your indignant snow seemed
so wasteful,
so condemned:
i remembered
your halo calming me as
the stage lights trembled;
i remembered your unabashed
stillness, the defenceless apathy of
corpses—

you lay wan,
abject, an object of
blank disposability,
howling in the roundness
of dust.

graves are silent in passing;
stone withers like snow
cracked and weathered: the horizon
pales in shades of blue.

i don’t know why
her eyes
why she soars over plains
and mountainsides

almost
to hold me, almost to say
goodbye.

i don’t know why
her eyes
drown in moons,
puddle in the rain;

in my heart so tirelessly
reside.

Electric lights don't waver
Across your strings.
As if I played only to savour
your darker glances—my wings.

if i closed
you—

if the air fell
backwards, darkly—

if yours
brooked with golden
sunrise

softened (i love

when you
    dance.

I abscond from
the phone calls where her
voice reminds me of her.
She's mumbling of the brittleness
of the east Cascades;
memory can't but etch, line to line,
some sore straightliner, wheeled.

I'll still playback what you leave me,
and harbor beneath the arches of ourselves.
Penny for the poor: I never promised to pay
this sum.

Evokes tension. Before
the full-stop. Before the cadence.
You and blood: red, oppressive blood.
Chiasmus cannot contain this
flood:

this drowning.

Conflict
in the eaves. Between
sorrow and sorrow-shadow.
Limb to limb;
Between the eyes of the godless.

Conflict as soft friction:
despondent, prodded, yielding.

A tumbling through the boughs—
Sandbag on the low-hanging sun.

i saw your note: “the
summation of your tears
infinitely converges”—
then breathlessness as you
paused

—and upon
the water, a heron stirred,
pensive;
the reeds bowed to the northern sky—

“converging, converging”: the mad,
scrawled words, the scribbled midnight
lament; you hid your heart in a pocketbook, pages
folded and layered.

did you feel the reeds yield to
that northern horizon? did you feel that pensive,
infinite heron? she stirred, scattering your
words in the early summer breeze.

the rains
gather in lines across
your skin.

they wave
like faraway leaves;

they flutter and circle
me; they float out of
reach;

they
brown
in the sodden soil.

the metal is poised:
upright, red, defiant.

the glow is muted,
inhuman    /.
       the garden
is tired; it asks for
forgiveness.

the metal is poised:
the leaves disperse—
frightened./
       the valleys crawl into the sky.

the metal is poised:
you’re/     like a dusty,
aeroplane
window: i see home falling
away
       away
              away)

bluejays scream: "the

world rounds about
your faces"

your lips—a flightless
moon.

pulses
on the stained desk
wall

jilted in absence
blurred by a haziness of your time

i'll spare
    the kick-drum
your overturned ashes,

      your northern         spaces:


these

   clouds will
      congregate—

these

     chemicals will
        whirl round and round.

Etched
feather on water's shoulder

her eyes beneath something
cloudy.

On roll these
temperate symbols of
a dreamy landscape.

she wanders
the flats, looking
for mirrors and windows

around her face—reflections
of the open sand.

auks felt like brushes
of yellow as midnight
traversed the sky; clouds
rolled as light
reflections of wisdom and i smelled
their smooth, ebbing trails of
quiet passing.

sail the fields

like her silhouette would
whisper: “someday

the bluebells will
crush beneath your
fingers”

like her sunlight would
wander: someday

the soil
will cover her

footsteps.

we're in your car and it
smells warm, solid.

you envelop me,
your eyes are pools of nightfall:
we're brushing shoulders—

time didn't stand still
even though i wanted it to.

two centres of
you:

they pulled me like
cats. they pulled me like
carriages.

the roads were
muddy: worn and
muddy.

the sky was grey;
the world was ready to
rain.

headway upon
the waters—scratching
like mice, their ears, furred
and wrapped into the overcoat

they dropped: your river was like a
cage.

The name of our love
is Untitled. She is young,

still, and dances. She wants
to be more, wants to

Project

but her tides are always
out tides. She is

the only moon
shut-in, boxed-up, hemmed;

her light-shadow kisses
against your midnight door.

cold and moons, eclipsed by the
shadow of that quickening starlight,
of the encroach, silently, of winter
misgivings, and missings;
lost and fallen in heaps and piles of
plated-snow: narrowing and narrowing.

you dare to reminisce at the dimming of the
night; waiting for the silent ceasing of that electric
light; smiling, for the warm fireside shingles and stones of such
delight; rising, persistent, reaching out to set the hilltops crimson and
alight.

Orchard hedge, overrun and hazy.

Murmur—
as flowers in your arms decay.

Long to sleep softer.
Long to sleep softer, thereafter.

