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Kotor

Even at midday, the solemn Balkan sun

Licking the limestone crags bone-white

Cannot blanch Kotor’s winding streets.

Women in cream dresses dance between the alleys

            And walk along the waters, dark

And patina by the day’s slow failing.

In the evening, a viola calls us to dine

            And walls to dream in thick-leaved ivy

Fattened on the souls of ancient stone.

Do you remember the feral cats

             Lounging in the shade of the square

As forks clinked on empty plates?

Do you dream of crescent moons and crosses

              In Bosniak peaks and quiet Dalmatian valleys –

Gravestones bright as freshly-minted coins

And carpets of Krokus’ saffron blood

               Peppered with snowdrops of early-spring

Sweeping up a lonely hillside?

All the sweeter is a love of shadowed things:

            Kotor’s smooth cobbles blooded by the dusk

Tap to the music of your footsteps.

The wind that sloughs those narrow rows

              Of rain-worn doorways and snaking roads

Seems the very sighing of the dead.

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Evening Walk

The moon sings between clouds of soft metal,

Forming triskellions of argent light

Above the house I once went all the time

Atop a hill-world that defined our days,

Formless dreams cohering round your body

Teaching me cruelly the pitfalls of faith.

Not that we had time for religious faith

When your heart would taste my heart of metal

A rare organ in a lonely body

Ancient like that moon, the sky’s only light

Filling the night, like you would fill my days

Feasting on that life like the clock eats time.

These days I think of you, from time to time

Wandering through shredded curtains of faith,

But those late hours have stretched into days;

Evening’s ore now the morning’s metal,

Dark longings exposed to realism’s light,

Safely fading a watercolour body,

That was once a photographic body –

Memory’s archives eroded by time,

Ensuring the heavy load becomes light.

But as we slip away, I still have faith

Like modern commandments set in metal

That I will love again, one of these days,

Someone with whom I want to share my days

Whose soul shines as brightly as your body

Whose body shimmers like precious metal

That cruel dream-love people have all the time

Eternal awakening buckling faith

Deadening us to universal light.

The moon recedes from the morning sun’s light.

Returning, it’s like I’ve been gone for days.

As fire might temper a martyr’s faith,

Fatigue sharpens my mind and my body.

All circumstance an artefact in time’s

Crucible, cooling love to dead metal.

Shall faith be our light, when romance has gone?

Shrapnel metal twists hope as days twist years;

The ache of my body time’s measurement.

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The Dark

After Leonard Cohen.

I began life as a beggar

In the food bank of the heart.

Two sirens nursed me better;

An inauspicious start.

In the iris of Medusa

I found a bitter spark.

The price I paid to lose her:

What I gave up to the dark.

I auditioned to play Samson

But a bald man got the part.

I served tea up in a mansion

But slept in Central Park.

Was beating them at Hold’Em

But the final flop was hard.

What I really lost was older:

What I gave up to the dark.

I coalesced with Amy

And her Appalachian harp,

The love I made was samey

But the pillow talk was smart.

With Kate I split the difference

Between nightingale and lark

What I wouldn’t give to see her,

What I gave up to the dark.

I met a man in Yerevan

A scholar and a bard

The songs he sang were Syrian

And his wisdom left a mark

He showed me blood-red gem stones

With which he wouldn’t part.

“They’re safe, these souls of children’s bones

What I gave up to the dark.”

An angel in Vienna

Showed me manna in the clart;

A demon drew with henna

My true nature on her heart.

They went travelling together

To sell off my spare parts

The rest I’d lost forever:

What I gave up to the dark.

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Bio:

Laurence Thompson is a writer from Merseyside. His essays, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Burning House Press, Subterranean Blue Poetry, minor literature(s), The Ekphrastic Review, Paraphilia Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the co-author of Wilfred Owen biopic The Burying Party (2018), for which he was nominated for Best Screenplay at the London Film Awards, and is the artistic director of the Liverpool Underground Film Festival.

@lancekthompson on X, and @implicatedisorder on Instagram.

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