I. missing poster, Kensington High Street

at what point did i vanish?
i did not evaporate.
i am still a collection of matter.
of energy, essence and intangible spirit.

it is from others, i have vanished.
it is to them i am lost, intangible,
the off-screen character,
the plot point in many a story too unremarkable to be seen.

my face lies plastered across walls in the borough
in various states of life.

but i am not here,
i do not stare state portrait shallow into you,
for i do not know you.

don’t think it couldn’t be you,
or do,
and prepare to exist,
sans living.

but you may ask “where?”

“where” may not exist.
it has no post code, no roman underlayer of brick.
no parisian layer of skull,
that is not where i lay.
if i lay.

“where” may not allow me my harsh whispers,
my last finger upon the cliff

“where” may call to me
from its halcyon planes.

come home.



II. The Dell, Kensington Gardens

what better a place to vanish from,
to trace my path from,
or what it will allow.

let my scent linger?
god may allow it.
i’m told the gardens’ gates are closed
promptly at dusk each day.

there are no street lamps here.
to be locked in after sunset is something other.
something indigo and sublime,

too early in the year yet for crickets.
it was this blanket i knew last before departure.

and yet even during the day, The Dell is sealed off from the public, like vast wings of a stately home.

it is pristine, this vanishing point.
seemingly untouched by the sickness of our humanity.

its miniature waterfall bisecting the scape
like the crack in our god’s head that birthed athena.

i don’t think it will ever be revealed to me,
my loved ones or god himself if i have chosen this place
or if it chose me.




III. The Dell, continued.**

the gardens that day were trapped in the faintest, yet most distinct bubble of brisk english detachment.

i walked, hand in pocket through its paths,
admiring Victoria’s memorial to her beloved,
thinking how we always view her as this austere widow.

but we forget that she too, once loved and loved so deeply.
that it so moved her, and changed her.

we forget that the divine can also be wounded, albeit not lethally, but with subtle, lingering pangs.

it was this thought that fueled my feet towards the Dell,

with its rolling, sample-sized hill,
its ageless trees with their hooked branches
in various un-regal poses.

i must have stood in admiration for five, twelve minutes before it dawned on me with the most pristine clarity:

i need to be a part of this place,
forever bound to it.
a statue in its gallery.  

this is where the trees have come from.
they are the shells of former lovers,
rooted in the deep, richness of the Dell’s soil.

we bend and undulate through centuries,
we are the dancers forever spinning,
never to rest,
for whom would want to?

Who will sail down
these laugh line Ganges rivers?
you should hope someone will.

turn to me and whisper,
declare, utter
that in the sinosphere,
they hire crying women

lest we pass, sail, transcend
within the silence we were
ushered onto this plateau with.

lest our Deity mistake the two.

scratch. stratch scratch scratch
on the back of your throat.

Two Hundred and Two Days ago
this would have been
your Angela’s Ashes spiral
into veiled, Catholic interment.

but you’re a heathen
and no criers will have been hired
no doters at your stone
come Dias de Los Muertos
as mother to grandmother,
as peasant to ****** Spanish friar.

but you have a plan.
you,
will be ground into a fine dust
and pressed into a record.

eight minutes on both sides

be not afraid,
be not a swan song.

I’ve taken a lover
and awoke 300 years
in the inner chamber,
some thirteen stories
above grinding asphalt.

in that inner chamber,
echoed a pan flute
as i walked home.
and glided
out of the tunnel once more
those seventeen or so notes,
a mystery to me
or at least the “me”
that awoke as something new.

I slept sgain.
to wake again in this land,
mirror to my native one,
in some strange reversal of migration,
somehow new to old,

and in this daylight hour i woke again,
in a bed not his, nor mine.
and now I know those seventeen notes,
their mystery now gone,

scribbled on a note and sent to him,
transatlantic,
enveloped,
enveloping,
maybe not all-encompassing,

this journey will have been merely a crutch,
a movement, or gesture,
as natural as a waving hand from a train car.
this place shall be an effigy,
a substitution.

parts of you truly believe  
that your frail structure possesses the gift of flight.

and for the rest of your days,
you will doubt what your eyes see,

every so often believing that you indeed
tried to fly out the 4th story window
and failed.

and everything subsequent is a mere, sublime transfer of energy,
consciousness and je ne sais quoi
into two disembodied hemispheres in a vat.

your earth-eyes, desired,
ground into meal.
spilt, with some smeared upon lover’s forehead,
ash wednesday, thursday, friday i’m in love.

as the Redon painting that left you shivering,
silent and naked once more as in birth.
yeux fermes,
eyes closed
yet they will stare into yours eternally.*

when you were young,
you wanted to be a cartographer
because nothing unto you had been discovered,
and you knew no wrong.

and you were as you are now,
without inhibition,
without the slightest regard for morality,
decolletage or social construct.

this was when you were a native,
without years,
without knowledge
but endowed with divinity’s
slightest, piercing eye.

the doubting,
strangely enough won't **** you.
but what will,
and very could, is nameless.

or, it does have a name.
sometimes we simply deny it,

quietly arranging our lives around it,
while it dwells
deep, beneath, dormant,

yet somehow still over our own heads,
cloud-like, but heavier still.

where is this place?
inside of the earth,
inside of me.
my security, that is
supposed to be a cognoscente

well versed on intruders,
or even worse,
those who wish
to see nothing there at all before their eyes.

My jetlag had finally bid adieu in a land,
republic and former colony the size of my thumb,
but with the strength of bulls on steroids
running through
a field of democratic china shops.

and your money's no good here.
your name,
that silly outfit from little oz.

I have no pictures of myself here.
only a porcelain-plated version in orchid hues,
dwarfed by my favorite ivory window.

from which the fall would most certainly be glorious for
5
4
3
2
seconds.

In another life,
I built several great palaces
by two hands,
brick unto brick,
until they sat
pristine and shining,
in their halcyon
newly millenial bliss

until the caretaker took ill,
and vanished.

so my great palaces stand, still
though in disrepair,
the whitest of elephants this side of le petit trianon.

their windows adorned with spider-leg-cracks,
vines twisting and caressing the parquet in replica Halls of Mirrors.
the royal apartments long ago looted,

pipes burst,
and a river flows into a third story drawing room.