Ready my therapist, ready the tissues
Suicidal jargon and self harm, tenth issue
My tears, the alien plants to my fragile
sanctuary, ******* all the water and smiles,
Are changing to healthy oak trees,
Odd, in Blue Season, trees shrink to weeds,
The rain queen has become a frivolous giver,
And I remember how the cactus use to quiver
because Blue Season meant the Sun’s burning rays,
Well, the cactus isn’t **** anymore! Back to wearing his spiky clothes always.
Industrial air to countryside,
My fauna and flora haven’t died,
Actually they have multiplied,
The poachers, the self harm, hasn’t ambushed,
No, no! They have been seen about
But they’re less and success is a doubt.

Momentary depression, the lethal poison to
my sanctuary, wreckage seems to be subdued.

A rose and a cactus fell in love.
They understood each other's thorns.

Cactus blooming red,
matches the blood in my veins,
hauntingly precious.

The thing that's annoyingly tragic is,
This cactus has plenty of adjectives,
So why can't I rhyme,
Like I do all the time,
And find myself right where the magic is?

I can't figure out a limerick,
About a cactus and its ******,
God-**** it, it's stumped me,
I've been trying for centuries-
Or has it just been a few minutes?

The flash flood of euphoria,
is swallowed by the thirsty ground,
eternally unquenched.
I will smile,
and fix my eyes on the desert sun.
I will grow roots and bloom,
an endogenous cactus,
while envious drifters lick the sand,
desperate for a drop of rain.

Delivered to us by an optimistic gentleman in a black Stetson cap
who spent his days waving village traffic down with an open hand,
it's been four years since you were sat on the bookshelf in Kath's house.

You stood proud, surveying the fine china made across the border
wrapped up in donated newspaper articles and pristine hand-me-downs,
while my inky fingers welcomed regulars who only ever looked around.

Each weekend we were greeted by bright smiles set in permanent shadow.
Sometimes I declined banknotes on the street for carrying dismantled tables.
I'm still searching for namesakes when perched on local stones above sea level.

Friends like Elvis were divisive figures due to their signature tobacco smells.
Under a green bus shelter, I laughed at his frown about a Midlands town.
Thinking about the rows of vacant church seats still leaves me cold

even now. As I watch needles drop onto rocks and a solitary shell,
your frame shrivels daily and bends you crooked like a question mark.
Oh, Eric - will I ever meet your father again to discuss your burial?

we blossomed once
in the desert
two green weeds
seeking rootless pleasure
now flower bedded
horticultured—yet wistfully I miss
the *****
of cactus lips

Looking down from over their bodies - I count them.
My split mind at once rejoices in and recoils from that counting.
Peering back over my shoulder I make
dark associations.
It’s as if I was afraid of becoming lost
the way the bodies made a trail like bread crumbs,
leading back from the places I had been.
I walk with the Holy Light.
I walk with my dark companion.
I walk between the spines of the body shrikes.
They harvest all my crumbs and remind me I am lost.
They hook the bodies high from spikes
so I look up to make the body count.
I can see the Holy Script
but I can’t seem to find the way.
Red and gold beacons in the dream,
flickering off and on like syncopated declarations
as if saying:
Here I am
Here I am
Here I am.
All elbows and knees I slip between the webs of the
orb weavers and the cactus spines of the butcher birds
while they count the bodies for me:
Here they are
Here they are
Here they are.
Hang-dog and hard of breathing  I have my medicine.
I’m hanging from the sleeping cliffs over
hell’s half acre and the high deserts.
I remember my brother flying me to California on a great olive branch.
He fed me sushi and smiled while he watched by brain heal.
But I was coming for the bodies.
My count was smaller then, but it was high enough for him
and his hands were the keepers of the flame.
The fire there was exiled and quietly he laid it by.
My brother spread out over the carpet of time like
the faithful departed with the weavers and the shrikes and
mounted bodies in the sky.
A child appears before me on the walk - eyes like a baby deer.
His mother is two blocks behind, so he asks three questions while he waits:
Why are you smoking?
Where are your hands?
Is it getting dark soon?
He leaves me to wonder where my hands are and where the dark is,
the Holy Sage smoking at my side.
Like some dark sabbath.
Like some reading of the will.
Like some dark and holy delta sleep in a crib of red clay.
I have a feeling I have been gone a very long time and I
want to be home now,
but there is buzzing and chirping and a red light and
Saul of Tarsus holds a great tome before me and with my hands
I hide my eyes.
I am the dreaming of the world of dreams.
Therein the Holy Light rages like the flare of 1000 suns
while my eyes are shuttered tight
like old memories all gone beyond the sorrow.
The old oath keepers are all plates and screws.
The golden woven orbs and cactus spines are all empty on
the altar like a decommissioned slaughterhouse.
So I go and make a body count.