Chris Emery

Our Noise Let me explain our noise close to the century's ending, the children of our fussing lives sorting the vertebra of each bridge, each videoed, captioned canopy. Roads are the bridal trains of the townscape, separating vestigial from vaginal over the oil-slewed asphalt. Our lives no more than cracks in the traffic, breeze-blocked and plaster-boarded retinues, learning our vocabularies through the gardens of dogs. The song's worn out. I am so close you can here me breathe. My smells are your smells, my lover's creel of weeds bending over the uninterruptible truths of the Christian Mission, its wired-up, cut off sing-song a monastic fortress, blistered with venom, holding on. Are we to be corrected? Mustering our presences like predictable ghosts, blonde ghosts under the fading sodium light. The little haloes of streetlamps drawing kids like moths to the flame, while adults burn crude romances in pubs, their grim lounges musty with the bullion of TV; no tomorrows in each sousing. I can see rooms throw light in blue angles like weapons behind the sagging nets, and the macula now of ads. My car hugs the desolate penumbra of each estate. Get me out of the efficient dust of Manchester. I¹m stood by the wraith-vermillion of its shadow, the winding iron of our visceral gothic, enduring towers of commerce, threadbare blankets of pleasure. Beggars define brighter pavements like bandits of grief. All done, and dead as the waters we stretch over, the black seamstress of the sump, sewing city to city, until the vertigo of take off as we launch over underpass to the flame-scoured chemical ports of Salford's dead grace, florid as angels in the turbid carbon of the city.

Copyright © 1999 Chris Emery All Rights Reserved

Christopher Emery was born in Manchester in 1963 and studied painting and printmaking at Leeds. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including the Honest Ulsterman, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Wales and The Rialto. He is currently working on three collections, Scally, Perfect Dust and Doctor Mephisto. He lives with his wife and two children in Great Wilbraham, England and is Production Manager of Cambridge University Press.