To err on the side of caution here is not to try at all
Fold, unfold and refold to stare at clipped wings
With the icy squalls and treacherous winds
Perhaps not to fly is a blessing after all
Tarry not, come whispers from lonesome depths
Subterfuge is no sin for a weary heart
To receive and not give and not come apart
Only the lucky and the naive dare take the plunge
Down the crimson stained ravines in which the fallen still lie fresh
Dashed on jagged edges of lovers' valleys steep
Embitterment on their tongues as the rocks on jellied flesh
Plagued with numbness by day and nightmares in sleep
Lock, unlock and relock this sepulchre of emotion then
Let me out of here and perish with these thoughts
Tread forbidden paths all over their souls
They crisscross like passions and tangle in knots
Unscathed forevermore, immortal be the insouciant

The man leans forward in his seat, reaching down with bony arms
His hunched back jerks every time the bus jolts - often enough
That the concern leaking from me almost covers the empty seat between us
While his shoulder blade rocks against the textured purple grab pole he leans on

Bright evening sunlight floods from the clear glass windows
His sports shoes gleam a blinding white against his black long pants and high socks
The laces on the right shoe have come undone
Thin fingers wrestle with the half-tied knot, plucking at the tangle

Just opposite him sits an old woman with short grey hair
Her cheekbones sunken in a permanent scowl that reaches the eyes
I cannot fathom if disapproval is directed or a decades-long feature of her face
With clasped hands she stares into space and never meets my gaze

The laces are fully loosed; the man now loops them around his leg
Several inches above the ankle and his trouser cuff
They circle once, twice. Then they intertwine haphazardly
I am reminded of a confused toddler with strings

We stop once again and the woman gets up to alight
He does the same, inching to the door with a crawl - he has no cane
She scans two bus cards; he goes straight out
Each unsteady step threatening to collapse his bent frame

The bus doors close. In the evening heat she grabs the crook of his arm
Pushing him down the sheltered walkway of the bus stop
At a sickening pace. As the bus drives off
I glimpse a pair of white laces, flapping around black trouser cuffs

The tide of dawn breaks in a surf-slap of forced urgency
Its backwash the limb-snagging routine of mechanical puppetry
A spray of dazed haste, clock watching and checks
Until the silent road is tread under the floating pale moon
Nature holds its breath, still waiting for sound to awake
From bent trees hurtling by on the familiar asphalt bends

The first arrow volley across the meeting table looses
All nurse wounds, some incapacitated for the day
Dull-eyed dashes for cover soon ensue
In the dust cloud kicked up by time's dragging heels
Through which the future whispers of release and light
But until that day knees shall buckle and heads shall bow
Amid carnage of fault and blame and fractured logic

The hours end in meager relief, draining with light
Back to the roof of a shell no home to the heart
Its inhabitants look askance in the perpetual clamour
Eroding the final bastions of serenity
Excess decibels resound off walls too close
Tugging on sanity's tattered edges

Are we to be knights, valiant and courageous?
Who leap into the fray with eyes ablaze to drown in blood of foes
Or grudging conscripts, having held just enough ground, with
Sullen faces due the touch of the next dawn
Whose names never make it into tales

They detest bald carrion-cleaners so, they do
Even as winged beaks rend the flesh of fathers, sons, brothers
Stripping carcasses from putrid decay to liberation, clean-picked white bone
To spare their loved ones the odious descent into pestilence
Misguided hate hovers in place of black clouds of flies

Weep! Bemoan! Execrate! For all the use it may be
Brick by brick watchtowers fall and signal flames choke into trails of smoke
A portent; walls recede, the castle shudders and recoils
Screaming crow murders knell the looming storm

Are we to be knights?

the slumber in the coffin of my dreams
is restless. weary whispers of the past:
black box effluxion, bursting at the seams
(they rupture violently until the last).
sometimes i feel perfectly fine alone,
accustomed to the comforts of the bland,
without another soul to call my own,
or living warmth to press against my hand.
is there a need to fill this cavity
with that which everyone proclaims is love,
as insurance against depravity,
a last reminder, Aphrodite's dove?
meanwhile in here there is but space for one;
hold just a while more - soon i will be done

Silky sopranos twisting thin: crystal notes
Spilling, glassy beads from a fat music jar
Soothing as the nightly breeze against our shores
Bearing new and forgotten scents from afar

Midnight dew forms on freshly mown silver grass
Slides down pumpkin cheeks to settle finally
Unperturbed as the scarecrow by the red skies
Rumbling low, the whispers of dreams yet to pass

