The damning

If I can’t love in full, I can’t love at all.

As then my love dies like echoing footfalls.

But you, you let it die. Conscientiously.

I can’t do half-loves found on rebated shelves. 

Nor can I do small sex like some do small talk.

But you, stifled it, with a pillow, slowly.

Feigning ignorance isn’t my strongest suit.

But you, you asked me. I tried. I did. I failed.

So you took my love, crumpled it, and burnt it.

I stared at you while the flames consumed it all.

Not with rage, nor with hate, nor with disbelief.

I didn’t stare with love, or disappointment.

I watched you as I have watched so many leave:

bruised, battered, confused, happy and unhappy

to leave yet another soul scorched up, writhing.

Your tone and words more chilling than the blizzard

always, as if gloating, as if satisfied.

Ashen prize in a smouldering, ashen land.

You brought many, down in your personal hell,

so that love looked worthy and achievable.

Thus I looked, found my ashes, took them, and left.

Not that you faked your feelings and sentiments:

there simply was no room for love among them,

and my own was too cumbersome to carry.

There is no vow to never do it again:

there will be other people falling with you;

there will be other times when I give my love.

But one thing more certain than the next sunrise

is that your soul dims as your fire brightens

is that my love whole always shall be given.

An old couple

Cooking he was. Like always.

Chatting with the wife. Like always.

Watching dumb shows eating crisps

by the fake crackling fireside,

the dog curled up at her feet.

Her presence, unenviable,

Slightly passive-aggressive, always.

The grim stare. The unanswered

“What’re we having for dinner”.

The evening going to bed alone,

waking up she there already,

pulling the long face already.

He didn’t hate her, nor did she.

They grew to unlove, listlessly.

Two kids, that is all it took

to kill the little joy in their life.

“I don’t hate you, just so you know,”

he said. It fell in dead ears,

both hers and the dog’s, unmoved.

He hated when they did that,

giving him the cold shoulder

“I’m heading to bed then.”

He got up, thinking of their sons:

none of them ever came home,

or called for birthdays and sad days,

or sent postcards, wedding cards,

or just… existed after they left.

“I’m heading to bed then”

he repeated – to himself this time.

He got tired, suddenly.

Sat back down, a knot in his throat.

Come morning, he would call them.

When the police came a week later

they found the old man slumped on the couch

next to a mouldy, empty armchair,

an old dog mat with half-chewed toys

dinner set for two in the kitchen.

The neighbour said the old widower

didn’t have all the lights on

that the dog had died years earlier

was buried in the backyard.

Nobody ever came home.

Fragment #81

The day the storm hit the coast

he drifted along the shoreline

looking for trouble in her jade eyes

– see-through waves through

the discoloured sun –

chaos and fury in his heart

hoping to find her of the pale eyes

forever resting in the waves

Loved

Folk who say it will be the same

when the two of us are done here,

when we part ways for good,

don’t know that we’ve built something,

something worthy of the name ‘love’.

When this love will have run its course

it’ll have nowhere to go, no aim,

and it’ll take way too much room

– it’s grown quite big, didn’t it darling.

So we’ll have little choice but to drown it,

pull it head first down the bathtub

and keep it underwater for a while

– until its lungs fill up and swell

and we need to dry it up 

before we can burn the carcass

– until its legs form odd angles

underneath its slouched body

Darling, maybe we’ll need to tie its hands

so it doesn’t scratch and grip,

– and its feet too, no nasty kicks,

just its belly doing its dance,

and its hair like Medusa’s

– it would be a good idea, we think.

No, we won’t look at its bulging, bloodshot eyes,

or at its snakey, purpley, swollen veins

– for we want to sleep at night, don’t we darling.

Maybe it’s easier to do these things, darling,

because we were selfish and trampled it

with both feet on its chest, caved the ribs in,

and still called it ‘love’, lovingly, 

because we stopped caring as much.

Maybe it won’t fight back when we strangle it,

accepting its fate with open wrists and throat

– we slowly choked it with our lies, didn’t we

– faking interest and orgasms and conversations

didn’t we darling, patient in our rage,

meticulous in our vivisection,

methodical lovers-turned-skinners surgeons.

Folk who say it will be the same

when the two of us are done here,

when we part ways for good,

don’t know that we created and killed

something worthy of the name ‘love’.

Something on the mind

Something on the mind

chipping away at the heart

clipping crevices smooth

seeking diaphany 

nagging the tip of the tongue

not quite unright or unthere

Something on the mind

thinning the eyelids

spurring pins and needles

tightening frumpled fingertips

Something on the mind

that behoves death to endure

weighing a goliathan star

pullgraviting everything about

alldreading void and longing

Something on the mind

spirating slowly into stasis

sunstilled dust particle

snapshot into existence

In one last, contorted pulse

something on the mind

flashflaring like a supernova

tesselating the seen and felt

fractalled into sense

Something on the mind

opened eye and hand

and fell out of both

in the sharp, exacting light.

