6 Poems by David McLean

Light Like Falsity

light falls shedding falsity

and Spinoza's strictures on souls

being absences and the all-pervading

nothing, liquids subtle

at least as much as piss is

so light falls shedding falsity

like love, like the nothing

we love to touch

Red Shoes

all the corpses are wearing red shoes,

like a telephone post might lean against evening

they prop themselves up in inconvenient coffins

because life has been here once

dressed in leather and evident eternity;

but flesh is all about stopping:

the corpses are wearing their red shoes,

everything else that feet have forgotten

Monochrome

the day dies like a film

that wasn't boring at all

when it happened;

there is light

and amphetamine logic

instead of distress

because everything should be electric

mold, warm snow, a groggery

to sleep in instead of being,

suspicions of color coming next

It Is Too Late

it is too late, evidently,

and history is children falling

from stones through old sleepy snow

to a silent hallway

like an empty packet of cigarettes

and a dirty plate,

all sorts of things

that are quite like death;

fetuses and marmalade

and sex

Not Bleeding

walls do not bleed ancient unspeakable

evil, just dust and boredom

and a faintly anxious concatenation

of absences;

death does not require the services

of madmen with axes;

just moths and modal fallacies

and things even children

would be ashamed to believe in;

there is no evil even in churches,

just impotent dreams,

just weakness and too little meat

One Inexorable Season

and winter has fallen to become one inexorable season

not worth breathing in, ice to line the sky

with butterflies and cobwebs, spiders

still defining night with patient legs

that pull a meaning from simple endurance

and old kings sitting beside disconsolate stoves

in hovels. one inexorable season

to fill houses with nothing,

dust and rooms painted like suicide,

flies and the spiders to love them

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