Poetry by Stephen Nelson

​Or Maybe The Sky

I could write about blue all day or kiss it or eat it.
Like the blue book on the coffee table.
Or the blue stone at my throat which causes me to disappear and appear 
at various locations around the world when the church pews are empty.
Like Padre Pio. The way he absorbed the wars as an empath.
The fields are blue and bloody and stuffed with dead bodies.
I'm so ill I need blue.
The blue of her eyes as she lies on the couch draped in blue.
Her pain in me each morning a blue light and yellow.
Bulbs crack. Blue bulbs.
She's a spiritual healer and wears a gown on stage and holds their eyes
and goes inside them like a boat sailing down a river in the forest.
I love her so much. She enchants me and I know that sounds old fashioned but I listen to opera
and have stopped masturbating for now.
I was talking about blue. Maybe she's blue. Or the glass on the bunker
which holds the orange juice the way she holds my desire like a candle.
But she's ill. I'll imagine bringing her tea from my opera house heart.
She can lean on me and rest and I'll hold the China cup for her to sip
while the monkeys are green and crazy and there's thunder rolling
in from the Pacific.
An ocean separates us now and god I'm sick about that.
But we're caught up in blue together like Jesus or Mohammad or one of those guys
who wanted to change things.
Like I'm blue and she's in blue and that's all there is for a million miles of space time
right here in the flicker of an eye and all the dust and light that made us.
I could write about her all night. I could write about the way she's blue
deepening or dying.
We're both so ill but I'll take a bath in Dead Sea salts and die for her.
It's not even morning but I'll die for her. It's not even as if we need another night
but I'll die for her and nothing exists without this blue to lie on.
Not even the war.





Sweets

Teal perches on my eyelid like a soft bird in a sonnet 
by a Neapolitan gelataio. Her lips are crystals of a strawberry 
milkshake soaking the rim of my introvert moon. She knows 
I'll come and froth her sadness
with the laughter of mountains
caressing her richness to a Coca-Cola quim spurt.

There are various ways she plays the limoncello after coffee -
ricotta down her dress in a bistro sticky with love and light opera.
I've got Puccini in my pants and he's not decomposing
or remotely concerned about 
the jackboots crushing juniper berries
on the sad, nutty plains of my heart -

Tender Teal holding my balls in her palm through the meal
from a Costa Rican jungle full of philia. I drift in and out
and celebrate her pout with peach perry and an aria of bubbles,
till I'm hooked like a ballgown
to an out of body waltz.
Oh my god, Teal! I'm the ritzy blue meringue boy on your teeth and tongue and lips!





Teal Hurt


Sun springs into Teal,
her heart open,
                     vulnerable
                           Teal
                           so
I'll eat another meal - Cajun chicken
& rice Pauline's nice, almost sympathetic.
I'm next to a payout puggy, have no money,
imprisoned, sweet non-alcoholic
                                                                VISTAS everywhere.
I don't do this to impress;
I've been too wayward, too backward,
too preoccupied integrating shadows  
as deep and troubling as the most
broken-hearted human - her infant
heart in me ok oh god - Teal - remorselessly held,
unveiled, revealing.

Girl blends fruit for drinks with ice - sunny outside tonight;
Pauline's voice lacks confidence,
her love her work perhaps emotional.
Man with arm around blonde girl in the corner.
I'm hungry, need fed, need Teal,
or that blended, unbroken immersion
in absolute authenticity
realising the wayward child is divine,
a mass outpouring of supernatural fluidity.

She danced last week, makes cocktails now,
waiting for the song that rocks her dreams 
over Chambord and vodka with cranberry.

Teal told me. I listened, then went into
the pub for a meal.
                                           But here, having eaten,
I'm full, fat, fed - fragile and philanthropic.
Fat guy laughs again, happiest human alive.
Slim girl next to me waiting, all waiting
the revealing, the unveiling, 
the bliss that's possible if I blow my breath
on Teal.
                   Incredible longing of the girl
at the bar.
Bottle of Sailor Jerry uncorked but I resist,
drink Coca-Cola till the cows have calves
in the springtime, lambs to the slaughter
bleating in the querulous love of the sun.

I'm here, Teal, all over and around you.
How deep can we travel into your sorrow,
your longing, your holy voodoo honey?

"Went to the Palace last night."
"How was it?"
"Aye, alright."





Supernatural Etiquette for Tourists 

Next week you leave and the beaches of North Africa are overrun with camels
trying to escape the downward drag of poverty and $2 tourists. Tribes smoke
hashish in the mountains, while old men run naked through the souk after boys. When did
William Burroughs get here? I heard the drumming years ago and went into a trance 
and saw you from the Pleiades and fell in love. Your beach body is the mother figurine 
an archaeologist steals for his daughter despite the antique etiquette. 

All our holidaying on the coast, reading books and staring at the mountains;
I watched my father burn then unhook a presbytery. Recently I returned and saw
the water spirits wring his neck, then mine at a time when all I ever wanted
was the integration of disparate elements of an idyllic childhood.

The chip shop and the harbour were the first stories I ever wrote after cooking 
my imagination near the golf course. The rock pool crabs were frenetic and mad, 
or else just shells wrapped in seaweed. Dad ate Old Jamaica and pissed in the sea;
mum drank shandy and held the cricket bat. Even then I knew I was more innocent 
than awkward, afraid of the strangeness of boys parading mohawks and pompadours 
for girls draped on motorbikes for sex.

Someone said I had dreamlike significance but I thought they were delusional,
until I caught myself behind the hills eating asparagus with a gang of mythological fishermen.
Certainly by the sea I'm prophetic in a knitted Aran sweater,
filmed by the waves for an audience of empaths choking on popcorn.
Every feeling is heroic and the audience knows it when I fall in love
with Marina the daughter of the coalman in a swimming pool on a rainy afternoon.
I'm going to write a novel pretty soon. You could write three in a day.

I like to think you're famous and have fought your way out of game shows 
offering luxury cruise prizes to sex offenders. Everywhere you go you make poems
out of hospital beds. It's your best thing and please may we have an ice cold latte to sip. 
There might be lions on the beach you'll see as a sign I'm everywhere for you.

Bio: Stephen Nelson is a writer and visual poet from Hamilton, Scotland. He is the author of Lunar Poems for New Religions (KFS Press) and Thorn Corners (erbacce-press). His latest book is a Xerolage of visual poetry called Arcturian Punctuation (Xexoxial Editions). He has published in The Sunday Times and exhibited vispo internationally. Check out www.afterlights-vispo.tumblr.com

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