Shattered by foggy peaks.

coalescing into the night time,
prancing about the dream time,
smiling through another time,
you love for a fleeting time.

you carried
space and time
in little dots,
like jackals, you thought,
like autumn starlight,
dotting the sky with their
cold, curdled howls.

not feeling the gravity
around your darkness,
not seeing the depth and shape
—stretched, elongated—
the asymmetry

of axes, maligned, blue on
red: blood on metal,
tooth by tooth:

we don't fly anymore
on these pale, manila wings.

unnoticed,
a silvery sliver,
you fade into our shadows,
and descend into our tears.

everything closes when the sun
goes down, i think.
i remembered you in fuzzy undertones:
the rays always seemed
to languish on your body/
the air always seemed to
sound so sweetly.

i felt the stirrings of  
spring, pressing close, withering
slowly.

green knotgrass (rising
like a

moon of you)

reflects the ebony
shades of

tranquillity

and the sky dropped in pellets of
sea.

found her but couldn't hold
what wanted you to find, to love
what you are
i felt you when you were closing

when you were closer

“an embodiment of the oneness of life”, you supposed,
but the moon was cold and the sun had lost itself below
the horizon

“the oneness of life”, you whispered,
melting into the calm.

She'd murmur "oh" to know
I'm dialing in the rain.

Muffled receiver to project an
Opus wholly mine. Picture
the murmur, shouldered.
Picture this chord, roaring in yellow tungsten,
Littered to the formless.

and the fog remains best understood unspoken;
concealed and silently together, we stare and
silence—only the quiet of your eyes mirrors the
peace of the morning, the greens of the unmeasured,
the dark intimations of understanding.

i think sounds echo
off your lips in the dark;
they drop like needles off
my back.

you fold
blankets into ribbons of
light

(she folds
stars like spiderwebs

     —
to catch you.

shaking through the warm underground,
rising to the impassive dusk:
i pointed out the stars but
we were blinded by the light—

you still stared.

paper airplanes
folded into
shimmering glances of
you, your eyes buoyant,
rusty with the dust.
you, your eyes fireflies
—looming, granite fireflies—
folded into
floodlights

glaring, blinding,
blue.

what spaces do
you leave between the
lines? what places do
you hide, beside mine?

ivory lines lead parallel
from dawn to dawn: from
pictures of you that adorn
agelessness.

prayers to gold-
tipped sunsets won't
bring that dawn
again.

A dozen hooded faces:
red.

Plain-blooded assertion:
"I am only self-assured for
checkout".

Chorus

or Operator:
neither under registry.

—dreamed and
still (it leavened and dimmed, to sea:
anymore?  —

—wrapped and
lamenting (it folded and hushed, to be:
evermore? —

—warmed and
quailing (it reddened and shallowed, and she:
nevermore? —

falling and constant,
one window purple with feeling,
the other dark and lifeless;
do your branches creak in the same wind?
will the feathers and flowers that you blew into the morning
ever find a home?

you were hovering
—a blackening shadow—
above me

i glimpsed your aura
—hollow, blurred, bruised—
but didn't laugh at your antics,
didn't reflect on your anecdotes:

just turned away,
just pretended to forget how to feel.

and sometimes, you
are like starlight, for you fade
with the colours of the dawn,
and only when quiet reigns—when
shadow overtakes shadow, when
adoration slumbers in golden, curled chambers—
do you arise; spinning, and just discernible,
you reflect on charred and distorted surfaces,
sometimes curving, sometimes eclipsed and
forgotten.

to be unmade, to arise from the
planar and float in myriads indescribable:
the object of your temperate love.

and the highest of tides
crest and balance along your side,
and render these ships asunder
under the dark and pressing thunder.

for i see the warmth in the light of that drowning,
that sparkling thunder abounding,
of rains and passing clouds, only a heart-shaped breach
holds the ethos of your sorrow, always shifting,
ever out of reach.

and we see it all, as the waves of futures hazily and uncertainty fly over and above me. we look up to the scores of crying stars, lowering...inexorable rotations, over and beyond, permutations through these emotive colours of the dark: of skepticism? of timelessness? winding slowly, downwards, there's no wild here anymore; do you still hear the lark sing?

in the

middle (our
love

sails)

of the night.

and seeing your
eyes, slowly
hold onto your nights—
the wind's rustling.

sentinel, pines
and pain winding in the dark
i cuddle with the emptiness
and fold with oblivion—
and knowing:
if you had to fade,
the nighttime remains
and knowing:
you were just a relegation of
loveless noise.

pointedly blurring in colours
and tones, you captured your
strokes in brittle clay fragments

we were consanguineal—
we were blood and oil—the

whirl of
your canvas sounded like a thousand
raindrops.