Though held beneath a tyrants yoke
Loves bulging eyes are still free to choose
And as even in that grip they choke
The gift of sight they do not lose.
They can never stop the word or kiss
Love and language tell us this.
Neither can they own nor control
The dreams we have that breed the mind
And as those now gone still we miss
Our love and language will tell of this.

I can hear myself think!
Why this morning
As clear as the cold I heard it
As the almost music of a sigh
Convulsed me in its clasp.

I was dreaming of a city
An immaculate city
Passed before my eyes.
Antioch, or were you Ephesus?
A procession of torches
Barely lit you. Immovable sands;
An almighty blank page
Spoke of an absence of belief
And were you not better for it?
O Edith do always look back.

Awake!
We belong to grime
The cities we dream are too clean
Other dreams, of other times.
They were just as ******.
For we are ******
Our hearts gasping through pavements,
Tongues tasting each other in the air.


But I dreamt of pewter skies
Of grounded clouds
And woke up choking
On a liniment of dust.

The Seven, they breeze through fast,
A sand storm of death, the timeless breath

The assassin’s red rose trickle,
Sliding down a silver blue shaft

Aren’t we bored yet?
Or just blinded by a flash of steel
And the overkill, that won’t forget,
How to please. The pleasurable squeeze,
Of someone's death.

Behind the masks,
Avian eyes glisten like steel,
And I stiffen, but it’s not me they’ll ****.

How old those eyes?
Where the fascination lies.

But it's not with them,
It’s us? Well me.

I can’t help but look,
I can’t help but see.

I watch, rapt through a hand,
A sword glint in moonlight,
And swoop clean through the land.

A head rolls, a feast for gulls,
The maggots and worms waiting their turns.

And all the time I watch and excite in the thrill,
That tonight, it's not me they’ll ****.

stirring in the trash
the cars go racing by,
wheels hissing through
the puddles in his mind

he's stopped remembering himself,
now cleaved forever from cocktails at the club
how proudly he bears his scar

From my window, only darkness falls in the room:
and in that darkness is only darkness
The sooted moon and ashen stars lie cooling in the fire
Only darkness is in this hour.

A scene heavy and distilled with fear
Oak leaves falling from the tree; a weightless mass
silently sliding into the void, that is all that is out there.

In this hour, the hour of the unborn,
no ghoul or monster stalks. Nothing else is left out there.
Only the thick deep terror that remains unanswered.

A roaring swell of uncapped vigour
Is turning in turns around me.
A human crest of but one figure
Filled with the potential of energy.
Here I’m but one, but one of any
Turning in turns; an end unfinished.
And in the loss of a self to the many,
I’m climbing now undiminished.

Wind chimes of white bone
Play gently on the porch
An empty chair rocks beside them
As a breeze lifts through an abandoned home.
And did I not rise from your touch
A warm sun on a forgotten stem,
Awakened a breath within
The tip of a finger; the memory from our skin.