This be the end

"But hatred gripped his heart tightly, making him tremble from head to toe. He would have liked to fight, one last time. To have the enemy within his reach, to see a blood that wasn't his. He looked away from the myriad droplets around him and went back to contemplating his gaping wound. It was being sucked inside his chest. In turn, he was sucked in. He saw only vast plains bleached by waving floors of blazing daisies, under a bare sun and the silvery reflections of a river in the distance, edged with reeds and dragonflies – yes, thousands of dragonflies dancing in the green wind of the grass, their wings rustling furiously, deafening, whirling around the tips of his fingers; he felt the hair on the nape of his neck bristle; the sun was duplicated to infinity, dazzling, repeated in thousands more suns in the iridescent prisms of their finely metallic and diaphanous, ridged elytra, and each of the thousands of suns on each of the thousands of facets burst with such blinding rage and such opaline wrath on the coruscating plains lying before him that he was forced to shield his face with his hand, and to close his eyes."

 

Home

Home is where we are

together home is your

sunny laughter

I know I'm home when you

speak to me with

your eyes into mine

– your eyes so fleeting

with others –

I miss home when you call

and your voice rings

like waves of

sleeplessness

Home is why we are

together home is our

sundog slumber

I want to stay home when

you hug me so hard you

push the stars right

into my hair and

cry meteors

I feel home when

everything down to

the spoon on the counter

spells your presence

Home is when we are

anywhere home is a

deepsun silence

 

Fragment #54

a year ago

we didn't know

the other existed

today it's as if

he had always been there

Plume

when her idle fingertip

brushed past my heart

it left a trace in the dust

when she blew the smudge off

it fell like a dandelion of stars

 

Fragment #129

I wish she hadn't let her silences

stroke my soul and my eyes

I wish she hadn't looked at me

as if she kissed my whole body

I wish she hadn't written those words

which now echo in my house of cards

I wish she hadn't brushed her fingertips

over my chin, my cheeks, my lips.

But she did. And now that she's gone

I wish I had been heartspoken.

 

Components of resilience

"Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence."

Hal Borland, American author and journalist, notably for the New York Times (1900-1978) in Countryman: A Summary of Belief, 1965.
 

Blueshift

Unslain, dressing wounds I cannot see

haggard – unsure of knowing this world

just when I thought I did but again

someone unmade it

the feeling creeping back

that this unworld

unrecognisable, unfigured

untasted, ungripped

is redshifting away from me

and now, unfeeling alive,

I am unmyself

shifting to blue.

 

like mirrors

"How simple life becomes when things like mirrors are forgotten."

Daphne du Maurier, novelist (1907-1989), in Frenchman's Creek (1941).

She will

When she will realise

she can move mountains

with her green gaze

when she will realise

she's the neutron star of girls

when she finally understands

she's shaping the world

in her gentlefirm hands

when she finally understands

she's greater than the Sahara sands

when she sees at last

that she's better than us all

and her love unsurpassed

when she sees at last

the good in her contrasts

when she finds out

she's stronger than us all

the strength in her doubt

when she finds out –

she'll move mountains

and supernova our soul

she'll make rain fall

where it never rains

she will light places

we didn't know existed

she will rewrite the tale

of what it is to love

she will lift the darkest veil

on skies we only dreamt of

she will fit the universe

in the palm of her hands

cup it like a young plant

water it with a verse

and we'll all be born again.

 

where the cliff met the sea

I set up my bed

by the break of day

I strung clouds together

wove rain as wallpaper

my bedroom was floating

on the placid ocean so

I stuffed my pillowcase

with the colours of space

with the day's sunshafts

I braided a farewell memory

One that I will keep deep down

and wait for the night to drown.