One day you will want to write in rhyme
When feathers burn in melting wax,
When the Sun comes too near your aching arms.
Will you feel you know so very much
As your graceless fall turns sea to foam.

One day you’ll match sound to the sound;
When logic’s strings finally snap.
All day your instruments remain un-tuned
As you search for one unexplained fact
To keep you free and likely alone.

The curse that kept me will knock your door
With parallel fingers of steel,
Will rip your throat to take the words that were,
Leaving you staring into the well
Wishing that things were not as they are.

When time stops, stands still, with folded arms,
When every flying thing falls down,
When the world collapses there is no room,
When you lose love lust you only song,
That day will you want to write in rhyme.

That day will you want to write in rhyme.

Forgetting the glances,
the long dark drift
of glistening dewy webs
spread in the misty dawn

Sound as thin as air
Soft, like filmy frost
that rimes the windows
on icy mornings

A tune as quiet as breathing
labyrinths of colour
without landfall
or metaphor

Letting go
to idle and float
From the surf sea sands
Into the fathomless ocean

No strut or clasp
but in its place,
the soul can rise
in all the washing wonder of the world

This wild being,
this State of flux,
this simmering smear
flooding the pure empty nothing.

This mess of splintering sparks
showering out of the deep dark
like dotted dice in awkward tumbles.

This misfit unfolding of stuff
with its difficult excitements,
dimensions and velocities,
describing laws of gravity
and the functions of our physics.

This formal structure of strictures
that fumbles at the hems of ghosts
now shocks the senses with corners
and the hard fabric of substance

This insignificant star dust
blustering in boiling eddies
disrupting the vague vacuum
with material surfaces
that jar against the ever present tense

This sprawling and reddening shift
of blue sky light brimming in domes
This semblance of solidity
This striving galactic ocean
beyond all forms of measurement

All this

and yet each night I sleep
in the disassembly of dreams

On the motorway
a signpost
to the place where last I left you

Behind a trap of traffic cones,
and excavated road-works
the junction lay empty and irrelevant

But I saw you there
in the spring evening
beneath the stone and clay and roses

I thought to sink into the rich deep earth
to find the rambling silk of your voice
and embrace you in your long stillness

Yet pulled away through these dark diggings
Improvements you will never see
ways you’ll never know by name

I trace my travelling years
And lose the thread of our short remembered days

So when can I see you again
and when can I see you?
When can I ruffle your vague skirts
into a turmoil of waves
on the flustered reach of your thighs?
When can I lean my breath
against your ear to brush those drums
with my feathering voice?

When again can I kiss
the flagrant mischief of your mouth
or fever my fingers
in the dark arches of your form
I want to be alone with you
in your revelation
and falter at the flesh revealed

Can I undo your clothes and leave
Strewn puddles of patterns
like islands in the carpet seas?
Shall I take you naked
Into the broiling avalanche
Storming down your senses
to feel the brightening rapture
of your thunderous cries?

In a dance of few steps
shall I press my weight against you
and trace your pulsing blood
to find the riot in your nerves
beneath the careful veils
of your long attended beauty?

I seek subversive grace
and dream of your disheveled hair

When?
.
Or if you would prefer
I could take you to the movies

The ****** mountain suffers
The limp and empty rope
Of the falling novice
Like an impertinent scar.

Unruffled by the tension
Of his fingers clinging
She is unresponsive
To his young chattering bravery

Mad with lust and fear he tears
Her undeveloped frock
Buttons of ice rain down
Falling hands grip lose threads of snow

Her beauty needs a wild man
A sensual avalanche
Whose passion would fill her aching reach
With the bright substance of his wayward dreams.

One whose driving force ignores
The pretence of her slopes
And in whose thunderous arms
She learns the dance of hammering drums.

Now her body hugs the ground
Her open arms are wide
for all the weight of climbers
To mount her firm and passive shoulders

Floating like velvet
in warm summer ruffles
lolling carelessly.

Idle breezes drift,
through open windows
traces of honeysuckle

The lethargic drone
of wasping afternoons
the befuddled trance

The holy divide
of consciousness and cloud.
the hazy glaze.

Drowsy dislocation
slight breath of a sated soul.
The heavy heat.

After planting
before reaping,
vegetable growth.

The waiting time
The moored vessels
limpid in the dog watches

Would you lay
in humming gladness
like motionless oceans?

Fleshing the harvest
the pregnant swell of seed
the ripe fields flushing.