Samuel Honey

The Knock at the Door

There was a knock at the door.

It let itself in and turned the lock behind it.

We watched as it strode upstairs.

Ever the pilgrim, I followed you

did not.

It climbed into our bed of flowers

through the curtains that were draped as two duvets.

It climbed onto the cool side of my pillow

into the case

into the goose feathers

into the fat

of your potato sack.

And out the other end of the weave…

a letter, so miniscule, so cute

I rubbed my thumbs to blood pulling it

apart

and the word spilled out, everywhere

in colour.

I tried to stuff it back into each perforation

The dye inking my lips and nail beds

these cartoon eyes labouring, enciente

to not take in the tiny characters.

But I read it. And then I read it again.

And then I paused to think

you are like my favourite rhyme

faithless, joyless, a tribunal, deliberating

singing a carol.

I smirk, recounting revelations in its entirety

the coda settles    at the firmament of my stomach

sleeping, now

I await the next savage hour

when I, too, will hear the knock at the door.

Humours: Choleric

Waking you up.

looking through your concavity

two parallel mirrors

flattened eye in your eye

walled green, recedes

I am the ‘flower-within-you’ perspective

the vase is your girdling belly

light refracts in distortion droplets

you drink it in

bloating dissimilitudes

in some fabric stabbed cab.

you are a fucking liar,

don’t feel too bad

I am the broken condom dialectic

of planned parenthood.

I am you looking into the glassy eyes of

a refugee.

I am the turning head of a widower.

I am you, noticing.

I am the gaze you seek in his contracting eyes

as he pretends he isn’t pretending that you are his dead wife.

you paint your better foot on the canvas

step it out into oncoming traffic

a burgeoning worm will trade your life for hers

and you will save her to ease your discomfort

embarrassment at secondhand convulsions

etched face plants into concrete, like a wet

like a mark of wet

in a wet, wetter

everything drenched wet

& then

going about your day as if nothing ever happened.

Experts from ‘Antos’

1.1

Statues lie around my room

some look like you.

I am clay and you are marble

inside us,

little versions of ourselves can be found

infinitely subdivisible

but not without changes in their nature.

I: crowds

Fornicate with you: packs.

Our tongues are interlocutors

that you can also term as

viscosity.

Molar chairs and molecular windows show me my patio-balcony.

My room is a hatched suitcase.

I flip the clasps and throw on Schrodinger’s jacket.

Like a cockroach, I live in this box

but it’s not my box and this is not a physical space

this box is sandwiched between my mind and yours.

A statuette enters:

leaves.

I am a squatter, here.

You cannot be rid of me

nor I you.

& none of this is Real

& you will never be anyone else’s empty drawer

in quite the way you have become mine.

I considered creating a metaphor last week

then the ideal abated like Hegel’s roadworks

mining for a crucifix while a traffic cop gyrates

or some other thing that was absent to begin with.

I have no Jonah Hill to die on.

I know now  I will never be happy

until then, she makes me happy.

If only she would last forever.

This voice is the illness and the only medicine.

She cries into my palm.

My lifeline is a fraction the length of hers.

I am the sigh of a dead metaphor

that we bend our heads around to have our conversation in private.

I tell her I am the chrysalis Voltaire.

She smiles, abrogating the words as they leave my mouth..

She holds me, still.

 I give up position.

1.2.1

The creeping soft grass.

Organlunged. Breathed out soft shrews

like father used to make.

Baked in a glazed crust are the summer months of May and August.

Faith is the word of September and

it is a plane which you think and fill up.

to which I would ask

‘If you were a riddle…’ all the while hoping you were not

& sipping my daisies.

And you would die to signify ‘green’.

      found that cute.

Between eyezomes and skyzomes, I thought-

but. Then.

1.2.2

one moment:

lobes recede, vestigial hammers

announcing themselves in Versailles

in vertigo, blooming like shards of light

hitting your iris

refracting

like horizon-galactic claws.

Knives coalesce between fingers

like the knitted webs of a lobster cage

the double art of scalpel and/or simultaneously

fork.

A forum is filled out.

Then emptied,

then half filled.

Then emptied and filled again.

In the consistency of all things

flies are wrenching from glucoids and this viscous sap

that we are all seeing: a sapient receptacle;

flutters from a little aperture

pendling about in the

lost between

and, more so, even,  in that spectrum:

Light!

You are far more green

than I ever imagined.

Shaking hands with hela

we breathe in a transundulating muck

and cars shoot down the motorway like

oils, the hair of rye,

the barley drums.

Heritage. Those who came before

we bury under the mound.

Atop, we placed Stonehenge in ice cubes, rotting beside self-fermenting fruit.

Copper tongued. Womanhood slept way down beneath your hips,

further still than the ground

but not the body, not entirely.

On the underside of a tectonic beach

in a crypt of deckchairs

I shot up gasoline and was just cool.

I found the vagal tone of a plasmid

hitting some cells with Pluto fists.

-       I feel so small and voiceless

.

fake dendrites, the inarticulable

nervous and sometimes anxious system.

synaptic microfissures

the curiosity of emptiness

my life and yours

a covalence of stomachs, shoots,

suns, other stomachs consuming the first stomachs.

I don’t know, it feels wrong.

1.2.3

Our diets are our own until they are not.

This is a hunger I am already

in league with

 (eye, green, sunlight)

more multiplicities

fell down the microscope

a calling card

twits the air

falls into a puddle.

We already know the cartography.

Every refraction:

a theory.

A tracing.

Takes off, escapes

vibrates the ground

in a magma storm,

passing atoms back and forth

like a straw in a homemade pina colada

a black hole chest

dropping out

implosions hitherto unknown

falling silent

like deaf ears, sandcastles and their moats

: a deluge whipped up on smooth tarmac.

Even when the concept is dead

The grass will still listen.

Born in Huddersfield and currently based in South London, Samuel Honey is a poet whose work takes aim at the philosophical in a personal way that highlights his love for metaphor and divergent meaning making. Sam’s poetry is a surreal take on the mythopoetic, aiming to simultaneously evoke the divine and mundane, and create an uncanny, liminal world within which the poem is uncomfortably birthed. Sam has work published in literary journals such as Tears in the Fence (issue 71) and magazines such as Streetcake (issue 63) and Far Zine, among others. More of his poetry and visual artwork can be found in his instagram @samuelhoneyart.