Whisper to me
You tall beeches
Whisper your shadows
The words of your leaves
On clouds I sit
Chalk
Your
Boughs
Long
Shadows
Like tresses
Of hills
Soft and downy
With grass

Listen beeches
Remember your days
The way the sun climbs
And lowers itself
Remember drifts of snow
White as chalk

Whisper your secrets of leaves
Let me sleep
Beneath your shadows
Glad that summer is arrived
Before
Snow

Look another way
Toward dreams
My hair is a tangle of black eels
Curled up in flowers
Contained and blue-tattooed
My ******* bare.

My legs hidden
I kick like a mule
My fingernails are talons

You cannot contain me
In this small Spanish town
I am not contained
Anywhere
I spill out of blue
Pluck flowers from the graves of the dead
My mouth is not for kissing.

Here trees blossom with plastic
Sweet wrappers garland a mossy wall
Empty crisp packets whisper like leaves
And jagged daisies of broken bottles
Scatter the grass

Here a woman,
Rose tattooed
Skin like the bark of trees
Her eyes tin-cans
Trundles her shopping cart
Over catkins of paper cups

Lager, the colour of sap
Leaks from her hands
Her mouth is a bruised petal

Friday afternoon late May
hopeful for sun
the leaves a cold green
a dove watching
books
falling in fields

The man is old, his face a map of lines, his skin white with dust, a small patch of blood at the side of his mouth. If his eyes were not open, staring at me through a million pixels, his thousand miles eyes that contain the deaths of babies and seas of unshed tears – if those old eyes were not open, I would think him a man of ash. But he is living somehow, in the rubble of the city. If living it is.

A chorus of gulls on poles
Lines of gulls on the shingle and concrete
Picking over bones, the innards of fish
Pulling at the corners of fake grass
Fighting over sweets.
Stinking gulls
Mewing
Mimicking cats
Flying
Gulls
Strutting their stuff
Nodding
Imitating boats
And sometimes
Even
Silent

How beautiful the light is
A luminosity like something never seen before
How it catches the leaf
As it spins and drops gentle as a kiss
I wonder if this is how you fall
Luminous and quiet
Softly spiralling
But you fall screaming
Blood spills from your mouth
Your bones splinter
And the baby is gone from your arms
The leaf spins and drops
How it catches the light
From your fading eyes