I am huddled in the coroner,
a little beast within a man,
And when at night he studies bodies,
I come out,
now and again.

Remember black winds of November nights,
rattle your bones, chill your marrow,
quiver time's arrow and rip the world's white
veil from a skeletal face. Throw
it. Watch it fold, caught on the cathedral,
high church of the ossified faithful,
whose whispered prayers will calcify us all.
Unveiled, the world is bones without a soul,
rattling as it grinds, creaking as it turns.
A flag flies / Calcium collects in urns.

dont move, she said. he—
felt the cold loaded gun. they
d been betrayed:
cops.

imagination cannot be contained
with your fingertip
trace the border of the trees against the sky
now see the clouds behind
and make them mountains in your mind

blood slithers snakelike
from cold neck to grated hole
a serpent in hell

the dog wakes
snapping
at the flying red dragon
fly
as the dream fades

follow her follow
her doubled in greenlit
rooms,   golden bridges
possess her    /    she is possessed
of death: falling—.  in love again.

We came but our children have barely time
for us for they are leading busy lives.
When we were younger we had barely time
for us for we were leading busy lives.
How it passes: like the train that brought us,
winding but with purposeful direction.
How it passes: like steam above tea cups,
a gently rising evaporation.
We had tea with the widow of our son.
Our train returns home early. Life goes on.

the best has come and
gone—burned, never to return:
ashes in an urn.

Give a man a book,
He'll burn it for a day.
Give a man a typewriter:
His mind will burn forever.

black lives matter so
black lies matter so
dive in deep waters to
die in deep waters to
be seven as the samurai
be seen as the samurai
your mind curved
your mind cured
starve and
stare and
carving your name in history make
caring your name in history make
the world: invert
the world: inert
an ideology to believe
an ideology to belie

Mud bath
Doc Martens
                        Back of head
Off the beaten path
                        Still beaten
But at least not dead
*******, they said
Don't understand what I did
But was
Drowning in the ground
One day they'll come around
To me

Doc Martens
                        Back of head
Off the beaten path
                        Still,
                        Beate­n
Dead.

I saw us again in Galway,
And again it felt as if you weren't dead,
You were young,
And I was younger than today,
You had your journalist's notebook and pen,
And so many things to say,
You looked ahead,
I melted away,
Past the crowd of gathering wolves,
Through the cinnamon rain,
To the narrow road winding through the hills,
Like a fleeing possum's tail,
Never still,
A pulsing membrane,
A hospital bed,
A naked, dying flame,
The road you chose to take,
Red with sweet precipitation and pain,
I still remember when you told me you were ill,
I want to die, you said,
What I wouldn't give to know once more your head,
Where your thoughts used to play,
The way your body swayed,
When you saw life's ugliness but refused to look away,
For your spirit I yen,
Faintly remembered by the markings of your pen,
In notebooks in an attic,
Living words floating above dead eyes,
Shrouded by the spice of time,
I desire to wipe it away,
But I'm so terrified of what I might find,
In dreams, I still see your face,
What if in wakefulness, I find an emptiness in its place

He brought spiders to the schoolyard
      to crush them
He attended Julliard
      to learn Bach's partitas for violin
He pays women to undress for him
      and beats them
Knowing culture is a game
      we play
The boy and the man are the same
      composition
Performed in various ways
      the notes stubbornly remain
What's born cannot be changed
      one musical phrase
Nurture is Nature's
Dais

The flag blew,
                         asking
Is it wind or flag which moves?
Wise man speaks:
                                It's you.

Wild ducks swim the flooded streets,
Dead men float face down,
What do the living eat,
When civilizations drown.

night wears a skin
of cold velvet
stippled with pores
through which illumination
prickles as the intergalactic whiskers
of Schrodinger's cat
catching the scent of gravity

july reaching's still to august,
whose days in general be more modest,
and september blowths the future cool,
june's present's past's hot-headed fool.

woodcutter's sunlight
absent like truth at the gate
at raintime; strangers'
memories, flowing as mud
a samurai was killed, but—

winter fir
–ing of a thawing musket
crows scatter

Duskland
Day's portending glow
divided by the room we're in
                           verted, lit from below
our shadows cast on ceilings loom
disfigured by the self-consuming gloom
of doom we ourselves evoked
in youth
Tooth for a tooth,
In short: revenge: the word we never spoke
As the hammer fell on his existence
Bludgeoning his dull, swollen resistance
Toward a ****** stillness
That, we hoped, would equal calm
But instead has led us
to the
Duskland

hawk stops atop a hornbeam
in an urban copse
leaves falling
how must everything to the hawk seem
a dream in a dream i have seen
him i have been
circling and soaring and
—the snap of a shutting laptop.
spell broken,
hawk on beating wings passing away,
passing she asks, how've you been?
i have been well, i say
i have been well, i say

