Pomes

Gone on the road

The future is cancelled

Until further notice.

My lover is a leaf in the wind;

Every autumn the trees are bereft.

A moth draws in and out through a house late at night

Intersecting the talk in a warmly lit room.

My lover is dark water running.

I am a blind man in a car crash,

for the time being

Floodlights in the yard:
Starving Russians standing in the cold
and naked avenues of light.
Why do they sing like this,
invisible night birds
burbling like summer blossoming sun?
Belie the dark grass furred with frost
and rabbits, each a shadow round.

silver and orange in hazes
striped like sky tigers
It's a long way from dawn.

At last, here is the place,
the landscape hung in chloroform
and pearls, circle echo owls, echo owls,
ayearning cup my hands and call.
A deepsea ghostfish, bulbing.

Down to the low city, tree by tree
tentacled and dead.
Blunt scythes loom in, gargantuan,
webbed branches; slicks of web.
One leg by the coast,
dragging circles in stones. Another here.

One sky above the gravamen,
Dark, brainlike, and old.

The Vigil

After two hours of burning, I get dressed

and smoke.

Past the mirror

where your eyebrows push together

and are deflected upwards like opposing magnets.

Wooden-toed, tired;

sun like a showerhead,

shoe-filled bed.

Cut, cut, cut.

The bright dust has left no company

but doors in parallel lines,

benign nurses.

I crave curves and blurs,

examine my fingernails.

Tomorrow in six hours;

tonight was bad like a fruit.

Book food

Very cold. Posters curling up

With mould.

Now, reading

My mouth has opened, thinking

I pant happy shallow breaths

Like a dog’s mouth after drinking.

white lines

Life gives you lines : Ad lib

Life gives you lines : Write criss-crossed

Life gives you lines : But the compass is lost

'K, have you got a note?

Vigil II (what came next)

I may shatter on this precipice

between these weary, restless whites of doors and beds

and hours and hours sat staring at your dead white face,

willing you to wake. After two days

you start to toss and shout, slick body torqued in sheets.

Just once your eyes break open, shriek – GET -

FUCK – GET OFF ME –

- You’re gone again. Late night

blows over empty cobbles, cold

and spreads the stars in space.

Lack of sleep like radiation burns the shadows into place.

Over your face

the freckles fall, like spots of mould

up a damp white wall. I watch

I hope you wake.

Date Rape : Prayer

Date Rape

Waking up, half-drunk

A roll-up, headrush

In wonder I touch

the brown patches

of blood

but nothing comes back

Go pee

seeing

no pants

and no tampon –

and

where are all

these bruises from?

Tonight, exhausted

In sleep comes

flowering pictures

That choke me awake

Evaporate The raid turns up

my underwear

two used condoms

Screeching through

A stretched balloon too thin for it to stretch through

And the bruises have gone blue

The lines that look like fingers -

Blooming

Prayer

Lord Jesus.

Justice Please

~~Amen~~

Repeat