'Morning, grey sky' by Callum Foulds

Morning, grey sky Callum Foulds

CALLUM FOULDS

MORNING, GREY SKY

Published by Electric Frog Ltd. Copyright 2023 Callum Foulds, all rights reserved.

Cover photograph taken by Samuel Clarkson.

1

For Sam.

A Letter To You - Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

You’ll come home with the chainmail glove I know how I’ll look when the key slides in life was a breath the voice of emptiness a dreadful thought which we defend ourselves but we both know how it goes down in real fucking life, fucking messy, the eyes wilder than the depression, than the horniness I am suffering from vertigo the desire to fall if you think I’ve been waiting For what?

the Arboretum I told you this as we entered the arboretum; I will perform this for you, dropping this poetic disguise of rebirth, and watched thundercloud birds with rings of hell around their eyes.

I could tell your hand was reaching, how our shadows became an ugly shape, how back home two parrots were pulled apart with pliers and fell from their perch and drowned in their own blood.

As I sense the wind between my fingers and leaves appearing at my feet I remember I noticed specks of clementine hairs in the sink this morning.

Here I am, in all my little wasp breaths, searching for metaphors in the dirt. You cry tears of the whole world, tiny little globe falling to earth: the globe of a teardrop – there must be something in there.

Morning, grey sky Like a tit shaking rain like a spring swept copse the teenage boys in North Face jackets, mirrored in rain slicked rooftops mirrored in 7ft high windows, in overfilled bins bikes hung over coffee tables, nine urns lay opposite the Raleigh St bike factory, from spilling lighter fluid on the Turkish rug you should lay Perspex under here.

But I dread the loss of heaven and the urns lay to face where the sun reappears where we’re so terrified where sleeves are removed where lighters ignite and bellies are warmed on skylights.

In distraction Through the soaked air torpedoes of pigeons drowned black in the last window of the student house I thought I saw something resembling skin feathered with smoke-toned hairs.

Warped by the bend in the drizzle they lack clothes but are wrapped in the warmth of anonymity. I could never find out where his bones begin or where the rivers carved out in his arms by the weather ends.

In the dark I like to read his mind, how his bus-stop downy is cartoonish with rain, how his winged void travels up his bellybutton until he cannot bare to put on a t-shirt. Oh the privilege of knowing your clothes do not keep you from dignity. His shoulders are as real as rooftops, real enough to house but cash isn’t carried these days.

Their guardians vanish, then appear then vanish. I dropped my cigarette looking down the crossroads.

Magpie Take things out get them out of the fridge the cupboards are empty a magpie looking silver spent money on its spoon bent eye in the root of the city smog in pores not smug berries rolled in sweet autumn rot of mulch the red car ploughs through the red dancers on the street full of sleep and sun scars laying fire convert a factory into cosy homes deep with courtyard and ground floor apartments.

Leather lanced green seam yellow trainers hung from telephone wires, smoking crows swing in Halloween sky blurred upwards into the sea-black heavens, glinting like moon on water.

Home is thick with memory, constantly denying entry, preparing the emptiness.

Coffee clearly The clock hangs around 2:30 like scum at the bottom of the milk jug, my poetry, my romantic propensity for sleep deprivation, the last thing I had last night was my coffee, I spilt it ascending the stairs spreading my foot around me, slithering back to bed, the estuary revealing itself you could say is monotonous like the pull and flow of inspiration, the water splayed, I really am disturbing the only thing I have going for me taking the place of any poetic voice, Eliot had clearly little knowledge of bed making.

Static Melodies stirring with the thrum of bees unappreciated, just something to sleep by, sank below then reappeared like buoys bobbing on the ocean ceiling.

Buzzing along the bed sheets, I thought I heard someone here tonight; the hiss of day-old stubble, but it was only the crackle of the radio not properly tuned, Radio 3 burning through the night, spitting over every little frequency; sleep cauterised by a sonata.

We used to lay inside one another, the words sticky when you peeled them off of me; and now when I wake, I am stuck together and swallows dart through the news.

I bet you thought this were a slaughter None of this is any good. On the television a man hung a poem mid-air and caved in the head of a young French woman out in the Irish countryside, the locals found it unbelievable that he could write something so obscenely of little literary value. Isn’t it terrible? To clutch at straws, to link a murder to the murderer.

I find the countryside difficult to manoeuvre.

And I know when my sister enters a room for her strawberry shampoo, or is it body wash? – lingers so violently as if the air she inhabits is not clean enough to possibly arrive as dirty as the skin she woke up today in.

She bleeds cleanliness, she sharpens her claws, I find the countryside difficult to manoeuvre as the copse varies in strength baring the wind’s unskilled rush.

As village skies open stars up in damp roads.

As farmland is painted with the bloodiest blood, thrashed over everything, the green green grass heavy with compliance.

How the moon rolls from the barn up the hill. How the dovecot shimmers with every dawn and spirits rise, running out of the dirt.

Trapping You made cinnamon buns yesterday evening and rain fell through the kitchen window.

You tell me to spit my feelings, that our home is a canvas, a poem.

But a poem that isn’t ours. If I poke too hard it’ll spill and we won’t get our security deposit back, so probably just best to leave it. We’ll cope, I’m sure.

I’m not one to reveal the outside to the in and walk away but you are at work and I am still here. You say our home is a poem not a page, you are at work and I am separated archways an impossible bridge, not living up to my expectations, the neighbours watching as I disappear.

