There is a spider on the clock face
And I cannot look away,
Staring at its journey across the hands
Horror legs scuttling through time,
Silken strands entombing the gears
Like it is a gift,
But the clock is wrong,
The calendar too young,
There is a voice in the stars telling me to come home:
I have never been so early for a reunion
That I will miss it entirely,
And the spider dangles precariously
from the corner of the five;
A pendulum swinging me farther from the stars.

We didn't start the fire
we children of the sun that did not
last the night,
But in the end it burned us all
And it has been a month
since we stood
Around a hole in the ground
And watched them drip tears and roses
on your body
Like you weren't just a year older than us
A child of the sun and the moon
and the forest
Who died on a mountain 7000 kilometers
from home
But the grass was just as green
And the sunrise over the peak just as beautiful
In the last wild place that you loved
No, we didn't start the fire,
We children of the sun that did not last the night
But in the end it burned us all.

Ophelia roars her drowning words
bruises blooming violet beneath her eyes unseeing,
Oh This way
madness lies -
A skeleton shriveling to ivory dust,
Time cracks like kindling underfoot,
Icarus wings melting in the heat of the flare,
Wax blistering on golden skin,
last prayers falling from peeling lips,
Always
Too close to the sun
Or too close to the riverbed -
A shroud of lightning
A storm in the blood,
Scream, Ophelia,
Open your hurricane mouth and bellow,
The Gods have yet to hear your lullaby.

You come home from the war
At least a third emptier than you were,
Like all the words were scooped from your head
With the **** of a rifle
That you constructed with your own hands
And demolished too,
Leaving so much of yourself in the barrel.

The teeth in your gums white crosses and country lines,
None of them belonging to you anymore,
Rattle like augury bones in your sleep
Because in the night you are some twisted, ugly thing
Like a trout gasping for breath
on the floor of a fishing boat,
Running from the yawning mouth at your heart
To get away from what remains here :
A battlefield.

You come home from the war and leave your love behind
In the hands of a poet,
A soldier whose eyes stare out at you in each nightmare
The claiming mark of his blood splattered across your face and emblazoned on your soul,
His smile tinged mustard yellow in your memory
But his hands so vivid;
Pencil, pages, and the pistol,
Flickering
Callouses against your cheek
Trampled into the mud
Sonnets painted into your skin
Frozen in his favourite shade of indigo.

You are dreaming of the hospital that had become,
By virtue of his presence,
Your home -
And here is the battlefield stretched out again before you
But you are tired of fighting without him,
Waiting for one more cloudless day in August,
50 years away he is a bruise in khaki pyjamas,

And you come home from the war,
finally,
into his arms.

It is October and I miss myself,
Traffic light leaves don’t stop their changes at red,
Wringing days from the calendar and hoarding them viciously as a dragon’s gold,
Every morning spent stumbling through fog in crackling dark,
Oh I am changed,
Changing even now with mist seeping between my teeth,
Feet tramping through my own reflection until I am unrecognizable
Inhuman:
I am Autumn embodied
The world spinning me out of my skin
And into the dark so I can breathe
Forget flowers and sand filled daydreams and
Embrace gale force winds and the crunch of the world beneath my feet
I am changed;
Will never return to that wonderland you remember
The one that you loved so vibrantly-
Everything will be different,
I don’t prepare you for the switch I only pull the lever and let us plummet,
It’s all I that I know to do and winter is colder than ever before
Spring all rain and heavy truths,
Your summer girl is somewhere out there, a memory,
But it won’t be the same next year, the haze two shades too light, the berries a sugary wasteland that you do not recognize,
I am Autumn,
And you have asthma.