Snow will fall -
Obituary clippings cling
onto the fridge door
like children’s drawings.
Gazing into the eye of an other
like peeping through a window of
of homes much more silubreus than my own,
then we stood stooping towards Bethlehem
seeking wisdom where something dumb was being said,
Staggering into the New Year
as if you tricked a badger
ensnaring your ankle
by snapping a stick.
As a boball drops
from a drooping branch,
he tells the grandson,
everytime,
with the taste of turkey
on his tongue,
of the thousands of feathers plucked
for a few poultry pounds,
way back then when,
when the dogs ran around the dog track
and the toys were made from wood.
Snow has fallen:
a pale morning.
From all this cardboard
you could craft a cave
or a stable,
brown gothic Cathedral
Or a Tower of Babel
using only this detritus;
but this is no moment for monuments.
Snow has fallen:
the clean country sky
is a blitz of bright stars;
Tomorrow,
they’ll fire up the fireworks and
We’ll get bored,
so bored
we’ll drink gin from
lemonless glasses
until the ice melts and
inverted alarm clocks of birdsong
beckons us back to bed.
Oct 19, 2025
Oct 19, 2025 at 9:00 PM UTC
Not that the sea was waiting
for the men, two outlines
just beyond the shade
cast by sagging soviet architecture.
The Baltic offers no explanation,
only lengthens its fabric—
a pale blue scarf
unraveling
faster than meaning,
faster than we can agree on the word “faster.”
Meanwhile, the people go by,
all buried in errands,
between cruise ships and bus tickets
and Mother Nature
holds this grey raw pyramid
without insisting,
as though this moment could be any other,
and probably already is;
as the undergrowth
gnaws at the ankles of sunset-watchers
as the weeds sprout out
amid the sandwich-eaters,
and some shoots slip out
amid merry beer-sippers,
the way a train schedule
pokes out of a pocket.
Their swimwear, striped and undecided,
like something borrowed from another century,
all blue and white and crumpled.
They stand there for a moment to
let the wind whip their bones,
No, the sea was not waiting.
Oct 19, 2025
Oct 19, 2025 at 8:44 PM UTC
Under a blue blanket
I taste a breath
like sweet mandolins
rolling over
like some great green wave
out on the grounds
they plucked
plebby-skinned mandarins
untouched by noon,
stepping gingerly
over the soft roots in the grove
with garbled syntax
worried about a tax on sin
plucking all the grays
from their skulls
untouched by night
plonked in a bed
never dreaming
but sometimes
wishing to be a bed,
or a wardrobe
or an old chandelier
or dead.
Sep 26, 2024
Sep 26, 2024 at 4:29 PM UTC
Damp and brollieless
through an August rain,
until in a dim room,
I find you playing chess,
with the vigor of a fist-fight,
with a ***** in lo of a white pawn
and a bottle cap for a black knight -
Playing one of those
Chaplineque Men
who were not born
but one day
fell like a shadow
from the coin-chute of the pool table,
spilling out so stale
immaculate and unshaven
like any of those crumbling men,
who long ago left dreams
of living the life of a lotus eater,
to hark on,
prattle on,
bore,
as if trying to empty
the contents of their brains
onto the floor,
or into you,
or into an ashtray -
You stare at the board
seems like months and months
as he relates in loosely related grunts
fished up from a sunless sea
speaks of how
the radios are smaller,
have clogged up the air
with more music than ever,
but with less notes than ever,
more talk, talk, talk,
with less...........pauses.........
no fingers to turn dials,
one now only need utter the words -
In the past, the future thrill us!
We should stop
meeting on rainy days
in dim rooms like this,
but on second thought,
sometimes,
all it does is rain like this.
Raincoats retrieved,
we left drunkly, drably
dressed in gray, and pale,
blending into clouds
like how Sunday stew
get in the air,
like how love get in your bones.
Remember love
when you lived by the river:
We'd return to remnants
resting on flattened grass,
abandoned fishing rods
with snarled reels,
chicken bones and orange peels.
We could stop
meeting on rainy days
and drink nettle tea
as if was absinthe,
drink nettle tea
and see if your lips sting me
as it were the logical last step of history.
Aug 1, 2024
Aug 1, 2024 at 11:50 AM UTC
Emerging like an aftertaste:
I only notice now
how sober a light
streams through
the curtains to
smear your cheek
In a milk white wash.
You far off there
wrapped in blankets
like a parcel,
limp limbs wrapped
around and about me,
the bent legs
and elbows jutting
in every direction.
A black trickle of hair
pillowclung,
Peppers its fragrance
like the soft tang
that gingerbread
imparts on the mouth.
We, wordless
and breathless,
were more than a little
ill suited to this,
like two sprawling dogs
on a hot trampoline.
Mar 19, 2024
Mar 19, 2024 at 10:21 AM UTC
In the city again
and it feels less novel than ever.
In the city again
waking up in my lovers bed,
she is still and soft like a loaf of bread.
