We are, when bruised by some new qualm,
capable of human knowing;
indebted to the open palm.

Some trials, surely, test our charm -
are we sane, still? Life is showing
we are, when caught in some new qualm.

So someone's hand has brought us harm?
Violent smashes; hateful throwing
indebted to the open palm?

Do we ourselves give in, alarmed?
Powerful and old; we're slowing,
we are, when caught in some new qualm.

Or human friend – you need alms,
others' helpings to keep you flowing,
indebted to their open palms?

This mandala of loving arms
is ever-present handshake-throwing.
We are, when caught in some new qualm,
indebted to these open palms.

You were the first to make me smile,
I'm told. Descending from suspicion -
Your bedroom staircase above -
You accepted me then. I have
Passed ivy fences by that house
When striving to Magic with you.

Amigo! More than brother; ours
Being found on humour – better
Than most siblings we know. In fact,
You were ingesting first substances
To drop the edges, were you not,
When I stumbled into that? You

And him and I – godless trinity
Of wrenched enlightenment. He quenched me;
You kept me sane with jokes, if and
When you could. You never browbeat,
Never boast of any graces.
Right and wrong are solid to you.

Yet somehow you tread easily
Between seriousness and love -
innit, though? Forming yourself
Happily through your work and home -  
Though home is mother's, it's yours too.
How light, the heart that binds you

In marriage. I should have forged this
For that; unsure how to cast you
In your own plot, I bottled out.
Brother, friend, joker – which face are
You today? Now the heath is sprung
With new tender lavender. You

Shock me. You were the first to make
Me cry at lunch, when you gave
Your speech. You invoked the dead,
Charged glasses and glasses, you
Called upon no weary gods; danced
Into shackledom with Dad beside you.

burn your night away into photo ash,
Stalking your development like we are both
Babies, you and I babies, clutching foetal
Breath one-a-piece, I press these images,
These offerings of yours, O god of my neuroses,
My concrete, crazy-paved past,
I press them between two books in my
Eyelids, try my best to recognise the
New in you and try to map out how you
Have surely, surely changed, and I
Find you are not these pictures -
Try though I do (nighty night every night)
I cannot know you from these icons so
Burn in me some symbols again so
I can know you again so
I can know you again so
I can know you so
Know you so-so-- again--

Here I lie -
One vulnerable ear
to the marble silk of galaxies.

Even though
Your figure is an act
of miracle meteors
raining on the soft,
shocked retina,

the valleys
between your eyes and mouth
a dazzling constellation,

Your lullaby voice
a play of centered orbits
carved around me,

Even though the slow breath of you
is the many pulsing
gases, bright beyond
the fire of any human glint,

I am, firstly,
a sacred satellite
for the cosmic murmurs
of something grander.

I have been reset by the whistle-moans
of distant deities. They summoned me
with hot, budding secrets
in earthy cases like mushroom dust.

Then, my lullaby death under lunar stage-light;
I retreated into the detailed finery
of the open boarded stage.

I was left a sombre vault of knowledge.
A soul deposited. An I shed of an I.

Grounded, I glide; an effortless waltz.
The grand illusion taking flight at last –
There is no me, but a simple interwoven thread
in all this fabric.

A whistle-tone as I danced my last --
but no listener, and nobody produced it.

Those gloved hands, concealing tears of
The lady opposite. I ask her
For a moment of her time.
She looks through hair, through me.

I simply point –
To the passive, low-slung disc
Out there; a massive levitation
Breaking away from the burned horizon.
Its proximity and its haunting face.

It falls away, behind a tunnel.
‘A wink,’ I tell her. ‘A hint.
Nothing lasts so long
That the grandeur, out there,
Recalls it. The snow reveals the weeds.
The wind disrupts their seeds.
It’s all momentum, smooth and sure:
Less leads on to more – breeds more,
Breeds more.’

She doesn’t know I feel the same; that
The train and I are on our tracks,
Both inexorably drawn. And
If we alight at dawn,
We’ll see that the journey lacked
And open the doors – reborn.