I wouldn't call them scars. Our bodies are ancient calendars marked with times and places. Tonight, you are not real. You are the desperate ocean lapping at the shoreline trying to take back the secrets in the bottles cast off by lovers, and children, letters to the dead sometimes. They are not your secrets, but they came to you first. They are full of feelings you have once felt or will feel. The bottles glisten in the sand mockingly, beautifully, painfully, like window shopping for jewelry you'll never be able to afford. You never expect to want the glass back after it has been pulled out of you. But the stories inside are your stories now too. You cast them off in the same manner hoping somone better than the sea will find them. The story about your cancer, your mother, the love you feel right now, the love returned, the time you thought of the beauty of a flower, the flower you killed to show someone how beautiful it was, the realization of the importance of stillness. All those stories like broken bottles in your skin. Like jewels encrusted on a big brass door leading to a room you live in. But tonight, you are the ocean at high tide, finally getting your bottles back.

seen from overhead
tributaries intertwine
seeping through the dust

tangerine rivers
honeyed, milky, candy bright
ooze abundantly

warmly encroaching
burdening the soil with their
sugary varnish

I have been singing for forgotten things,
beer bottles hidden in the hedgerows.
The opera singer, the strangled vibrato,
ash-filled cokes cans; the afterparty sunrise.

This recovery has been long, fickle.
Reckless optimism and the science of failure
collide into the colour
of a Daniel Johnston cartoon,
or a songwriter's sense of humour.

Disused pencils stand as monuments
to old dreams of grass-roots art,
the fragility of neurotic *******
drawn with innumerable straight lines
that composite a woman's naked body.

I have been drawing on memories
and hoping for a brand-new image;
dissolution of old borders - a strangled voice
in a room full of opened tongues.

The Hawaiian shirt made light of depression
in darkened hours and wax smiles.
Plastic cocktails, the pending brides;
desperate men - the post-work demise.
I have learned a lie ever since.

This recovery has been imperfect, a fraud.
Swollen truths to satisfy the concerned,
only myself left to fool.
I have found the early morning
but cannot reach a sober conclusion.

Redundant habits mildew my mind
with the backwater of yesterday,
familiar street names to mourn
those who became strangers,
the negative bias of my mind's eye.

I have been writing words of action
from the safety of my desk;
all that the desk-lamp can illuminate,
all of which words can make sense.

This half-lived recovery is bunk, irretrievable.
Working poverty and untied knots
are co-morbid in meaninglessness;
chains to hold me in Plato's Cave
whilst her skin freckles in the sun.

Disused and living outside of love,
morning curtains open to a sheet of light
that obliterates loneliness
in the presence of shared heat,
only for it to return again, come night.

Thinking is an
overused
abused
undermined
misunderstood
under-understood
gene­ralised
washed-out
Concept.

Language has killed it,
or rather people have.
The world now goes -
"Thinking is such a waste of time"

I am now thinking
how they got there
Without wasting their time.

What a waste of time!

I'm getting along
without you verywell yes
I am except when

I moved,       and I found,
a dusty tennis ball of
the dogs under the

couch       that he forgot
accidentally. His dumb snout
is what I do miss,

it's not you, though I
could use a hand lifting the
old blue couch, true,

but other than that
I'm getting along without you
very well as I

catch in a damp rag
flakes of tawny onion husk.
     Fridge drawer corners

     full of our old crumbs.
I'll clear that skin away,
and just kid the moon.

We are essentially unknowable, she says
and laughs.
I’ve lived with the same man
for thirtyoddyears
and he’s basically a stranger.

A stranger that occupies
her bed,
her body
her kitchen table.
They eat oatmeal out of stoneware bowls
washing them over and over
traces of their spit
mixing together
in the lukewarm dish water.

He clears the sink
of the bloated grey solids
that remain there once the water has drained.
They are so similar
two magnets aligned  
as they’ve drawn closer
the space left between
grown smaller but harder.

A question rings red as a tuning fork struck.
The spreading halo glows it's ache
through the tunnels of the head
hammer, mallet, and shell
all shimmer in concert
I am awash in it's ripples
and my mouth fills
with the iron taste of rust.
There is metal in it all
in blood and in dirt
and there in the tone
as my own blood aligns redly
along it’s sharp edge
traces embedded
in the weather and in my veins
charged, polar, always pushing
at the the insulation
the condensing division
the gulf

Six:

standing for prayer
the corner of the school desk
thrice daily finds me

flatness and hardness,
and the fluorescent lighting
heavenly verses

it’s tuesday morning
forgive us our trespasses
and I’m told to chant

Nine:

horseback riding is
a wonderful thing for girls
it builds self-esteem

trail rides through the scrub
learning skills in the outdoors
Palomino flanks,

hard leather saddle
rolling, dazed, back and forth and
sweating in the heat

Twelve*:

vaseline vignettes
of slick and dewy couples
raw, tanned romance, all

in rapid Spanish
the love in *Latin Lover
is jacuzzi steam

all we can do is
laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh
and laugh, and watch them