i’ve always thought the
sun was cold;
i put on my
jacket and longed for rain.

the mud stained my shoes,
trailing on the carpet; i fell into
the soil.

frightened, like colder
clouding sunlight,

like windows
of shadow and blue,

colder
shadowing sunlight,

like widows
of frightened blue

i pasted your love to the window:

blue, clouding sunlight.

seeds) buried
in the mordant sunshine;
they) told you the sun
would hold you—setting the
soil and the moon.
they) told you the sun
would bury you—cutting the
glassy afternoon.

the morning was threadbare,
loosed on a string.

we watched
the rising sinew; watched
the morning as it knotted and
coiled. the forest
trembled slightly.

three years and the wild severed
her heart from mine—

and she told me that “the air
had the brittle scent of October”

dreams parallel dreams in the shortest of hours;
we listened together for the advent of rain,
for the unfurling of flowers.

time and time lost held the fragility of her eyes;
now woven, now frayed, her caress
wondered of the fabric that holds the current
of the world…of the crisp delicacy of
tomorrow.

“love is held only by the greyest of skies” softly i replied,
for i knew
that three years and the wild had enjoined
her heart to mine.

Expressions lax at the crossroads.

Their worn tracks are like
little smiles (stained, muddied,
darkened) on evening's
soft purchase.

— I'm clutching dry lips
on these bleeding
little mouths.

— I'm remembering
to be as stars:

so closely far away from you.

she was temporal;
she poured like a loon and
splashed on
warmer and blanketed white;

the folds crackled;
she disaffected—

that colour,
acquitted in your
smile,

that time,
quieted in your
softness,

that coldness, tacit
in your
hands).

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.

you have taken
me to these sunken hills
to stare at the cold
stone bunker
leaning against the dawn.

you have bruised me
in faraway places: my peripheral
vision was never
as finely attuned.

askew with your thoughts—
leaning against my shoulder,
leaning against the dawn.

the sky was lilac and
blurred with the
pale obfuscations of
clouds;

opaque and formless, you sharpened
the horizon
and i thought of remembering.

Blue amorphous tones
waxing darkly.
Her lunge, a vaporous sigh.

And down poured the Pacific:
   callous, immutable, wild.

i’ve been trying to
hold the wind; it rushes
past in dying gallops and inhalations
pulling the reigns on my mind up
and over—
rushing in the windows, rustling through
the cricket-fields, towing the clouds
like you
do.

They are strings of letters unset
from their horizons.
Swollen ink smearing
in air;
their little stalks, serene, suffocated,
like pockets of dust, attended
but in passing. Pieces
of you—agile, remiss—
spark notes in shattered
melody. The dying refrain
flutters;
only the echoes are staining. She
is like a tumbling highway,
still tumbling through full-stop.

your white dress
trailed along the high highway
brushing leather and sage

i knew why you were driving
away:

the consecrated hordes and
suitcases in your closet closed
on their broken hinges:

i never felt so askew,
such a part of you.

sweetly swimming
in the colder tides of
emptiness—
tidier than the backseat and
your umbrellas; tidier
than the rolling crests of
suburbia;
tidied by the frayed smoothness
of sea.

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.

A dozen hooded faces:
red.

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

Chorus

or Operator:
neither under registry.

silken
your touch

she moved closer
to the fireside
    to feel
(here i

i think trains roll
like tires, at night.

their rubber arms can
hold—

can let go.

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.

she was a heron,flying
under pale,
)
blackened fields of reeds

she was a mallard,floating
under pale,
)
overcast fields of green.

“sway, sunlight,”she pined,
“stay”.

twisted graves rise,
dissonant—

not quite dark
     
     yet.

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.

interred into islands
i ached for your
icicles

and rained.

i love
your morning gaze,

like silk
—torn, ethereal:

the world
disappears when

you touch me.

i scattered flowers
in her

hair (they

always
seemed to wane
with the moon

It’s old and weathered,
the texture, she said.

You’ll find yourself, she said;
I see the wooden beams hanging low:
the outline of a doorway, shutting
out the closeness of night.

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.

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?

and it's a cold evening,
the writings swirling on the wandering pavement—
your silhouette hangs on the tail of the lowering sun,
and gleams, a pale reflection, in the water below;
and crescendos of the waxing moonlight seem more like the
hushed whispers of starlight, like the
hushed silence of forest's night, like the
hushed breathing of your heart's bright, like the
hushed rolling and descent of all that might,
of all that stirs the spirit, and all that bespeaks the pensive, slumbering
winter infinite.

we'll feel-
as collegiate corners
are filling the pages of
our tragedies.

i attempt to seek
next century's repose:
the motion of a thousand
spinning conjectures.

your restlessness holds
junction and duration,
consciously screaming of our
former years.

i'll seek-
you in oscillations
and what little you
left of memory.

from behind the
rising lights, your hands
dancing like little wind.

i couldn't look away
as you sang
and they sang

i knew what was most beautiful

—the lights passed in
a moment of you.

when the wind hits in
gusts, it bleeds through my
jacket. we splatter to the soil,
churning towards an
unforgiving
sea.

where
love sleeps on goosefeathers and moonlight moors,
withering on the solemn slopes of moss and

heather where
hummingbirds climb on raindrops,
sailing on the pattering and

puddling where
fog layers on hillsides, augmenting
the shades of evergreen, folded and

ambient where
light shines through panelled oak and
purrs with the howl of the lonely sun, speckled and

blurred where
you sigh, narrowly, and long for the tides
beyond forty-five degrees (where it's

cold, i think) where
lorries stop to breathe and you
step, i think, to be closer to magic
and further from me.

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?

who broke the moon? its
slivers shatter on tile and you
emptied them in our flowerbeds,
waiting, i think, for the rain.

lark, perched and persistent,
upon that willow,
and billowing, that screeching wind around you;
and willowing, those branches stretched out to guide you;
and singing, that song reaching out to hold you;
and ages dying, fading away beneath those yellowed branches—
now you wait for the advent of spring, an eternal lament
of slowed, persistent flowing, of pointed, ageless growing—
of wallowing in the hollows
and promising in the branches,
and leaving in the sunset,
and learning in the shade:
she flew away, I think, to the edges of the sea.

curl, wind:
or wind over me—
but closing and hinging
on this bluer softness,
over the wending,
wooden handles:
curl, wind.

carrying the white-flecked wisps
of you hurt like tomorrow. sometimes they
whispered, when the sun quieted:
“you’re like frost—
you melt into the dark”.

i am everything you need:

anchored,
linear along this dais—

red, dying.

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.

worn wooden beam

flaking paint in places where
you held me.

hollow in its solidity,

wearied by your caress.

every time you
come around i think
the sun rises just a little

as if to see a little further over
the low-hanging horizon

as if to cast another green over
our shoulders, draping us in
timelessness

then hesitates—
then falls to the depth
of earth:

and you're leaving.

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.

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.

i don’t know why you
told me not to die;when the
quiet settled, i thought i heard
your agony. i asked the
(moon to
hold you/instead of rising
like you do. instead of dying
like you do.

i shattered;
docile, sweeping, the sun rose
in misty greys, greens, and you
looked like unravelled yarn/ i want
to wrap you together, press you close,
knit your branches in the cold.