Rupert Loydell

RUNNING AWAY FROM THE CLOCK
for Alan West


You wouldn't
like it here. Go elsewhere. One person's
Torrola is another's Sadness-by-the-Sea.
— Stephen Dunn, 'Postcard from Torrola'

Diaries of forgotten happiness,
photographs of the past,
offer presences and dimensions.

Strange world. Because of me
rivers burn and run backwards
shaping our unconscious.

My body is a landscape
of social realities and carbon footprints.
Breathe in the beautiful smog.

Distant relations are my inheritance,
tomorrow's forecast is strikingly clear:
a collaborative elegy until we meet again.

Hundred-year-old trees are in bloom.
Don't give up the ghost, the life or work,
try and stay under the influence.

New galaxies form like droplets,
mirror universe pulls back the shade
(enjambment from heat to sub-zero).

Nomad words, spiral lands:
an oath between trees & rocks,
empires and environments,

a bottleneck of evolution
sewn together with sinew and string,
a project of total fiction.

The many-voiced powers of song
toe the line between irony and piety,
an intimation of divine retribution

at the point where ice meets water.
The machine version of death
is the forgotten language of light.

The opposite of the body is the world.
Here come the young and digital;
sleep is running away from the clock.