When first we met our words with each
Were laced with smile and touch.  Our eyes,
Confessed and broke at the closing café
And fused in joy and salt, opened up
With long, arresting arms at our sides.

You brought me to your toppled room,
I counted a number of worn, weary
Books, various anthologies, travelogues
And philosophers, a few fierce Poets,
Looking on, strategies for study,
All assembled, with great measure,
It was an alternate version of my own
Battle ground library.  Then, I was yours
But you were never mine.

                                           Your stone,
Walled spirit encroached upon me
And I was unset to siege at the base
Of your winding turret and waged
With you a fortnight of five full years
When you rushed forth on your crusades
You left me, flung, far from the holy lands.

Was there a word,
Plain or shimmering,
Cast of gold and mercy,
In the bathing light of forgiveness,
Tempered with down and feather,
Wrought of worthiness and pride,
The mellow flame of tenderness
And shearing morning sun,
One tabulation of saving flesh,
The tapping root of the knowledge
Tree, the forge of stainless metal
And touch, stone direction,
One healing humour, cardinal
As blood, forceful as the salt
Journey bearing the pines
Of lodestar coordinates,
Spotting the Xanadu ex
Of the lost lovers?

Little lambs gathered on the precipice,
Soft and snowy, peaceful and patching,
Their numbers change in spotting fog,
By the sea a great erne dives, snatching.

I came to a courtyard of my own making,
To a cottage by the sea at the worlds edge.
I furnished it with my left over life, complete,
Barren and colourless and I wrote the newest
Book of psalms out of tinder and flame, a tome
Of grey and useless poems, unheard of songs
And reams of flesh.  There in the lightest dark,
By the Druid stone that was placed just for me,
I planted a creeping yew tree.  And the moon
Sang in celebration and silence like a fallen
Priest.  
                    Under the covering hazel trees,
That sprung to life after the longest winter,
Which taught me to forget my name, I now
Struggle with light and my body, warring, torn
Is fading slow, like the always arriving, down
Turning solstice, the climates of the mind,
Where it is digging the never ending shallow
Hole only the spreading eternal yew, that I
Planted, will ever know and only the Lazarus
Moon shall ever rise above.

I came to a courtyard of my own making,
Was it dream that led me there or my eyes?

The fly makes his way through the house.
Its tongue, like billions before, is tainting  
All it touches.  The fly has wings to spread  
His mess, and though he has innumerable  
Facets to his eyes he cannot see  
The swatter coming.

The house surrounds the fly and is sacred.
As the great blue world beyond is sacred.  
And the fly is spreading fast, flitting here  
And sticking there trampling his own  
Shelter, spreading pollution and excrement  
With a rolling tongue  

That spews and spits upon his own home.  
And though he is happy while he soils  
His house his eyes are two dead worlds  
Barren and still, born to die by the hand  
That flies even higher, so, the fly cannot  
See the swatter coming.

Buzzing, like a burn, through the innocent  
Air he dreams of vast minions rooting  
His world with legion hands.  The house was  
A garden that led him in, he cannot  
Wait for his seed to fester, all's he needs  
Are God’s green plants  

And clean water, some fresh air to conquer.
This house was made for him he would have  
Himself believe.  But when all has dried  
And all is soiled the fly would wish to move  
On, if only he could, trapped as he is  
In the earth and wooden house.

He could taste it all, oblivious to oblivion
In God’s green wooded world— all spinning,  
The sands are running in the sacred home  
That he himself has always defiled,  
As he has never shown any grace;
The swatters hand is His  
Own hand.

I left the house of the tempest brewing,
Spinning like a rod, spun into flame
And came upon the redwood forest,
Eternal, shouting out heavens name.

The sun was indifferent, the creek shuffled
Its lament, the birds fluted their dirge—
I was so small, in the red giants grove,
Yet, felt so beloved, my pain was purged.

And I warmly came to see again—
My eyes, through the needles drove,
What a trifling is ones fleeting mood,
How true, heroic, immortal is my love.