In the city again
where people who are
busy, breathless and caffeinated
do not say hello.
In the city again
Where weeds wither on
a green roundabout,
where posh elongated vowels
assault my ears
like a cold blue breeze.
In the city again
where political graffiti
and the same 3 tags
cover all like a blanket,
where yellow buses dissolve into the night.
In the city again
Where ancient corduroy clad men
stumble out of churches,
Where a secretary leaves a memo
for the manger,
where tinkers temp tourists
Onto a horsedrawncart.
In the city again
under the days dark weight again,
where we all attain
the usual filth under the fingernails.
In the city again
and it feels almost like a home.
Mar 19, 2024
Mar 19, 2024 at 10:05 AM UTC
We were soon to dislodge
ourselves from this
embarrassing embrace,
though longed to be
as permanent
as the trees:
Arcadian spectators
longing speechlessly to let
our discolored ancestors
live in a fortified mound of leaves.
A cigarette burning
at her elbow,
he proposed
“I will give you sponge cake and cider
in exchange for alcoholic lullabies.”
Too late for that now;
the stars pierced the pale vale
spread heavily
over an August night,
Far too late
She rose gauchely,
brushed sawdust from her cheeks
and wandered
out into the open,
into a reality that she knew then
would soon become
a stolid simple thing.
Nov 30, 2023
Nov 30, 2023 at 10:54 AM UTC
I admire the cluster
of photographs
hanging perfectly askew
as you carefully
put our preferred ingredients
between slabs of bread
that you place on plates
then place on the table.
Right now,
as the cat does a figure eight
around my legs
under the table,
you are one billion seconds old
and have left the tea brewing for too long,
you say, assuaging:
'It takes on a slight bitter taste, but that's about it.'
Sep 28, 2023
Sep 28, 2023 at 8:47 PM UTC
Outside a country cottage,
where the road trails off like a song,
and the paint of its pebble-dash walls
play off the sky's complexion,
your indifferent eyes behold
the curdling clouds above
and scrutinize the strangers under them;
the expectations met like
a faulty firework firmly
mounted in the Earth.
In the garden stands
a Spaniard perplexed
by the novelty of fog
stranded on the hillside
and the absurdness of it
existing outside of a horror movie.
In the course of
a near imperceptible drizzle,
it seemed that the clouds
forgot how to float;
At other times, elsewhere, a refusal
to be so gentle,
to became fused with other things,
to be born from
the seepage of smoke
of more than a million chimneys,
some slink home through it
holding hand-cranked lamps,
others: smaller, older,
wrapped in white sheets,
cough up a whole city.
But we are not there,
we are outside this worn-out cottage,
where all the white cats have blue eyes,
where a bike rests and rusts on an oak tree,
where incredibility is murmured
in hushed tones of veiled dialect,
where the conversation tapers off
like a half-learned hymn.
We amble on in.
Sep 28, 2023
Sep 28, 2023 at 8:09 PM UTC
Hard stomaching my insides
even before
these dull black undulations
of Guinness inside of me.
Sequestered in the echoes
of disembodied chatter,
the flagrant words
splutter to the floor;
whereas those same words were before
streamlined in marble aqueducts,
dispatched like love-songs to G-d;
meanwhile a door has opened.
I felt you take my temperature
in a fever-dream, I felt
even in dreams, your quart-clear hand
on a pale damp forehead;
The cold silver stethoscope
counting percussion in my chest,
with no whale-song nor rainfall,
no sound at all save for
the sirens and the foxbark.
Then after a while,
a night of mostly true silence
that left you with nothing to hear,
only the ****** functions:
Internal blood pulsations
rhythmically throbbing you find
some cells dying, others being born;
the anti-bodies of body,
the anti-thoughts of my mind.
She will make it better,
at least alleged to,
when, while her nocturnal
might she, with brown bandages
might have still acutely concealed
lips (now purple),
and the same eyes: Blue.
And I knew
that whenever the daylight lit,
didn't I slouch toward it
to be born?
Me, then, knowing no better,
to be warm,
and not yet cold,
not knowing of coldness
or anything at all,
any of it,
this 'this'.
When we shook off the mud,
and all in all in all, with
a wind westerly breaking
foreshadowing shatterings
of antarctic brass monkey *****
Still some mutterings of mite,
practically blue and purple,
still some mutterings of 'might',
wherever first you felt a light go off
and slouched toward me,
with that stigmata your palm caught
in the crux of a rose-bush.
Wilting on a winter morning,
when foxholes sighed like
moon-creators that have
never know sunlight.
When all things thawed
and turned towards daylight
and shook away the frost;
Windblown brittle bird-nests quivering,
same wind that lashed your
goose-pimpled skin
beneath your raincoat,
your spine shivering,
beneath our blue creaked
lips twist two pairs
of gnashing white teeth
again,
This.
Sep 21, 2023
Sep 21, 2023 at 7:18 PM UTC