'I love you' means more than itself, it means nothing, and everything. It means that I cannot now live without your voice in my head and my heart, whispered softly in early morning, lucid dreams in which your skin finds mine and we are suffused with warmth and a gentle, deep arousal that is beyond everything; utter rapture.

It means that you have infiltrated desires and abilities that I have always had and never known, and gifted them to me with a deft flourish and a heartstopping smile, halting me in my tracks, making me aware of myself and of you and the myriad possibilities that are all caught up in us.

I tell you in the spaces between these words that you are my dearest friend and only love, that I do not exist in any real way without you; you make me true.

'I love you' cannot mean these things, and yet it means all of them, and everything, and nothing, and when I say it to you I hope that you will hear the catch in my throat as the words fall into your waiting hands, my gift, all and everything I have; now yours.

Lilies in the long grass
wild with tigers, striped orange
under trees, cool canopied
buds of sun blossoming
pretty cats slumber
sleek they dream.

Nights,
twitching whiskery
breathing slow
slinking low
as if to stalk
shock the sallow moon
hunt and growl
purr and prowl
animals whispering
stark the tiger lilies
glistening.

Easter Monday (2015)


The silence
It was the silence
As we entered the gates of hell.
Then…
The bird song,
It was the bird song
That chorused our way
To the well
Of tears at the wall
Of many tongues
That speak to the silence still,
Of the voices that cried
For the people who died
The void only time will fill.

The sun
It was the sun
Shining on the wooden cross.
And…
The sky
It was the sky
So blue, and flecked with the floss
Of clouds so white
So pure in light
That the wall of the well of tears
Transfigured the sin
We heap on Him
Whose loss for many
Is the only way
To feel the void time fills.

The woodpecker drummed a beat
On the trunks
Of the trees so parallel still.
A whisper of wind
That rebounds the sound
Of innumerable roll calls
Of the thousands who now
Lie deep in the cradles of mounds
Stone faced, inscribed Toten
With the number interred within
Verboten… now
But why not then?
In that world of men
And women, when humanity’s meaning
Was turned on end.
And a godless creed
That shadowed the world with grief
Which now for many,
Is beyond belief.

The stillness
It was the stillness
That gave silence the space to breathe,
To remember the times, the godless times
That now are so hard to believe.
But silence and stillness envelope the House
A silent place to be
To hear the past that shows the present
The prayers for a future that sees
What could be,
What can be
But will we
Learn, the history from then to now
To forge that future for future’s sake
And answer the question…
How?

David Applin
… late afternoon and evening of Easter Monday 6th April 2015 following a visit to Bergen-Belsen earlier in the day, completed 7th-9th April.

15th April 2015 … 70 years after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British Army.

David Applin (Copyright 2015)

watched grains dance playfully
affixed to lengthy golden stalks
the wind sways them gracefully
in-between a hidden world unlocks –
pink-footed mice run
well-trodden paths
the warm summer sun
never granting them baths –
shiny black crickets chirp in the night
while grasshoppers eat through the day
an occasional rabbit scurries with fright
and ant colonies seemingly play –
a dust covered floor
‘neath a ceiling of blue
in the middle, a ruffed hawk soars
striking fear in the heart of a shrew –
nobody suspects the vastness of life
when passing by in their car
the joys of birth, hunger and strife
within a wheat field under the stars –

When dark clouds diminished the day
and rain carved moon craters on the river
we were drenched beneath a tree.

Her hand upon mine was more than words could say
but made me once more a hardened believer
in love's miracle of bridging hearts quietly.

I don't need you on my side
I can fight this world alone
take away all of my pride
I will still be flesh and bone

I don't need a loaded gun
I will use the song of birds
I will use rays of the sun
I will use my heartfelt words

I don't need you on my side
I can fight this world alone
when the blood and tears have dried
I will still be flesh and bone

“I have loved you so much that I believe I understand you a little.”
Marcel Proust

we are wearing our glowing skins
full of unwoven whispers
or au contraire
we’ll have worn them
-who knows
in poetry, not in theory,
anything is possible-

one of us could say
“take this animal
out of my eyes, teeth, bones
for wild flowers
to grow in my sockets”
and I’ll say:
“for my eyelids to rest
in the shadow of your breath
and my vertigo, indigo
in the nest of your palm"

-words are just riverbeds-

see you - the sea in me
at the echo point
of blood

I’ll wear rivers
lipstick
bluebirds

in this poem of touching
every cell is spinning
its nucleus of *numinosum
while the day breaks open
into the heart of trees

-words are stones of silence,
unintelligible altars-

I was in love
with a vertigo man
last time I checked

blood has its madness