There is a cloud over Yorkshire...
it brings burst speech in the evening.

The grass is bending in the rain;
a fine fog slips goodbye like window fingers,

leaving behind a shining extract.
We're on the viscous edge of night,

straying into dim, broken hellos
that dissolve us like a companionable acid.

We cook our meals quietly tonight
in black aprons of lonely air.

The silver of the blade is dwindling.
Stars blink like vacancy signs.

Green wine in the afternoon...
I am flaking thru another Saturday:

a year ago I found you after years
in the milestone courtyard,

you bought me coffee and we compared notes
on the carousel of inadequate lovers

who had betrayed us and vanished,
but never quite vanished enough.

One night, late, I came by
& admired your house.

Then the waters slowly closed in
over me and my mouth crept away.

Now, you cut thru the ether
to recover the string of thought

that passed between us.
Thank you for that -

you have been a spray of stars.
I am the empty space in between.

You are the passing shadow in the lavender,
the new wet leaf on the budded branch.

You sweep the year away again,
the morning ploughed blue to yellow.

Low tide grips and goes,
a seethe of chilled salt and muddy mist.

What remains is a breeze:
your cotton sleeve sun-speckled.

I send you this verse
as a mourning dove lifts

its black penny eye
under strings of evening,

& sings a falling song
cheek to cheek with the glass.

My heart is muffled,
buried as if in sea mud
alongside thorned shells
nestled in the slick.

Purple gore rings it
in ribs like tented fingers
as it sits and waits
for nothing in particular.

By drunken prophesies,
libels and dreams,
it makes its needs known.
Like small birds on the wing

spreading wind-wetted seeds
into the endorsing green,
I half-hope that something grows
from this busily clouded chance-chain.

Maybe a small gesture,
made half-way, made in jest maybe,
might root in the red of the soul,
unmuffle the muscle's knell -

but it all passes by -
no one is waving this way.
The floor is an emptying pattern;
the rain is coming, the rain is coming.

I watch your legs -
not the denim or flesh,
but the long thigh bones

as they glide above the chevrons,
flourishes above the tile,
cursive scrawls in the wet air.

Strange thought, I know.
I cannot account for it.
My sister sends you regards

from New Jersey's Starland.
You smile with sweet tolerance.
Mezcal courses through my face.

Happy hour is ending,
& with it, my tenure in your kingdom.
I am cast adrift once again.

The moon is full tonight;
gravid, a white bursting.
It sings into the palms of my hands.

O bartender, bartender,
with your good posture:
who am I? Who am I?

Glossy-budded hair,
unnameably Portuguese,
your hand-picked star anise
floats in my pear sangria.

You are of the moment.
You are a smile and a nose ring.
You seem curious about me,
but you can't be.

Thank you for the swift nothings
of little talk that helped me along
on a Friday afternoon.
You couldn't know it,

but such small items
as bar talk have become, for me,
strange freedoms that bubble up
& sometimes displace the sorrow

that encases me perpetually
on these long spring days.
Your stance between the beer taps,
by the good scotch and gin...

it brings a faint gladness
to an ulcerated gray
that sweeps back westward
across the parapets of new night.

"Before our lives divide for ever,
While time is with us and hands are free.“
-Algernon Charles Swinburne


There is a strangeness in the air today.
New buds came out on the branch,
green and purple and yellow,
like bruises on old arms.

The sun is gnarled, wrinkled,
folded between ****** clouds
like stringy dough in the knuckles.
The sun doesn't care, it doesn't care

if I'm alive or dead.
It sits in its eight minute perch
in perpetual mockery
of my careful observations.

Someday my dead ash will mock
the fat red belt-bloat of the sun ,
expanded to eat the first couple planets,
maybe even ours.

But no one cares.
If there was ever a lazy, wanton god
who made all this waste,
he or she retreated long ago

to watch these jests from afar.
If there was ever a devil who scourged
the hells with a red hand,
he or she retreated long ago.

Now there are just free hands,
roaming in the salted night
of the inner city boundary.
Free hands can touch what they want.

We are all frozen in time
by our unregenerate desires.
We are free-handed, starry-haired.
We are just lines, wavering.