Turn onto
Trap grounds
Spend a moment
Curated Eden
Silver bushed
Wet scuffing squirrel
Shoots under
Rooted upturn of trunk
Slakes back
Hairy tendril roots
Finger away
Dappled heat
Old breath of rhubarb
Chokes
Stumble drunk elder
Fizzes nose
Alerted fresh
Up there hear
High branched breath
Look down there
Mushroom home
At foot
Lowly  mauve
Modest flesh
Penetrate deep
Immense
Deep dark
Wet dark
Soil
Absorbs
Thunderous
Footfall
Unperturbed

While I still breathe, I write to save my life
in compact form; mistakes, the lessons learned,
triumphant days and nights of needless strife
brought on by willful dreams and bridges burned.
One day too soon, a final page will turn,
the book will close. My fine and fragile chain
to life will break.  A loneliness unearned
will mark your passing days in ink of pain.  
Then if you wish to hear my voice again
one silent morning when you wake alone,
I leave you songs and poems.  Each refrain
will resurrect the soul you've always known.
So when my fated moment shall arrive,
my words are here; come read me back alive.

The river gathers
To squeeze
Its swollen flanks through
This narrow, peopled place
In flood, It commands
New space
Spilling
              down
                          the
                                   steps

Here
******* at railings there
Meeting again to move
As one fluid congregation
Not singing, but in prayer

I am here to marvel
Toe to edge I stand
On knotted roots
My eddying thoughts
Only half perceived
Rise like an ache
Behind the face
In the palms
Like grief
remorse
Or shame

Joining the slow march
Onward to the town
Of glass, cast high in stone
Where intellect and adoration creep
My knuckles brush cold stone
Now stopped by a half opened door
To examine the blood, the skin the bone
Inside, alter bound
I glimpse
The thorns
The crown

Our shame is audible  here
It shifts uncomfortably
Among the pew creeks
The hushed bibles
Then again the thought
                                
                    Clea­rer now
                    The feeling of apart
                    The answer
                    Half perceived

The cool air slips
Through my morning window
Rests its hand
On my warm neck
And passes on

Here
The deep longing
That comes  with spring
The unbearable pull
That is the teasing echo
Of footsteps walking
Into mist or pall
Always receding
Never reaching

Is it the reverberation
Of an unknown guilt?
Like peeling bells
Cupped to ear
That die across a meadow

He is forever on the horizon
A Perfect and endless
Breaking dawn
Of grief and joy

You
A soft brown neck
Glimpsed
Swaying in your stall
Peace and steam
Your odour
Your gentle whinny
"I am here"
I pass in the delicious damp
Green scents and dewdrop
Boots that crunch in grit
Ankles brushed by nettles

Creeping in at every edge
The sting of my desire
The exquisite
Have, have not
My thoughts
Too much

So I imagine
Plunging
My hand in your mane
The tight-knit muscle underneath
You allowing, for a moment
Though unreachable, really
Always seconds from a bite,
A kick,  
A flicker of disgust

So far removed
Yet I persist
At this practiced stillness
Holding out a hand
There's that breath again
The have, have not
The all, the mane
The muscle, the flicker
The cruel bite

Blind, inconstant love:
you rose up and shattered
on me like the burst salt wave
over the night promontory.
I was so unprepared...

And then you receded,
back into the sea, impossible
to differentiate from the rest,
the only traces of you
what remained on me.

No one is watching you
No one knows you are here
Your feelings are your feelings
Your thoughts are your thoughts
Take power in that
Curl your arms around your body
Fold in your own earth
Your are as dense as peat
With certainty
As black

Only in knowing this
In touching
Your dark wet earth
Have you anything at all
To call you own
Life is after all
Death without meaning