Offcuts

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First off,
Being so low, but lower still on coin, we had to strike a deal;
I, a woodworker, bring wood for the wood burner
Who, being a therapist, questions me on wood
working, and other burning issues.

Every week, I cycle over one-handedly, wobbling through traffic.
Ungainly black rubble bag, pinned on a knee.
The offcuts, ajut with nails and screws, dink along my ribs,
These ugly things left in.

Someone more inventive than I might still have found a use for;
All these it was all thises and thats, iambic pentameters, seemed to’s, senses of, spare commas, my
hands, suches, quites, justs, perhapses, lapses in rhythm, false starts, spare parts, stanzas, voltas,
couplets, figures, flow states, free states, occupied sixes and sevens, Heaney derivatives, saved fucks
and cut fucks. God’s honest. My mother, sincerities, insincerities, jokes and avuncular caesuras, a
child’s game, a chessboard, could’ve, should’ve would’ve made light, the load despite these tools

I am cutting South again, to talk,
Through idle dusking rush hour,
My hands skelfed, callous,
Cursing myself yet again
For not bringing a rucksack
Or finding better use for these offcuts.
This time the rubble bag is doubled up.

Perhaps someone more inventive than I would have found a use for;
Some Thuja, a bit of Beech, three trapeziums of Douglas Fir, Hornbeam I think, Ash, Oak, bits too
good to burn, Birch, silver, painted, mouldy pine, too bad to burn, will smoke us out, chair legs, table
legs, my girlfriend’s would be bed, old black bamboo, a theatre set, splinters, tenons, mortices, two
biscuits not biscuited, saw dust, veneer, ply, MDF, formaldehyde, the bad stuff, a broken pencil

Burning, that whole glacial winter,
I stare into the dim glow, a shadowman.
He shifts his legs to match mine.
Spread, crossed, restless, on the toes,
It is normal, for two men, to wince
When asked, then shrug

Perhaps someone more inventive than I would have found a use then for;
An old adage I heard once Of how the man who cuts his own wood, warms himself twice,
does it still apply when the workshop freezes up, and a rusting table saw cuts crude, when the old
master has you captive as he hammers on about the rats on site, the sort of chat that leaves you numb.
He’ll think I’m a right dose if I say that he pays me to listen to him say that so I pay him to listen to
me say this:

That every remnant is marked by its origin.
Its grain delineates its life. Read in its rings then
A stunted year:
A long cold winter here, not yet splitting into Spring.
The hour spins unreal, so your seven-year-old self
Sits beside you. His silent, unspooling, strangeness,
His young eyes cutting like a hot knife
Through muttering – Blink.
Readjust my limbs. Perhaps someone more inventive than I would have found a use for them.

–

In the 7PM night time a baggy leather chair reinflates,
The heat leaving, as we enter the hall.

                                                                                                                           Do you want the bags back?

What’s left of them is yours to keep.

So, empty-handed, I leave.
Scutter home, to sleep.

Next day, a silent workspace.
A growing stockpile.
Ageing poems in my notes.

Next week, I’ll cycle back.
Notes cluttered then with cutting lists.
The dry tongue stuck on something –

                                                                                      We’re trying to put words where there are none.

But the burning of those offcuts –
Something there –
I’d like to invent a word for that feeling –
Where you think you know what you think.
But in trying to word it what arises is overblown,
Lofty, leggy, a meandering epic –

(like this)

So I’ll go back in, armed –
Fine-toothed-comb in one hand, blunted hacksaw in the other –

For what is poetry if not the offcut of something larger?
Not waste, but not the thing itself either.

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