**** frost's barbwire grip on branches
glitters in the scathing glare,
I wondered how I could see you through the blue sky,
but there you are
breathing like a dragon,
heaving heat into my heart
from the centre of your lucent sun;
We, close enough to burn (again).

I lean to kiss your pulsing lip.
Only, you turn away... cold,
indifferent.
Hard to tell
in negative degrees
why you came here with me.

And as snow begins to fall (again),
dusting hair
caught as flecks on eyelashes,
eyes specks of blue, sparking
wild... fiery,
You disappear in white:

                   Always easy to deny
                   the season's change
                   when you linger in a past.

Come summer,
I still remember the taste
of your sweat upon skin,
your scent sensually
fast in clefts of flesh,
or hung in hair...
Remembered that taste on lips;
There, I alone once permitted to kiss.


__________________­____________________



­By Data © Sept. 2024

The sea speaks of longing
Songs from lost navigators
Echo in the cadence of dreams
Stowed half-known within.

Perhaps the rain has made it so;
Slanting across vague light
Recalling a memory of itself
Having fallen there before.

Desire is that wind somewhere
Blowing the hair from your eyes
Agitating damp leaves away
From a child's tree-house.

Only the dreamless forgo
The pain of things that will never be
As stars give out their grave glitter
In otherwise boundless dark.

Hunters from the dark
dancers in tight bunches
consolidate together as shadow.
Waiting for first light, they wait
to see what becomes.
Hands work down
broad cavalcades of ochre;
flames glint over vigorous tools.
Maneuvering across, they move
with bright reverence
and their own deep purpose.
On the wide grassland
each thing gestures its appetite,
and its consequence.

Sleep then, sleep among the stars
Dream of those days when your words replaced myth
Where all that you breathed, became the just so.

You created the coiled mornings,
And infused dust-filled days, that led
To evenings replete with quiet contentment.

What now is the purpose of a life without beauty?
What now is the purpose of a life without duty?
What now is the purpose of oblivion?

If you understand it, it’s not 'it' you have understood
The gap between melody and each second tone -
Resides in an absence beyond language.

We know this place through faded recreations of creation
The tides wash away faces drawn in sand
Only light need not hold any understanding, of time.

I meet ghosts who do not know they’re dead,
Who recite the poetry from the shade on the dial,
And know not from where, of a yet to come...

Of a wind that will blow dust from your throne,
And allow that cold magisterial, emptiness
To be filled again by your sublime sense of things.

the light at noon
spread over green:
fields of tender green
before the harvest
before time knew all
but our names.

the seasons reinstate
grass broken beneath
treads of the innocent
who tried remaking the world.

memorials of thorn
uproot in a moment
and who are we to disturb
what remains underneath.

how many lovers since
haunted by sacrifice
lay nameless across
England's pungent greens.

and with their kiss we scatter
between the gaps
in this thriving
meadow soil.

as birds above, explode
from the time-worn trees,
and wheel dreamlike, toward sun.

“Why seek the Living One among the dead?“
asked angels to a few who‘d watched the Lord
be crucified—His blood and life outpoured,
“He is not here! He‘s risen as He said!“
In days before these women wept in grief
as Jesus‘ lifeless body, wrapped in shroud,
lay buried, guarded, sealed from Paschal crowd,
but by God‘s plan entombment would be brief!
His slaying served full payment for the debt
incurred against Himself by mankind‘s sin.
His raising proved His sacrifice the win
to satisfy God‘s wrath, my debts forget!
Because Christ Jesus died but ever lives,
the sin of all who trust Him God forgives!