For a long time I have known that my poems lie there, inert things, until a reader comes along and breathes life into them.
As the first in my Read My Poem series, I invited some people to record themselves reading the text for a poem called "Brothers at Lakeside" the way they would read it, and present here there voices.
You can scroll down to listen to all the recordings. Or you can check out the three soundcloud playlists:
We Burn
Brothers at Lakeside
The Salience of Sunset
Brothers at Lakeside
And after pulling through the dark green trough
of the mountain road, a dim carpark behind
a bar. The lake below. The blackened face
is smooth enough for us to see the stars.
But one of us prefers the girls who lift
heavy glasses of beer again, again
to touch their mouths with a galaxy of foam,
and the other one prefers the girls themselves.
If movement were a form of grace, the lake
a kind of pillow, not to find tonight
a darker bar, a further station, would
the moon that is and is not the sun still rise
above the hills directly across the lake
from us? Its watery twin so much requires
our diving in. A bat twivers from tree
to tree and says Go in, below is where
the action is. The moon that is and is not.