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

kintsugi-san

the gilded-veins 'tween the heart-enamel
spiralling-galactic-arms welding memories
into a cracked-whole – all her own doing

 

I swore

 
I swore I’d tell you everything.

I lied.

In the cinema I mouthed “I love you”.

At home on the sofa I realised watching you
that I was in for a second mourning,
when at last you’d be walking away.

That this new apnea terrified me, like
a dummy death before the real one.

When you’d be gone forever from me
unnow and unhere and unstill

and uncharted and so out of reach
except for that one time when
in the cinema I mouthed “I love you”
and held your hand like a drowning man.

Fragment #196

The long and short of it lasted more so

than anything she'd seen, and it left her

– panting – sweating – and looking up at him –

both still slightly discombobulated –

A middle-class death

When are we supposed to reach

the age at which our rest is due?

We are tired

– tired of looking after others,

our elders and youngers –

– the first bailing out as soon as possible – 

– the second deferring for as long as they can –

We are left with the toil and the sweat,

the emptiness of our feelings and of our lives

– the very subject of the shows we watch –

We are tired of stretching ourselves

across such vast distances,

our minds numbed with pain

and impossible tasks.

We long to rest – perhaps even

waste our lives, unoccupied,

unaccompanied, slothful –

for the prospects of being too frail and sick

to be able to rest when our work is done

– out of breath and having achieved little –

– unable or unwilling to have sex, do sports –

– life suddenly just a distraction,

death the justification –

– and endpoint:

bedridden, committed, parked and underfed:

how could we escape this middle-class death,

we ask you – the answer more deafening

than the fucking Big Bang

– and we’re expected to go down

with a barely-heard whimper –