There were long nettles, sharp thorns, a wasp’s sting;
bruises, cuts, a piece of paper torn, a broken ring;
grey trouser rags and still, pale lips.
We stood quietly. Long mute hours passed.
Someone scattered dark petals from dark, crimson flowers
upon his hair; he being ours.

The drip sunk in his arm
he looks out; sees the bone beneath the nurses’ skin,
loose in their leanings.  

It is over : death
out of his vein, the drip
sunk in,
the drip with its minced ******* of blandishment.

They will save his life,
abort a quintessential,
struggling gentleness, a life he has
placed in her womb,
a tiny pulse too light.

“It is ridiculous,” he murmurs,
as the pretty nurse leans over, tightening the band.
The blood thumps into strained normality,
the overdose has petered out in yellow urination

dripping tears.
A pull, and it is out
in the bucket.

Squashed, he continues,
suicidal, for tumultuous reasons, small abortions, live.

It is a rotten morning. The
core of hazels in the damp wood, wet
and drowned, lose identity and turn to gutless shapes. Cloyed
the muddy clay traps the dampness in its dips
and depressions, clings to the shoes and
slows the pittance of steps towards the caked
tree where the mud mutters below the uneven branch, the
bark is crusted over, and the one bird calls out once
too often, level with the woodman’s pile. Turning
aside the dropped stone splashes in the well and then he follows.

Light thieves transparently
upon these windows now:

Now clouds migrate
and birches bow into the bowing fields of night

where night and dearth conspire
to fulminate this widowhood,

wild as the smouldering eyes
of the angry child, surprised by the fertile god

that taints the shoot
before the seed has travelled from the root.

I don’t mind waiting.

Flowers fade.
The stripped stem lowers,
broken.

It is beauty that I’m after.

Sleepy-eyed, golden-snaked,
you slip away. A fissure furrowed
in the stone is breaking in the heat.

Around you shy clouds wheel
immeasurably distant
but between them cliffs are falling.

Trapped, you hesitate.
A dry blood loosens in your mouth. You know you’re dying
and at last I can’t help waiting.

Who are these loved ones
who cannot begin to mend?

If I could see them,
brilliantly rejected -
like wimping ships
dropped under buccaneering waters,
watch the slow horizons empty -
I might smile.

But if I see
the hawthorn creak with buds
a joy unfolds to tempt me,
withers with a bare simplicity.

The world is narrowed to a single sound:
your crying in an empty room.

This useless suffering
that strains to pull away
and pulls you with it.

Only cards, your card:

Inevitable flowers
near a girl’s lips
pouting slightly
and her nostrils testifying
to a hidden perfume
neither of us knows;

a man whose blurred face
forces me to trace its lines
and lose them under paler shades
indefinitely fading…..

Only words, three fives,
and finally your message:
painted masks
could not destroy it.

I force words, proudly boast
the nothing.

Only you,
your voice, your love in gifts:
expressionless, expressive.

Diamonds crack.

(from "Poems People Liked (2)")