Fragment #71

 

acutely cut-chaining daisies
hovering over catastrophes
sowing clover until hollow
daisy-cuttering hearts in the
unjust absence of tomorrow

 

Coming home to him who loved

Coming home to him who loved,

a little late, a little flustered,

unshowered though they’d met again

– against her better judgement –

– his marks tarrying all over her –

Coming home to him who loved,

she knew he couldn’t but know,

the very second he’d smell her

– and then he’d see the redness –

– sense the palpitations of her heart –

Coming home to him who loved,

she remembered the man’s gaze,

his keen beard and carnal smell

– him who loved no longer enough –

– she had allowed, he had indulged –

Coming home to him who loved,

waiting on the threshold, smiling, loving,

waved as she stepped out of the car

– buried his face in her neck, and kissed –

– averted his eyes and held her hand home –

Coming home to him who loved,

she let him touch her where he’d kissed,

let his tongue search her where he’d looked

– he couldn’t ignore, he couldn’t unknow –

– she cohered he who loved and he who didn’t –

Accept

Accept that she doesn’t want you to be there

for her, everythen, everythere, everytime.

She wants to get hurt, she wants to know fear,

she wants to learn life lessons in crime,

in passion, in absence, in love, in hate.

She will be and kill what you hold dear,

she will leave early and come home late,

she will be proud, waste and ace her prime.

Accept that she will one day be gone,

accept that she will answer to no one;

accept that you will find none like her.

Ever again.

She will be just as unlikely as a comet

shooting across both your life and pain,

and you will never have that sort of grit,

she alone will make it a boon or a bane.

She will be more free than you’ll ever be,

you know, for you tried it and failed miserably.

She will be just and unfair, both lock and key.

And turn away. 

Accept all of that and live, or be damned

for you’re alone in the hot, glistening sand.

She’s already out there past the crossway.

  

The wild horses

The wild horses hoovestormed the heart

swept acrossthrough relentlessly

clangingiron on the hollowhull

echofilling the shell with life

and futurethrills

the cavalcade over the wildhorses

slept in the newlymade loveswire

silentawe swelling the inmostcentre

whinnyready for the next pulserace

The garden

Busying ourselves in the garden after the frost

the weeds are in better shape than the crops.

The constant struggle wears us out,

the unrelenting going against

– for Nature is restlessly reluctant

to relinquish the want

yet generous to hand out the need

as a rule in the guise of a seed –

in the kindness of our heart

we pry the ground open

to snatch sustenance from its jaws.

We harvest everything we can

to stave off what we think is hunger

and randomness and chaos

for we want to feed the sated

in the kindness of our heart.

We are an odd species:

in the kindness of our heart

burns a savage desire

to tame, to shape, to conquer,

to be unmortal.

Uncontent with good,

unsatisfied with enough,

we vie to overcome and surpass

measuring up by measuring out

in the darkness of our heart.

Yet what we cannot have

we burn to the ground,

in the kindness of our heart,

for fire erases, cleanses,

renews parched lands,

weeds the soul out.

Sometimes, it is better to just

burn everything

in the garden of our heart.

Fragment #55

The lantern outlined your pockmarked face,

watchman who survived far more than thieves.

Even the darkness shivered with fright.

Fragment #17

In a fingersnap

with snipersharp

accuracy

you tore through my heart

ghost, soul and bones

when you laughed

when I said

I love you

.

All sorts of nights

The night had been long, the night had been short

burning up the last of the last wick

pantomiming my way home after work –

the day had been longer than eternity

and I moving like a rattling bag of bones

The night was long and the night was short

intoxicated by the smell of her skin –

lost in the hours of her lap

the day inevitably whorled away

but I was to be stilled again

The night is long, and the night is short

moments like meteors for an attentive mind

scrutinising emotions encased in seconds 

in curled strands of hair and wringing hands –

having to inhabit stillness in motion

The night will be long and short –

full of words that pinch and twist the heart

each breath a farewell to love and time

with only smells like petrichor to keep sane

and spoken words echoing like footsteps

Blue domes

I spent my youth under vast blue domes

the cerulean so heavy it was suffocating

lying down it felt like a lid sealing shut.

Trees whispered cryptic, leaf-and-sun songs

power lines seesawing across the car’s window

also sang when the mistral blew the laundry dry.

And the hawks, the hawks,

flickering through the clouds

their cry pinning souls in the heat.

Blond locks of hair turned crimson in the dusk

the fateful petrichor in the black autan, pungent,

time was as unending and volatile as space.

Such expanse overpowered every sense

lightning-jolted the heart to the origin

like those summer storms I loved so much.

And the hawks, always watchful, on the prowl,

scourge of the infinite, parched fields 

when the driest acorns pulverised underfoot.

In the warm embrace of the night I sank 

built the cities and lands in which I grew

stillness sought in motion to gain peace.

The day, sunlit tiles framed by a window,

crystallizing specks of dust in sunshafts

church bells unringing the flock to work.

I spent my youth under vast blue domes

pretending I was an unfettered hawk

against an immense, blueing eye 

Right above the surface of the sun 

disaware of pain, despair and joy

floating, floating, floating in a blue dome.

 

Dustballs

 

countless year-long days past since she went

every memory of her flared from under the bed

in a lock of hair balled up in dust

 

Shelter

This place is a shelter

wind-battered

snow-congealed

lava-covered

but a shelter

– seas crashing on soul

gashing the littoral –

– clouds so low

one with the froth –

– rumbling geysers

quieting volcanoes –

black sands upon grey stones

steel sea neath pearly frost –

few dare live where the ground splits

where winter winds wuther the mind –

but if they brave the elements

this place becomes their shelter

this uncompromising land

is all they need and have

this is home for the lost, the weary,

the orphaned and the widow/er

– no question asked and left

but where the glacier goes

those who find this place hospitable

have seething magma in their veins

burn with an impetuous fire within 

their love like a Lichtenberg figure

thriving where life is scarce because

wind-battered

snow-congealed

lava-covered

yet they found a shelter in this place