14
The Number 9, or Tsubasa & Misaki in Spring Nine Ways

Reds and blues, the colours of bruises,
the colours of everything
coursing in and out your youthful heart.
Is one your first choice,
your first consumption,
and everything that follows
just natural selection?

The weeks come and go
as the tides come and go.
Time is a sea, reaching out,
retreating, returning to us
our discarded intimacies.
Asleep beneath that sky-ball moon,
those pitiless dream gulls pick through the detritus
and present to us yesterday's carcuses.

Nando knew the navigation of dreams:
head on the pillow,
eyes closed,
drift away.
Sleep is another sea.
You have to keep your eyes on that dim light
you have always followed
if you do not want to wake up
under a black sky, forgotten.

...

Hard to believe, the darkness,
it's vast heaving, pushing down
like that leaden galaxy in the mind.
Everyone’s alone in winter.
Do you remember it?
Walking down a ginnel,
trackies tucked in your socks,
collar popped, to keep out fucking everything

yet somehow a pallid light gets in,
a sliver of that inverse weight,
love, that impossible lightness
that unzips the world
and casts it off like a training top.
You can play skins on a windswept park
in deepest dark
if the love is there in you.

Wait, wait, what...!
how do we arrive like this,
time after fucking time,
in the depths of winter,
huddled together for shelter
under the feathers,
delirious love birds under the duvet
seeing out the blank & black, ecstatic?

...

Scoring goals is such a simple thing:
as simple as kissing,
or doing the right thing.
The ball, so long your friend,
knows every conceivable permutation
of your cuneiform,
all eighty five thousand complexions,
and is also just so completely cómplice.

Then, just before you score,
that sudden gallery hush you feel
the first time a bold hand
slides along your thigh
as wide flashing eyes find yours,
and that hand finds and takes hold
of what’s hidden under the silken folds
of your sports shorts ........

Anyway:

Nando and Stevie, Tsubasa, Misaki,
played football like two swallows in spring,
careering incredibly above the hedgerows,
just laughing, skirling together,
up and over, round and under,
betwixt and between, bewitching,
oblivious as others watch on,
drinking in this impossible beauty and smiling, wondering………