Take Off

videos of space shuttle launches are enough
to leave me a cried-out wreck for a morning.
I’ll ask you not to put on your suit & go
but only because I’m coveting that soaring sensation,
the total chain-release of never coming back.
vulnerability’s the fashion we both look best in.
escape velocity depends on a vital confidence in image.

JAMES SYKES

4.32 – 4.47pm Wall Stare

dramatically remove & replace your glasses
in darkened rooms while humming a theme tune
to experience an entirely new perspective.
how was it for you? obviously not worth telling
someone else about, it being one of those things
nobody believes actually takes place.
some of it is left out because there is the expectation
not to be boring while other stuff stays dormant
due to inaccurate articulation; it’s up to you
to decide which is a more legitimate reason
for silence. no one really wants to be confronted
with the fruit machine levers of a person
and a sign reading ‘pull for images’.

JAMES SYKES

Six Seasons and a Movie of Cool and Cute Adventures

Was that what you meant when you said those things
I’d never heard until now, your bell-toll-echo?

I don’t want to fuck another year over.
I think I genuinely did just need time.

Realisations strapped into passenger seats & driven
by time-commuters leap out, knock me to the asphalt.

I’m totally ready to discuss a host of things, to have
six seasons and a movie of cool and cute adventures. 

JAMES SYKES

Great Friends, Teachers

I sometimes wonder if we are responsible
for ourselves at all, or if we are actually
always guiding and guarding the lives
of another – a far better system,
I think you’d agree, it often being so hard
to see what’s wrong just by using a mirror.
The eyes of another, meanwhile –
we will never truly cross that endless plain,
ascend the mountain of their understanding.
It is frightening but relieving to admit
we will never have the greatest view
of ourselves, can always rely on someone
else to push us in a corrective direction.

JAMES SYKES

And other things are changing too.
Every day the boat nudges the riverbank
and every day we push off again
with the splintering oar,
motion being preferable to everything.
Things take longer but are still completed
and are better for the time taken.
The cameramen take longer getting
the perfect shot but when they do
we actually look pretty great,
all things considered. Stand still
a moment. This will form part
of an establishing shot – the director
will then cut to the scene next imagined,
use a coloured filter to make it dreamy.

JAMES SYKES

Boiled Eggs

(gonna be posting drafts of stuff again ideally every day, need to build up more material)

Most mornings I’m reading poems and boiling eggs,
taking stock of the changes I’m causing –
the way the eggs are cooking unseen,
the poems transforming, tainting, on the page –
the never-going-back crack-open of the egg.
God knows how many poems have wound up
hard-boiled and unpleasant or uncooked and inedible
thanks to my life-long inability to take my time
in the sense of waiting, or in the sense of taking it.
JAMES SYKES

Days

I keep having days like wet bars of soap.
Earlier I was wondering whether sadness
is circumstantial or geographical –
I’m still not sure they can be separated.
I keep meaning to explain things in full.
The beginning’s great, it’s clean,
it’s rehearsed – “I just” – and then it all
slides away like the smooth rush of a passing car.
Headlights briefly flash by like the thought
before the one that goes “on seconds thoughts…”.
And we continue to clench glasses & phones
the way we should be clenching each other’s hands.

JAMES SYKES

If you’d only listened to what I said
we wouldn’t be in this mess,
or we would be in a different mess –
they’re sort of the only two paths available.
I’m sorry you were led to believe otherwise,
but that’s the way the world crumbles.
I on the other hand have guiltily
stood still for eternity – you know,
I have this funny recurring dream: it concludes
with the creeping tingle of pins & needles.

JAMES SYKES