The wood room door was opened wide
I closed it firm last night.
I woke at four and felt it's breath
It gave me quite a fright.
I felt it's chilly, gentle breath
Exhaling on my brow
And upright in my skinny bed
Roared "Get thee gone ghost,
******* now!"


With naked shanks I padded forth
To set and light the fire
Whilst outside in the wilderness
I could hear the specter's ire,
It moved about deliberately,
It stalked outside my room.
I warmed my *** by fires heat
And cursed to dispel doom.


That icy feeling permeates
It reaches to the bone,
It is far to early for a call
Yet there's the ringing phone,
I listen to the vacant hiss,
There's no one there of course
So I bellow forth obscenities
And hang up with a curse.


Old Basil told me of the time
He watched with open mouth
Whilst a faceless man in hounds tooth coat
Glided past him from the south.
The housemaids tell with fear filled eyes
Of depressions on the bed
Where something sat and rested there
Laid down it's weary head.
Except the house was empty then,
Unoccupied by guests.
No cat nor dog nor friendly hog,
Nobody playing jests.


Some nights I walk the corridors
To see what I can see
And I fancy Thomas Dawson's ghost
Is quietly watching me,
For he only shows his bearded face
At the darkest witching hour
And it's usually in the dead of night
To the echo's of the old clock tower
When the mountain looms above the lodge
Enshrouded in the mist,
And the morepork calls its haunting sound
And the snow is moonlight kissed.



Marshalg
Dawson Falls Lodge
TARANAKI,New Zealand.
18th August 2008
- From Watching the Ripples Radiate

Starbucks for the beach sleeper,
cigarettes for the cruise ship worker,
around the world a further three times more
with a six-a-day job, one on shore.
She smiled with Gatsby glare.
She smiled with  fair, tied back hair.
She smiled.
And how her love for Poe and Wilde
found its way to my ear a mere three year veer
around time itself.
Turkish delight is not a food nor a sweet
but a lady who gives a discreet smile to those she meets.
My cafe in my street has you across from me
and the books I read have you printed in an uppercase key,
black on the white and bound by the spine
for you are the cruise ship lady, the lover of mine.

I am making a desicion
to clean my body of
your hollow whispered bruises
cracks in my diaphragm
your words left sizzling there
like acid that dripped from your lips
I forgot the deception that swam from your eyes
I have never been stupid
enough to believe
that you were only one
when there were three.
But we stood and watched that house burn
never feeling colder,
than we did that night.
Im sorry your brother died and took
your parents with you.
So you are an orphan that
demonstrated car crashes
in the mere rhythm of your hands
or melody of your speech.
But I find myself drawn to angry cobalt blue eyes
too often enough to know that
I cannot grapple out of your choke-hold
and frozen fingers will bruise me every shade of your
roaring ocean-like blue.
I can only admire the sapphire in your soul from a distance
and hope the red ruby rage turns to wine and not blood.
I have left my marks on too many wooden floorboards, pleaded with too many icy aquamarine eyes;
from boys with steel in their voices but a fury in their hearts.
Too many fingernails stuck between infinite spaces somewhere in houses
where the silence reminded me of the stillness of a teal lake in spring
your eyes are reminiscent of a grey morning I do not wish to remember
I will leave a mark here.

Everything I ever knew
Bundled in a waft of air
Weaving thru
Branches of the deep forest

Everything she ever knew
Left in a compact she dropped
Buried under
Thin layer of snow in the deep forest

Bright-colored tape stood out to me.

I walked & followed a line of blue tape
Crunching branches and leaf's under my boots
Holding the tape like a stair-rail 
A lifeline.
The opposite hand waving off twigs.

The blue tape ran into a red tape that
Came from another forest corner
I ran into a yellow and a navy blue tape line, too
Soon, tape from everywhere, every color in the mist

The fog of the deep forest seemed to condense and
Flow
Down to wherever these lines led
Hundreds of different tape lines
Used by campers to track their way back
To track their way back.

I held onto this story and followed
All the way into deep forest sanctuary

They all met at this dark spot.
A massive entanglement of rainbow'ed tape
Swaying like a hammock 
Held frozen in the mid-canopy 
A complicated dizzying web; 

I stopped there,
in awe of a feeling I got
                                         someone felt *missing.