…. Many years torn - a leaf, a paper towel, half around the other side, locked on the beach of my nadir - discipline and a cold cruel courage, jammed into a groove. Just the sunlight on my wall, warming the wall, penetrating the heavy plaster.   I was born from a stem. I fit on a chalkboard. Over the cool half-formed moon…

… Escaping on the brook’s bank, banking on nesting warm through winter, but tears are horns that open soft spaces, and autumn shifts heat and any hopes for renewal. Love is fire - from where it goes there are no shields to block its scorching. Can we reach bottom in the rain? Sing hosanna at the mountain’s base?   Becoming is the stone, the house, the wave.

…. Paved paths, brisk storm of senses, an old opening, endless as a dug-in arrow - head in the weeping jungle, the coolness of autumn air brushing tombstones, the thin necks of geese. So much night in a single glass, body and name together, replacing existence with this inheritance and no other. Rows of ships crowding the edge of the lake -

…. Underguard. Crumbled tissue in my mouth. A crazy way to run - hands in pockets. Forward without, undeterred by reality. Plywood I am keeping for emergencies, for days when putting on the brakes just won’t suffice. Speeding, retreating, torsos twisting beautifully in anticipation.   I used to make mortar by hand, no machine to ease my impossible labor - brick carrying and scaffolding climbing…

…. Come upon me like a feather-stick - sectioning my abdomen like a fruit. Suddenly toddlers are conversing and the grey cat takes in the morning. Bundle of weeds, bundle of flowers. An opening under the burning canopy. Lifetimes spent collecting synergy, male rhythms and fixed lines. God is coming down to hide in your loose-change-pocket. I dreamt of owning your praise.

Sliding through the sewage tunnel gleam (poem in seven parts) I Forgotten (soon) Hard and cold as an ice storm killing, hardening life in its blanket frost. The only love you keep is what you can control. If you can’t control it, you ditch it with a kick, with a higher-than-though mighty sneer. Digger in the rocky lifeless garden, resisting you, you claim as savage stupidity…

…. Light that drips down the turnpike, onto roads and ways far away from any window. Blocks to build shelters and shields. Flags on flimsy poles. A neutral breeze busting cardoors and personalized licence plates. Paved over, I see a carcass dripping, a little yellow flower, smaller than a thumbprint. Rust-coloured shawl, poncho that holds great sentimental significance holds me to a memory, old now as a ten-year-old untended garden…

…. Laid low, laid out like soulmates never meant to meet in this life, in the spectrum of folly and limitation. A painting layered, re-mastered, re-mused and then, burned by neglect. Miniature moment of perfection, condensed to hold a legacy in swirling matter, hard and glittering. Fractures as long as a walkway stretching the borders of a great body of water.

…. Piercing, lingering, chiming out a hymn, lullaby on a chain. Remorse to wade in like a sea-salt bath, absorbing the past into the present cellular flow. Mounds of construction sand, building and restoring roots without life, chopped down at surface level. Ideologies fuel, then turned to cinder by anger - justified violence that violates the laws of love.             Skittering up stairs, the last time I held a leaf I held…

…. Smudges, under siege, patches of calcified tissue and the swamp I enter in - fuming with failed love - connections broken under the Buddha fire. Detachment will not save me - nailed to the pavement stone, looking at birds.   Summer where have you gone? Smells rise to meet me, and the air is still humid, pressing on my cortex,

Walkways - part 1 of 16   Dual forming on slopes of darker minds.  Succulent nodes of effervescent whispers, whispering Oh! Blood clots bending in unison to sharp solstices.   Dig and reap tomorrow’s regrets, piled on like love you thought was comfortable.    Comfort is a guard you let loose, let down and found judgments - platters to be served and roasted upon.

Far and Here  . Far from the small-talk daze and this season I long to unload, my hands are open but numb from the cold. My body turns the colour of moonlight glowing, hollow, a thing only of reflection. My last chance came and went. Everywhere power escapes me and the place I live is wrought with extremes, incapable of toning down.