The sighing willows still sway under the weight
Of the cold luminescent moon, even now
As it waxes and wanes and rages at fate
Whose warm breath yet still stirs the earth deep within

sonatas soulful, soothing, softly somnolent:
i kneel in surrender to their swells —
slipping under the spray, slow submerge of sound

soaking my eardrums
sealing sight
the sea’s silence deceives, concealing

songs so solemn, solace’s sorcery suddenly suspends:
sorrowful solipsism sublimates —
i seek stupors soporific as soliloquys

The lights shining right onto my face have finally been turned off. I double-check my bed's position - too upright and I'll have trouble falling asleep, too low and my back will ache. I ask for one last drink of water, but take just a sip and place the cup on the bedside table. It will have to last me the night. The man in the bed opposite mine is still on the phone, conversing in deep tones. It is joined every now and then by an outburst of piteous groaning from the old man near the window, restrained by lashes so he cannot get up and pull out the catheter leaking dark yellow ***** into the bag on the floor by his bed.

I drift off into a restless sleep, roused every few hours for my vitals to be measured. Your heart rate is low, every nurse says. Athlete's heart. It's as reassuring as the cool night air, the silent peace when even the mentally unstable moaning old man is asleep (he wakes muliple times throughout the night, moaning himself hoarse and back into slumber). The nurses come and go, gowned wraiths cloaked in the semi-darkness gliding with their equipment and medicine trolleys. The red fluid level in the tube by my side heaves with each breath I take. Alarmed, I wave someone over to tell me that the blood will not flood back into my lungs.

Mornings creep from the windows into the room, no more than a purple light that turns to orange, then white. The chill of the night gives way to a steadily rising warm humidity that seems to dilate time, the minutes worming into sore patches of my torso from laying too long without changing position. I waste away bedridden, lung collapsing further. The course of the day contains little more than still more waiting in vain for good news, interspersed with bland meals that I painfully finish, hunched in a half-sitting position with a limp left upper body. The ward comes to life again, a sickly bustling blur. The slow heat lingers several more hours after the last visitors have gone, long past sunset. There is scant comfort here but sleep, yet even that never comes easily.

Some grant release in the same way as an emptying of bowels
Temporal relief slightly soured by recurrence worries

Some as shadows unnoticed in the midday sun
Gradually shortening until they lie beneath your feet and
You only realise they're gone when you look hard
Maybe by the time you notice mere minutes are left

Others, as smoke; your scrabbling fingers net naught but wisps
Too hopelessly material to stem estrangement
Watch, as they dissipate. Surely and slowly

Yet not all go that way. Some waft back in spectral flashes
In random corners brief phantasms recur, memories of places and traces in people
You will be strangers with polite smiles for greetings, faux familiarity distilled from tenuous acquaintances

And the last we painfully hate and crave:
The accidental auroras, sky-splashed above the lone wanderer
Lullabies of brilliance and bewitching beauty
Your breath is swept along in their wake and when you finally find it again it is all that's left
A lost stirring awakens in your gut, a giddy cocktail of emotion
The sweet aftertaste twists to regretful desire that sears a cruel bitterness deep

Orange earplugs, pill-shaped, one pair:
for use when pretending the neighbours' furniture-dragging is comforting invariably fails.

White humidifier, cylindrical, spewing vapour:
twenty minutes per cycle. Each manual reset is a life lost and there is no Player Two.

Day curtains, thick and heavy, one set:
to evade the pincer of lunar Cyclops' glare and unblinking orange streetlights.

E5:E2: the projection clock spits on the wall, fresh red and upside down:
it's almost midnight. I shall feign death until the whirring in my head dies.

Desolation comes like some huge gaping maw
It swallows you whole, smiles and laughter and all
Makes you want to curl up and cry your eyes raw
Down into insecurity's depths you fall

But at every tunnel's end there will be light
A rainbow smiling above after each storm
Beauty in the dark corners graced by your sight
Cold winter days end in a bed soft and warm

You have strength yet, untapped deep within your mind
Feed embers of hope with the sparks from your friends
Above all, love yourself and soon you'll find
You're just fine (and there's no need to make amends)

The jogger stops a while to catch his breath,
a sweaty grimace painted on his face.
Perhaps in half-light it appears a grin
to others - actually he feels like death.
With averageness as his only sin,
he thinks, how apt to go in such a place.

Her memory is blank beyond this place.
She draws a rasping, thin and ragged breath,
inhaling scents of forced carnal sin.
The caked make-up is falling off her face
but all her thoughts these nights have been of death;
a cigarette will reapply her grin.

The old man looks around and gives a grin
at all his children gathered in his place.
For months he has been waiting for his death,
his lungs to finally run out of breath.
The ghost of life still lingers on his face,
a long, benign existence free of sin.

Bejewelled silky hands still slick with sin
support, neck-like, a head which wears a grin
that looks like it's been stolen off the face
of mannequins and plastered into place.
Her role in hastening his final breath
still haunts her. So it shall unto her death.

