Cloud of gold and night
And hurt, swarming around an
Oily dumpster filled with sacks
Of torn receipts
And polystyrene fish-stink boxes;
Yellowing bags bloodied from
The butcher's counter.
Plastic sacks the gulls have sliced
Open with grease beaks and lard white skulls
(The optimal greed of bird)

But it is the wasp's tornado of
Stingers
And beautifully armoured torsos,
The heat of them and the buzz wing
Drone below the clang
Of the scrap yard next door;
The hum of something you could call anger
In a woman or a man,

But which is nothing more than wing
Against heat, it is that which strikes me,
That meaningless will to go on.

To all the skies beyond the feeling "what became of me, of us?"
To all the heartbreak syrup of the glory, begotten in the days
gone by in empires and sand, in all the hearts and minds of hurt.
To all the starts again and white wings beyond and above the water.
To all the heavens, we have mislaid, and to love that has knelt down by the black water
of the world and cannot stand again.
To paying for what we have done in the golden, broken, oil-slick air.
To all we never forget, mister, in the mystery of the burning up sky breaking into stars
like
falling dreams, like the children we never see, like all we said we would be
and the things we would not do, and the yelling "What went wrong?"
To all the dead coming back like Lazarus blue-tongued in back rooms of the soul,
rolling rocks from the grey sun-lost tombs of the Fathers.
To all those coming back from nowhere.
To all those who promise to ring and never do,
and all that time spent staring at useless cell phones
as the days pass on
and as the hours mark into nights, plain nights, like palettes that hold no paint.
To everything you ever said.
To the fact that you were the one - and all that matters nothing now, and the world
this beaten feeling, this snapped drum skin, has nothing now to offer one returning,
walking out through doors of the mind,
imagining stars and lives where none is to be found.
To everything.
To all the stupid things remembered,
this is a hymn, to the night we watched a thunderstorm in ochre clouds
above the distant lands;
to the silence of that first night in the country, which was so terrifying
like the greater silence you spend life against.

To navy eyes, I never see now as clean,
I cannot picture,
I am losing, as all things are taken from us.
This is a hymn to the one thing I cannot forget:
we were for each other,
but that is no solace in the red display of death-lights over smoking moors
and I wish you knew me again, as we were together once,
a gambler lost in whisky stains and new names lost hard against the sea
and frozen strengths,
lost in dreams and highways ahead, leading on, winding on
into the end of stories.