I've mud on my face,
Dripping from my eyes,
The tears of the Earth,
Shed as the Earth dies.
I've fire on my cheeks,
Burning off my skin,
I've become the flames,
Of the Hell we're in.

What ugly brilliance burns within the face,
Of the man who switched his head for the Sun,
The Earth, in orbit round his skull in space,
Becomes a Hell: his heat—melting everyone.

a hawk without feathers,
skin, hollow bones,
its avianness severed by the wickedness it knows,
it sits upon a house,
the house that's always stood,

(by the cave with the painted walls,
after the massacre
     of the neanderthals;
by the agora, where the voting took place,
     in sight of which they signed
     constitutions
     and other contracts in black typeface;
by the workplace;
by the banks;
downtown,
     between the metal-glass towers,
     footpath from it
     to the corridors of power)

out of time, it is: a Wormwood,
where men gather to unaffix themselves from the good.
the hawk has eyes of malice,
it watches as you come to the door,
inside, it smells of money, might and phosphor
us.

Snow. Globe / Newspaper
:: tycoon revealed as nothing
but a boy, taken
from mother / Nature simple
as a sled burning: "Rosebud."

A spiralling ascent
Along the world's edge
Sweatdrops fall
To a below without sunlight
Boot dust
Llamas labour under supply packs
Hoof beat lantern dance
Shadows cast on the cliff face
Distorted we loom
Above the mute fog of humanity
Summitous
Awash in the final dawn
The old Inca smiling sprouts his knife
Ancient tapestral landscape
Exhales into us
Curvously infolding
The old Inca holds out his hands
The knife cuts horizontally
Reality opens like a book upon a tabletop
There, he says,
Pointing to the infinite space between where the sky in the past met the land
Timespace lies like a discarded washcloth
And we see dimly through the mists—
There, he says,
Pizarro could not follow us,
And we see dimly through the mists—
The neon lights of
Neoqusqo

the mountains rebel
       rising up against the earth
anti-gravity

Introspection
The art of finding within
What you cannot live without

/1975/ My mother died,
And forever cold she burned: cremated
No ceremony, no final goodbye,
Her will leaving me uncompensated.
Alone but for her ashes in the urn,
Which sometimes buzzed like bees and wheezed like breath,
I kept it shut until the day I learned,
That she would be my burden even after death.
Now every day I lift that hideous lid,
Remove the tiny skeleton within,
And place screeching in its awful stead,
Held by the tail, still in its fleshy skin,
A freshly caught rat / Hungry ash covers,
The dead too devour their living lovers.

My writing desk
My chair
A slap to the face
Fingers running through my hair
I will words
Which refuse to appear
I will
That which I will always fear
That only the quill knows how to be sincere
Unbuttoned shirt
A battered sternum
Under the hurt
The heart
Blooms the poisonous laburnum
Beating like a drum
I insert the quill
Holding in
Until it's had its fill of yellow ink
I do not think but write
Numbed but the words appear alright
I repeat until the flowers pass their bloom
And blackened fill the room
My throat is dry
My writing desk is wet
By my laburnum blood and sweat
Time to rest
To sew up my open chest
To sleep and in the morning feel again
Anatomical garden
Quill pen

Gravity died,
Or so it seemed to us, who were to die,
All loose objects vortical,
Yet static,
                 car spinning,
side over side, the policeman said,
No one could've survived,
Radial blur
All in the rearview
Thud of impact, Thud of stillness
No screams till the spinning wheel ceased
and then only one,
                                 melting like snow upon asphalt.

Wisdom carved in stone
is lost / what we know we know
under an accumulation of moss

I found the two-headed baby deer dying
on a bed of soft pine needles under cover of an overturned oak,
not five kilometres from my cottage,
Its lungs still pumped,
Its crimson heart beat weakly through a thin,
translucent skin,
that decayed before my eyes,
until there was no skin,
and all the organs lay warm and still,
in a heap upon the earth,
like waste.

