There is nothing to pinpoint of the strange beast.
Only images,

Blurred and refracted,
Fleeing down a hallway of mirrors.

O maestro of conditions,
It is you they are in love with,

A dark sun unaware of its own orbiting planets.
They are the cause of all of it.

Every comet, every lack
Leaves a trail etched across your sky.

And in their eight eyes
Something seemingly whole becomes distorted,

A piece cut out made separate from the rest.
From this gulf appears a war engine,

A bite of venom,
The desire to **** what they can’t.

Darling of judge and jury,
Blame absolves them of all responsibility.

You are the sole carrier of their weakness.
They fill your skin with their nightmares.

Flesh as fruit
Is strictly poisonous,

Bleaching the sheets of the saints.
Now no more –

Vanished,
Like what was found and then lost.

Like what was married and
Soon divorced.

Still, notoriety is a phantom
Floating in cages,

Star player at a masquerade,
Costumed with your own face.

comely, maybe
but not beautiful
my features are as round as vowels
and I carry the moon in my hips
I am an unpolished beauty
smooth pebbles resting at the bottom
of a cold clear stream
with an empty purse
imagination
my only currency

in this world
I am a shrinking violet
occasionally a rose
february-white
caught in your button-loop
long-stemmed red roses
stalk runways
hollywood bombshells
are bubbly as champagne
and full of flesh and light

but *** sans love
is still an empty bathtub
whatever happened to pin-up girls
long cigarette holders
and muted photographs?
I am distorted
in the fish-eye view
of the modern lens

in my fantasies
I am no longer sand and loam
I glow like a tall slim candle
though I am often numb and dumb
and my girls are as absent
as long lost unicorns
I am the bohemian princess

I travel through foreign lands
clothed in exotic costume
a jewelled headdress, and
indian pyjamas coloured sapphire,
turquoise and cayenne-red
my feet are near bare
and my hippie hair
is a mass of blonde curls

I take a sojourn in
southern california
warm desert air
soft against my skin
I surf in the salty sea
held buoyant by the waves
a sunset stains the sky tangerine
the palm trees
black against the orange light
click teasingly in the breeze

Could it have happened any differently?
Perhaps. But which fork in the road was it?
Where does the path start to unravel?
A change in the way things are
Would have changed everything else as well.

For all the mistakes bemoaned, lessons
Learned – unless vanity stands in the way –
Or the same error repeated
With different actors playing the same role –
Hero and villain alike.

And the split between people of insignificance and
The people that matter – faces splashed on
Tabloids and magazine covers –
The invisible reduced to mere shadows
Floating on the fringes of light.

Shadows have a way of defining the light.
People have a way of shaping our lives,
Setting in motion our trajectories,
The way banks and boulders guide water in a river –
The wind, a fallen tree.

No absence made a hole in the day of someone
Who was never there.
What’s out of our control – people,
Sequences of events. What’s inevitable –
How we choose to react.

Stars of tragedy.
Stories of their untimely demise
Told soberly in newsprint.

Stretching from Africa to Mexico,
Victims of natural disasters, crime,
And of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What was here is lost.
What was warm is forever gone.
These envelopes that remain can be stamped with anyone’s address.

In the end, it’s all the same
Dust
That settles in the melting ***:

Empty shells littering beaches,
Dried-out husks,
Vacant houses.

The clocks wind down,
and soon the Earth will spin
tightly again.

How many passes do we need
to take a conscious breath?
How many paths?

The curtain lowers
before the curtain rises again.
I find myself staring at the red velvet,

the in between.

They are the sky.
I am the earth.

They are taxi rides.
I am a river rushing.

They are eyes glued to a screen
when their companions long for real conversations.
I am the wind in silence.

They are ****-coloured beer.
I am black coffee and stout.

They are cell phone towers.
I am the stars.

They are poodles on leashes.
I am the lone wolf.

They are elevator rides.
I am off the beaten path.

They have forgotten their roots.
I am plugging in.

How my disappointments frighten you,
the scalding of hot tea that should be comforting.
Chocolate mint, I’ll tell you this: these are
the virgins I have sacrificed, only to give birth
to two. These are the dreams I have traded
for cold realities. The rain is no longer green
and peaceable. The ocean is a perfect stranger.
Sleep evades me; the pillow is no loving cradle.
I am serenaded nightly by the baby’s wail.
Frozen solid in winter’s cocoon, I long to unfold
my wings. And no matter where I come to stand,
violence permeates every space. There is no escaping
it. It is in the square. It is in the mean people, hard
as glass that does not break, unlike hearts that do.