Bomb exploded you to life and missed saw your wife last night outside to offer condolences you’ve made all the coffee this week she sits there looking pretty but thinking of her blood text me when you wake up to remind me of my funeral at 19 it was held in a fuck off church the cross tapped never sounded so free how I appeared back into the night how she never woke wake me when you wake up kiss me fold yourself over me minutes before the solstice

We Slow Danced Then Fucked - Carissa burned to death last night in a freak accident fire We slow danced then fucked you know what needs to be done you bite my ass leaving a heart shaped lesion

when I beautify my life how important to remember the man who fixed the hi-fi appeared at the bottom of the stairs covered in nothing and you were torn at the funeral and your uncle died again so I set the soft cheese twist out

on a duck egg ceramic plate no bigger than my fist or the cardamon bun received free from work how I wrote in a song about fire vanishing him in flames except that’s not how it happened but I like the song that inspired it

and I wonder what you’re even thinking about as you complain to your parents finding myself inconsolable at some fake trauma that ultimately I’m just searching for material this bullshit that means nothing because some really do just raise two kids

and die because they’re born and the bookcase you’ll pass away kneeling in front of will sway and I’ll just continue to slow dance

My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars - Now I’m begging for footnotes in the story of your life Your beard is the colour of crushed little stars visible only under big-light Nine birds landed in the photograph not constant enough to capture their shadows an oxymoron like melting water Must I cut to get through I am not sure what you mean use the serum on your skin Can I get a cup of coffee please warm how it was on our first date when a poem weaved its way into me Suckling throat I am not sure what you mean generous scarring to get closer to you Open your wound must you cut to get through I’ll write my way into you

Little Pillows Pack me little Bedside draw Sized whisper me Your speciality Begin with lack Of touch at all Except for pillows Just how I need And dust clumps Like tangled hairs But we’re together

Headlights under Twombly and Richter gashes of flame touching arms the morning breath slipped under the pillow bent in the rising sun like a painting hung on the horizon cutting myself where the spirit meets the skin you could carry the field in your arms the deer with its nose against the wintered willow you could catch the fire I spit reading the brail where the tree meets the hoof we arrived in Berlin last night your breath took me like wind out of a train tunnel spat myself into some flickering courage I try to disentangle the hair from the brush you could caress the sinew of my thigh your morning breath slipped under my skin

The Bull You grabbed the bull by its horns and woke up too early for me to reply you were a blood-let a naked spirit leaving your body at the speed of sound taking horns you said let’s do it And a river coloured dragonfly sprung from your terrible hands and touched my big black heart Touching shoulders Touching arms Touching fingertips A thanksgiving dinner with a blue-lipped boy I hear you and see you I acknowledge how your family have hurt you

Chasing, gliding What is height when you’re pulled by an engine on a string when buddleia seeds float into your glass?

Leaving the bedroom, how will you make the bed?

Seeing you beside me, like a tree sees the forest, the first star of the night hung above your shoulder, sparked from Sacha’s lighter.

So fragilely you say, goodnight, your ASICS disfigure you, your skin twisted like forgotten lunaria.

Hidden in dawn your completed orbit, your poem returned to me with my voice.

the dark or was it the ulcer awoken by the BLEEP I’m working on my poems being tighter the 4:22 phone glow my grandparents Celtic white with fear I say it’s a collaging effect but each line is a fragment without elaboration and in the whiteness of morning I lay by the tub nursing your sweet body to rest but you lean in dampening my glasses in the blueness passed on new year’s eve let the bells shimmer the night fire rains across the sky the day dark as it turns over

Perhaps I’ll Write A Poem The city’s not flat, it’s just new to me.

Whilst you work, all evening long, I’ll swallow the silver fire of the desk lamp, my sun starved blood thinly flowing, the cobwebs snagged on the journey around my skeleton, bread gone indigo since we’re never in to eat it.

Perhaps I’ll write to eat. Ordered a 100 pack of tea-lights but the package was lost on its way between it and us.

If I work the graveyard shift (the job in the Phoebe Bridgers song) perhaps I’ll have time to write a poem.

Doing the things people do in poems, twirl an unlit cigarette like a biro, spill a bible-black cup of coffee in my lap as the deep-eyed olive boy with thinning oak hair smiles over his untouched copy of Nabokov’s The Gift, but the carpet’s an arranged vomit of 2000s era colour composition.

Or just take away boxes closed like tombs stacked stoically in the warmest of places.

The Shape of Sleep Show your wrists if you want them to love you The arteries that blush that fray and flyaway Like the puff of clouds after the rain The wheeze of summer and the sand of your being Thrown over your lap like all your pretty capillaries The journey to me stretched out like a map The first thing you see a gloom orange sun Collecting flies thickly swarming over concrete The moon’s ring pulls you in like a warm night The shape of sleep hung out like a sheet in the street Why must we snap ankles to fall?

Because my gender Because you never ask how your parents really are Because a blue bruised sky grew strawberry welts that glow and recede Because you rarely hear birds but they light up the twilight believing at the crossroads and you left your phone in the Uber Because the tree they sing from never formed any words Because we bought dried flowers to arrange near candles but a fire suggests so much Because they search for a god mark on the ceiling Because so it turns out this gender is political you tickle my back I am written into you Because I write poetry within poetry Because I find solace within my home Because the portrait you drew made me statuesque.