Initially it was… “Oh no! Death!... Why now?”
Then it became… “Death… not you again? Not now.”
And now it’s more like… “Death… dude! It’s me again, take a bow!”
No one takes me seriously anymore
In the era of plagues I would wipe out whole towns and villages, it would make sense now that I should be able to take many more
But sadly this is not the case
Nobody takes the Grim Reaper seriously anymore
I find myself picking up crumbs left for me by doctors and surgeons, if only to save face
This pride that has been taken from me… even a suicide bomber or a mass murderer cannot help replace
I find myself, ironically, in a dark place
And it kills me to admit it
Medical breakthroughs, my biggest hindrance… this technology, I must beat it
These humans are getting cocky… even teasing me, again holding my pride at ransom
Taking unnecessary risks all in the name of thrill seeking, I see you Richard Branson!
I should have taken you while you were still a ******
To take you out would give me such joy… so much joy, a satisfaction level of which you cannot even imagine
But so far… you’re winning
You all seem to be
It’s different now from how it was in the beginning
The simplicity of your ways then made the job a lot simpler for me
Now you play this game, and cheat me at it… constantly
You cocky little *******
I hate you
Look at all of you smirking over there… toasting at me.

Exploding flowers—
Maid earth stemming to the skies,
  .  .  .  Insects' point of view.

I have lost my sun,
Though I still orbit in a strange attraction.

I have lost my music,
Though I know my heart sings sound.

I have lost my vision,
Though I see in dreams an impossible beauty.

I have lost my sense,
Though this world has never tasted as sour.

I have lost my purpose,
Though aimlessly, I write in pale drear of twilight.

I have lost my reason,
Though I chart dangerous courses without a crew.

I am the last falls of the loveliest red proscenium
curtain.

I am over, undone, a foundling, lost,
Without you.

Sometimes the body is contagion
To the soul.  Stars in their mission fall
To seed the fertile flesh, ignite
Blue waters of sulfureous hearts,
And so the flash is set to cancel
In the flood.  

Sometimes the lip of soul onto seal
Will not hold, before he first knocked
And let flesh enter, thorny pegs
Pricked nerve and pierced bone on his climb
To the rose, yea, some stars odd as
Meteors crash.

In the swan-sea, song-sangy-frame of crib,
Rough hewn words bent mold to scrape, like
Blasted coral, stood half-submerged
Amid sea and sky, for between the leaves,
Behind the eye, there are little stars
Shining like existence.

In a circle world he fashioned green
Blazons about the darkling day,
Fostered by celestial navigation,
Wrote a language for music, on a map of love
And charted the force of green in a wind-
Rose of discovery.

Sometimes the soul is not contained, it
Bursts in silent sound like well water
From the source.  And of men in streets
He saw the pennies in their grumble
Eyes, and of love and its course he rubbed,
Tickling dim stars.

It was his thirty ninth year in that fall
To heaven when the steeping cell,
Refused to push in its tide.  Homeless
And free on scaffold of bone the middling
Man retracted from sun to sink
With the moon, turn-tiding-toward sea
Like a changeling.

And as ever, nor often, unwavering eyes
Sprout through shifting grains.  And as he spoke
Quite rimless, Dylan Thomas was petrified
In undying light, and solid set within a rill
Of reef sparkling in concert betwixt gas
And sea, so becoming in purple sleeves,
This constellation of mute singers all,
Dried five-fingered-fish, bright embryos
Returned to the shell, they burn between the leaves,
Beset the grounded skies and show sprite flashes
In the dark where He has left his imprints, burning
Above and plastered below.  The first rock stars!

****** red bleeds best,
Purple Heart for serial killers,
Orwellian nightshade.

1

The chards rising.  Am I the praying bird?
In the gleaming sun my bones are negative,
My flesh a cypher walking through the plains
As ghost I move, my dark lord, above me
Flocks swirl and spike. I stand accused,
Your pointed face divining oblivion,
And no redemption in the rains of my
Cliff walk days.


2

I see my shroud pinning on the wires
His legs are razored forks spinning my
Compass from True North. Your dark brush-
Fire wings, the swept wind, wheels and strings
My fate. Such black rhetoric in a burn,
Your caws, loosed perches, on the stakes, picks
My crowning grave. Black dove, your feathers finger
As they slice.


3

Smoke, the cardinal blood caries my teething
Bone, spades my hand without a flight.
Taut, the pulled noose my hooded one
I see my scarecrow’s reflexion, the scar,
Let blood, the seeded droppings end trailed
To my door. Feathers, ferry to carry on
Dowsing downward, black knight of down, to sticks
On extended wings.

In a grove of seven oaks
From my run-down cottage
I see, the night clouds saunter
And drift and spinning round,
The break-neck moon, beaming
With joyous abandon, the piercing,
Painted white face of a pagan God.