A god evaporated.

It is human nature to disbelieve
that one may be witness to epochal events,
so I did not believe that I,
of all people,
should be witness to the death of time.

Epochal: the concept itself is dead.

How lucky we were
to know time at its cleanest,
and most linear!

We know now that such constant linearity
was the consequence of a living entity,
It followed the creature like stench follows a skunk,
and we basked in it
as if it was the natural state of the world.

No more.

Time no longer heals,
Things do not pass,
Or pass only to return.

At first we believed this would be manageable,
Yes, we thought, we will relive our pain but also our love,
Everything shall be magnified!
Welcome to an age of great emotions,
a new Romanticism!

Yet we overestimated how much we help,
failed to accept how much we hurt.

And we did not realize the nature of evil,
which accumulates in a way love does not,
To re-experience our love is to know it,
again and again,
at the same intensity,
but to re-experience pain is to increase its volume until it overpowers us,
deafening us to everything else.

I will never forget the creature's eyes,
full of hatred or hubris,
yet seeking aid it knew I could not give.

How does one save a dying god?

It was not my fault!

I was but a child asked suddenly to solve a deathbed equation
expressed in an undiscovered mathematics,
I had to fail,
yet in failing I have brought it all upon us.

I relive it constantly,
Every time its eyes are louder.

But it is the hour for my afternoon walk,
so I will take a pause and enjoy what remains of living.

I will go to my favourite spot overlooking the city,
and sit on the iron bench,
from where the view is magnificent,
Above me,
the clouds will form,
a tangle of pain and human corpses,
and I will sit and ponder until the first blood drops fall,
Then the screaming will begin,
the final storm will rage,
Beating, crimson corpse-clouds under a thin skin
of dissipating reality,
raining blood until we are left
warm and still upon the earth.

slow, wasteful minutes:
begone!—but why? they shape us
void time trims the self

i forgot my phone
i feel lost: because i lost
my identity

Bodies jostle toward the heatsource,
Foot stomp, elbowed in the rib,
Muttering voices hoarse, exhale mists
That swirl like deadmen's ashes in the wind.
Pale lumina saturates the cinder skies,
Under which the aged remember
The suns of former lives,
Their memories the glowing solitary embers
Of a world we've left behind.
Ahead, a mother veils her babe with rags
From a passer-by's ravenous gaze.
A man automatously drags
A rattle-bag of assorted human remains,
Leaving trails in the dirt,
Leaving trails in the dirt.
We have splintered apart the frame
Of this landscape of hellpain,
Against smokestack sequoias and asphalt seas,
We stumble toward the crematoria.
My God, the coldness hurts!
As upon the canvas of this frozen Earth
We enact the terminus of human innovation,
The burning of every breath,
The engineered suicide of civilization.
Out, out, brief candle,
said Macbeth.
Into the cull chamber I step,
Hoping there at least I will find warmth,
In death.

heart beating // beating
wings lift me and flight begins
bare feet above ground
the world receding / the world
beginning [...] to appear small.

i am daylight burned
into your skin / buried deep
                   seeping out as sin

the sun belongs too
the night travels swift-like like
the heart beats:
scared

by brightness
you are my second sun
though your gravity is such
you are
my only one

early eve, an august day,
the shadow's long but
end of summer still far away,
the heat is less
than it was yesterday,
the sun is less by then-until-today,
but already I am burying it all away,
nightfall echoes,
people,     on their way home,
that's the way it all goes.
early eve, an August day,
a warm wind blows
life down the hallway of the choices we have made,
it used to be may and may it be
may again someday

a man leans as i leave
the office building—against it,
dark and young,
his face has emptied
of expression, and innocence
has fallen away like drying sand from a stone in the sun,
i do not look at him,
in passing,
out of respect, i tell myself,
but know: out of fear
of connection i do not speak to him.
next morning, he is not
there is only a mound of sand,
which, in my name,
the city workers and the wind sweep and carry away.

Three poplars grow along the river bank,
Three poplars reflected in the current,
Past is paint and the future is a blank
Canvas framed with poplar wood recurrent,
Reeds sway silently,
Tree trunks climb crooked,
Colors blur like smoky clouds unfurling
Colors blurring cloudy smoke rings spread
Across a pastel sky. Autumnal swirl
in kingly golden glow—presages:
Brush be quick / the sun dips / the light changes
Capture it before it rearranges!