A New Destiny Like a love I cannot speak, this feeling coils around as a whip, scorching my skin with its disease. Break now, like the tense are broken by gentleness or the weak are consumed by merciless rage, raging in waters terrorizing and sleepless. Proud of the years spent feasting on turmoil and prophetic visions. Proud to savour the call of despair, to have kissed that…

Childhood cracked  . The doll fell and was never picked up. It fell by the curb in a lucid slumber of inarticulate words like a dew drop on ice. Nothing was coveted, the chant grew like the moon as the month moved on. What was cold inside was a needle of sharp divide and the impact of unbuffered death.

Thinking Outside  . Touching tails and feather wings. The apple trees bend and sing of autumn's coming. Starlings talk across backyards and the high-pitched beetle fills the wind like a calming drug. In this place as summer fades the quiet demands self-truth. To pull from inside a lacerated pride and pile it on the dried grass. Shadows mend the divided self…

Bowl of candy  .                 It falls and it dies, dried blood on a tombstone - palliative care, parallel petals of varying hues. Leaning against a concrete pole plastered with posters of faded dreams, dreaming their last gasp - ambulances, lawnmowers, bird sounds - feeling the sun’s rough tongue circle and slide with moist intensity over the sleeves of my new jacket.

I Know That  .               I know that faith ebbs and flows, sometimes larger, then hardly there at all.               I know my faith is often all I own, though barely visible, crushed under the world's forearm.               I know to sing and that singing can be freedom no matter the crack and heel.               I know to love for love is what remains…

The bough breaks  . and dreams collapse uncushioned like the smile that forsakes me and the wonderful illusion of things past but never lost. For here I cut my antennae down and kiss the pyramid on my grass, blessed by the end result but never by the happening: I know the world and it needs forgiveness. For here the smell grew toxic…

A Newly-Patterned Fingerprint It’s the end of my kind, the last of my line unfolding. And then all of it will be different - both the edge and the enlightenment both the things precise and the things undefined. All of it that was smouldering will be set ablaze, and beauty and grace will be overflowing like a drip-drop dream pure as reality.

Seamless        .     Raincoats and rainy seasons are behind us now. I picked up a feather. You took it from me and now it is yours. And just like that, rich as the coral reef waters, we were initiated into a lower layer.     Intensity is a button. It is concentration - one part, one of your parts unrelentingly explored while ignoring other…

Our Days  . I place my arms up here reaching for you in the morning at half-past six and later when you are just waking, disheveled and wishing to return to dreams. In the afternoon when we finally talk, the brightness of the day absorbs into your face and what is left is the movement of our connection between coffee mugs and our children’s play.

Beyond Instinct or Dreams  . Renewal is in the night, comes like lovemaking to heal the bruise of harsh words and lonely needs.   Because a cigarette is sometimes all that is wanted, or good news in the mail, and because the ways of the heart are erratic, inconsistently falling as flakes of snow, that is why we sometimes sleep with death…

If it is empty then it is empty  .         Perishing like wasps in wet tar, we can’t claim an answer but only wear our raincoats, acting out past wounds, meditating by watergardens where amphibians breed, owners of the pond.         Perishing enough to create parables to be sold to our advantage, holding hands in the summer or after a bath.

.  Silence  . I lift the bullfrog from the waters. Bread, parables and staying close to a legend - these are things of joy. I am thinking of the grave near the willow tree, whose roots have grown around the coffin, and of a sailing ship that has no home port, but drifts like a hollow log on living waters.

I  Am This Creature (drenched in mute history) I am this creature let loose from the grave, but still without a Sunday or a bed of more than weeds and worms. I am this liar, trapped in fantasy, a carcass hanging upside down, all cheers and woes set at high volume. I was with hunger, a rage of flies on soiled food,