This industry is headed towards death.
They think intelligence is just a sin
and try to cut him off at every breath.
He finally allows himself a grin.
With this he'll put them in their proper place
and wipe that smug expression from their face.

The kiss of malnutrition on her face,
a souvenir from those merengues with death,
lies testament to horrors in this place.
Though poverty may be a fatal sin,
she bears the burden with a toothless grin
and croons her lullaby under her breath.

Behold my face! They all know I am Death.
But truth is, there is sin in any place;
I'll grin the same before I stop your breath.

this week is melting into the last again,
an unspooling reel of denatured days whelmed in a geodic cavity of suspense.
entombed air turns stale quickly, curable by neither smoke nor innumerable crystalline mirrors refracting the lightning blinking in my window.

occupation's familiar musk hangs heavy,
pierced only occasionally by storm sounds.
the flightless beast of languor growls an uneasy thunder
rolling adrift in a hollow sky, phantom wingbeats striking my temples
as I recoil at the realisation that my tormentor is my pulse.

lucent orbs of twilight gemmed in a shapeshifting head
stare at any number of absent realisations guilty talons rake deep into the void,
yet even this suicidal contemplation snares in ephemerality.
we barely remember to maroon the latest self-undoing consecration.

I return once more,
to where the rivulets run dry,
the horizon flattens into nothingness
and the ravens cry.

I tread back across
to where the waters once ran deep,
and watch my feet sink while I hear my
winged companions weep.

Scrabbling in the dirt,
I become painfully aware
of every inch of my exposed skin under
the naked sky's stare.

There is nothing here,
nothing but the wind's icy bite
gnawing at my cheeks with the frozen breath of
overflowing spite.

Then, the distant growl
of thunder from just beyond sight;
it knells for all these dust-swept dunes I've built yet
whispers of delight.

I may have returned
to this dead oasis again,
but now after all this time I'm finally
waiting for the rain.

Dusk's fire vanishes into me these days,
a simmering that chills the soul,
an eternal gravity of parted ways -
yesterday, a lifetime ago.
Those resigned retreats I have beaten, it seems,
have all folded upon themselves
in this samsara of half-abandoned dreams
with their twisted trajectories.
Words stoppering my throat return to the pen;
they come out all messy and wrong
in discordant collisions time and again,
denatured by decrepitude.
The alternating current leaping through weeks -
snippets of a life without me -
rampages, heedless to memories it wreaks,
feeding the voltage in my brain.

I have confined you to a prime number beyond my own imagination
to turn my blade on a yet time-frozen heart;
but all I find carved upon the blocks I chop it into are your initials,
indivisible cube roots of memory.

Sometimes I am the whip-flailing horseman charging into tomorrow
On the fevered hooves of the present while
Safe under my cloak against sunset-red clouds of kicked-up dust.

Sometimes I am the frantically zigzagging prey half-blind with fear
Cursing the double-dealing wind that lashes against my hide
And feeds my scent to the ravenous hounds of the past.

Perhaps I am both hunter and quarry in a simultaneous paradox
Which explodes from the shattered fiction of single-mindedness
Into fresh awareness brilliant and dark and incomprehensibly vast.

For all I know I could even be a sprite tossed haphazardly in a Bermuda Triangle
Above fault lines where yesterday's memories collide into the future
To birth strange whirlpools of thought stirred by phantom hands
Waiting for me to join them below among hulking carcasses of rust.

I am the hedged question put to a bland catalogue. Perhaps there is no right to expect anything more than diluted answers.

The rose buds are falling off, a bell tolling in silence, an uneasy clock slowly sweeping fairy dust with its bare hands.

Soon the paint will dry, congealing thick and fast on the brush tip it has never left. It is pungent as a rotting flower.

Watered-down doubt flowers, its roots grazing my conviction. I fear the simple answer will undo my seasoned justification.

There is little good in ex post defibrillations. Ambulances are not made for chasing after Frankenstein fairytales in various reincarnations.

A compass in my thumbs deposits me variously reincarnated on the doorstep of our conversation,
yet each time an infant wrapped in a different blanket.

Long have I pored over the spectrum of untrammelled human emotion,
spanning cover to cover in this self-forbidden grimoire prefaced with bearer risk warnings.

Now my tongue plays host to an intermittent rebellion of intangibles,
each laconic usurper alacritously poised to halt a never-ending coronation.

Hope-marbled milky shadows beckon softly with a sleepy seduction,
searing the remaining threads of her stitched through my fibres: a cyborg-like tingling.

I wonder if we have all along been welding another contradiction onto our feet,
birthing the latest excuse for returning to our destiny under the yoke of newly-minted gods.