From The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea by Mark Haddon

This Poem is Certificate 18
When you open a collection of poetry or attend a reading you need to know that the poems you choose to read or hear are suitable for the audience.
To help you understand what a poem is like you can look at the certificate it has been given. This poem has been classified as 18. That means this poem is unsuitable for anyone younger than 18.
A poem with an 18 certificate may contain scenes of a violent nature. Carlos de Sessa burning at the stake, for example, his hot fat bubbling like porridge. Or Erymas, stabbed in the mouth, the blade smashing clean through to the brain so that teeth, bone and blood spray from his ruptured face. The slow death of a parent, often from cancer, is particularly common.
There may be sex, too. A man may be sucked off in a McDonald's en route to the airport, a babysitter may masturbate on the kiln-fired tiles of her employers' bathroom and an arsehole may be described in more detail than is necessary. The word "cunt" may be used.
In a poem with an 18 certificate the syntax may be knottier and the meaning more opaque than in light, narrative or straightforward lyric verse. A phrase may have as many as four different interpretations, all intended for more or less simultaneous comprehension. Conversely, when the hedged sun draws into itself for self-quenching and these modalities stoop to re-enter the subterrane of faith, the intention may simply be to confuse the less intelligent reader. Sometimes a line or phrase is used simply because "it sounded right".
A poem with an 18 certificate may be written according to occult rules which are not made available to the reader. A parallel universe may be assumed wherein the expanded inkling undergoes an allusion and, at the climax of frogging, binges in the Bermuda. Some 18 certificate poems purport to be translations of work by Finnish and Romanian poets who do not, in fact, exist. In others a lightbulb may be granted sentience.
Like plumbers and dentists, poets are fallible, and the possibility of genuine nonsense cannot be ruled out. Unlike plumbing and dentistry, however, poetry is slow, frustrating and poorly rewarded work which fails more often than it succeeds and is therefore embarked upon largely by men and women labouring under a sense of almost religious vocation, grandiose self-delusion or some combination of both. As a result, many poems with an 18 certificate are written by people whose minds you may not wish to enter.
The language of a poem with an 18 certificate may be denser and more powerful than the language you are used to dealing with. And though it makes nothing happen it may, like a piece of ice on a hot stove, ride its own melting into your soul and bring you face to face with the madness of space.
It is an offence to read or supply a poem classified as 18 to anyone below that age.
Poetry certificates are there to help you make the right choice.

servitude

Saturday, September 17th, 2005
might I suggest she said i love you and leave it at that
well that was how she poured coffee, that waitress whose collar was creased so sharp you knew she was wearing the shirt for the duration - but it was early only Tuesday - sprayed wet and ironed in the important places.
Funny, these outlines of people, "waitress", her attire a line-drawing of a coffee pourer, taking notes on floppy paper. Dark hair.
leaving and returning, that was what she did and how she did it, pouring coffee we didn't want into our stained cups
when she spoke, we looked at her, and suddenly she blurred into the haze of cosy ambience, less outlined than imprinted against the circus poster prints, the dragonfly lighting
and Carlos couldn't disagree.
His MO like his DNA was impervious to her guile. He was the one dealing with the object of his affections, and he was it had to be said, by me, who had been listening to an everbuilding code of versions and episodes as they worked their way through his emotions and psyche, my hardworking friend who could only take so much, being dealt to by a master operator.
so anybody could suggest anything, because advice is only offered. It's a very light thing, comparably, wrapped up in sparkly paper. But you know, and Carlos I think felt it, because it occupied a lot of his time this relationship, that the material form of a thing has no bearing on it's use in any situation, it is not an all-purpose measurement, the dimensions of a thing.
Carlos had to fit his intentions to the will of another human being (mentioned earlier I do believe).
As sensible as those words were, as perfectly formed a statement as it was, Carlos could not simply say truth in as loose afashion as that. By all accounts, it would be a betrayal of the web they spun together, and here he was just trying to give a little struggle free of the stickiness of the relationship to a sympathetic, that is to say, silent, ear (me). So he just smiled and we ordered moccacinos to walk out into the night with.

what is water asked the child

tuesday, the thirteenth of September

water is what makes everything work. It runs between and keeps everything running. Water is the clearest of evidences on the capacity of boundary, as a theoretical term, and it is resplendent in it's permeability.
Impermeable is an example of vanity. Isn't everything permeable?
The degrees to which things are unitary, are 'not-the-other'; the quality of the persuasion which will resonate with their structures; what are these if not instances, faceted through sensory perception: reductions from the entity of life: a formulaic partiality?
These are what they are and highly dissolvable, increasingly submerged. They are what they are and absorbed or exposed, they come from the genesis of water.

attenuating circumstances

Saturday, the 3rd of September

how many people are going to be awake like they are the only ones, moving like they are a minority within a routinely sleeping group?
what are the dimensions of this solidarity?
worldwide, between the ones who feel their solitude acutely and come socket-to-blade keen in connivance with the boundaries of their impulses and the ghostly framework of solitary agitation?
how even when it's happening it has the quality of memory and how your feelings whisper into the atolls of the nerves of feeling which are tenuous at this time because even while they are as clear as they are, in this ante-time they are liable to become something else as you squint or swing it.