Could we convince our scars
That the world isn't sharp,
That it means no harm?

I see the world horizontally,
Soft sheets all stuffy
With potential hardly realised.
My eyes, heavy and unhappy,
Are blinded by the muted sunshine
Mocking me through the blinds.
The hum of life,
Doing fine just outside the window,
I feel its energy,
Almost laugh at its impossibility.

Because I bear the world brutally,
Confined and coffin-ed
In an ache that leaves no stain.
Lady Macbeth,
My crime is wept on evidence of
unliving,
Those shrines of *******
Laid to rest around the head
Of this tomb effigy,
Chronically enshrined in invisible agony
While the world just carries on.

I miss you
In the way lovers used to love
- Urgent, daring,
Desiring more than
Just touch.

Every miniscule molecule
I make mine
Meanders from,
Mightily moving mountains,
To meekly maintaining mounds.
From harmlessly heeding horizons,
To heroically holding off hounds.

My epiphanies never last
Rising and popping like bubbles in a glass
Frequently falling flat
No real form for all their fizz.

Silly that my heart should
Be a secret,
That my love should whisper wishes
Than wear them wilfully
On his sleeve.
But my soul only sours
In silent sharing -
The eyes meeting in mischief
Across a room busy and unassuming,
Of the quick lift of lips,
The stifled snicker, the cheeky wink
That makes something wonderful
Flicker in my chest,
Caught breath at the beauty
In the boon
Of being the only two
Who know -
Without obvious touch
Or flamboyant show -
The all of each other.


Silly that my heart
Should be a secret,
Given in confidential agreement,
But I only give all
For those who would take silently
The big and the small,
And shelter those morsels
Like a treasure,
Never measuring their worth
By grand shows of splendour,
But by the tender
certainty of together
In the quiet.

Her heart could heal
the heather,
Even in the colder weather's grip -
snapping the bony, brittle twigs
And sparkling sharply on abandoned leaves -
She could find her ease
On the downy carpet of the diseased,
Gather their lost limbs
Like a forgiveness-
That warm welcome of forget.
She could rest her head,
And bloom,
Bright blossom gazing up at the moon
More often than the sun,
Her fire blazing on -
A little hearth, among the heather
Warming roots in the
Colder months.