss blandly tattooed across my fabric.

The sun’s poodle wavers, sidles gingerly

into an imagined crack between hibernation and denial,

only to find that fantasy is reified in times and places of its own choosing.

And it’s so fucked up, it does my head in.

I am mis-classified.

Sun’s poodle puts his testosterone back in his handbag,

and returns to his basking,

a lizard in a crack in a sun baked stone wall.

I am the wall.

I am the fly the lizard hunts; I am drunk;

I am mulling things over;

I am soaking up light

as though it could be stored

to sustain me on narrow days

when I must be a creature of visible breath,

and sleet, and filigreed rime on morning windows;

and piercing sheets of anaemic yellow

animating haze above white gilt fields of once was and will be.

My words betray me: I love those things,

love winter, as it kills me, love how it kills me;

loving it kills me.

I am hoping to convince myself, but…

…fuck it, I am the sun’s poodle.

Limousin and Suffolk, August to September 2010