.
In straps, of wire saplings,
Becomes one wild rose.
Alone in the dawn,
A solitary crow knows
That this is beauty,
Greater than his own
Shiny black robe.
Impossibly regal
Red as a scarlet wail,
A siren, amongst all
The greens and yellows
Of a meadow, of the entire
World, is the rose, above those,
Especially the bleak, envious
Crow, latched to a branch
As scaly and gnarled as his soul,
Blacker than eternal night,
Beside the shining light
Of the rightly charmed
Wild rose,
Alone.
             Sorry is the crow—
Most of all unmatched, strikingly
To long flame of chalk faced moon,
Rides in airs, misbegotten, makes
Desolate cries, of wounding caws,
Self inflicted, so, somehow seems
Unalive, tarred, undead as smoke,
His fettered, black, unfeathering
Eyes.  Not like the blooming spark
And flash of the stunning, runner,
Unbeaten, indomidible, shocking,
Wild rose, unmired by bramble,
Wood nor motley thorn of bush,
A star of life, razor cut, blistering,
Free, this spirited, ****** heart,
Set, a rage, on jagged leaf.

In tangled straps of green wire saplings,
A Rose is even more a rose, next to crow.

.
I tried to capture you
In the forests of Donegal,
Your bark of hair, red, so dark,
Was smear, camouflage, and window
Into a lost Fae world made as I was sinking
Without ever knowing, falling, without fear
Years later, you have long left and I still
Breathe in a wooden box of dream.

.
Etched in smoke, burnished by olden sun,
The runner grasses wave below into maze,
For eyes in cloud to clutch on mottled vermin,
Higher in stations, a judgement for all grazer,

Pleated feathers arched in weightless stone,
Are blades as steely as any burnt ploughmans
And airs that break, lift hawk far into sun shone,
As quake of earth strikes up a still haired louse,

For blades of green shall call, bleed in grasses
And whisper will shout, downing smallest might,
Tiny beasts who crawl among waveing masses,
To hawk over hill, sheering in raiments of light.

.
Scurrilous birds fly by,
To nest in the little painted
Houses left clear for them,
In awkward circles they romp
Their peculiar dramas
With ****** wings.

Do they even witness
The skies revolving canvas,
New masterpieces each day,
How the light shimmers
In the sparkle rays of sun,
How the golden fields,
Of vales in sighted sweep
And dance, airy etudes,
By the windfall gusts
So suddenly arising?

These visions are marks
For but few, who hear time
As it plays in stepped quartets
Of the spiraling seasons song,
For the lone mercies, gifts,
To ones most gentle, merest,
Spirited eyes who gaze deftly,
Deep in sacred days,
From a window.

.
Light sparkles in the clover,
Yellow and blurr of bees
Are honeyed in the sun
And robins have come,
Yanking in the gasses,
So green is the moisten
Of the painting of the dew
And all is lolling in petrichor,
The soils running with slow
Time so shortly experienced,
Oils of wood permeate the air,
Lapping brooks bream into light,
The loft kestrel swirls in meadow
And chipmunks scuttle at base of tree,
Even the wind does freshly quiet, crisply,
There as a hug waiting for body and spirit,
Patches of white are disappearing, they know—
That one day we must all return, after winter snows.

.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite.”
― William Blake

.
In this room
Drowning,
In ocean flesh,
Our days, replay,
With eyes cut
Out under sheet
Of stars.  All is
Not real, screened
For a soul, lost
On the dry lands
We bury ourselves
In.  

      One day we shall
Wake into the sun,
And bathe in the light
Of unbridled constellation
And voids deeper than
Life, holy and actual
Like drowning flesh,
Come, alive in sky,
Lit by eternal sheen,
Lost memories, grace,
Being burn, new sparkle,
Cast to air, as embers preen.

.
I have seen couples,
So far from each—
Other, on a platform,
Waiting for the next train,
Never touching, yet how
They ****** their mobile
Devices, how softly, sweet,
Without guile nor agenda
They swipe the glass—
As it swoons back in return
With blue lights and alerts,
So dearly needed and answers,
In way words for the machines
Of flesh and the ghost within,
With such personal aplomb
In real notifications of text
And instant message.

.
In whisper— shadow sings a song.
My call is joined within the hollows,
Only tiny dimpled crests of the sea,
My voice, for rains, round familiar                                                       As patch into tune of old shattering
Light.  I search for love, sloe in slips
Thru ******* eyes, outcast beyond
And ghostly move into monumental
Futilities of unbearing, leery in flesh
Undeciphered.  Make me one lattice
To bind the wind and mark shallows
Mine as I trudge into black, blue sun.
This song— I sing is for lost keeping,
Hear my hush as it breaks for darks—
And I shall love in box, buried, forgot,
Kept at one sight so grave, remaining
As smudge onto stone burnt in a dial
Etched by firing rays of timeless star,
Hear my song— whispers of shadow.

.
Under fish scale skies—breaks the sun,
In myriad eyes, beamed longing across
Stupendous arcs in highest procession,
As we make our way in glittering dream.

Under quilted clouds, in rains we swim,
Wrapped in fibers and whim, a webbing
Embrace and steeples of mind to shim,
As we enter the waters from a shooting.

As child we ask, 'do we return to whence
We came, or do we end, after days, time,
Thru sorrows and bliss and sleep but lent,
Balm for us to bear loss of spent dream'?

Under winking stars and full faced moon,
We sing our songs writing a story loosed
And pray our hands, to a feather will turn,
As we make our way thru glittering dream.

.
Sometimes the body is contagion
To the soul.  Stars in their mission fall
To seed the fertile flesh, ignite
Blue waters of sulfureous hearts,
And so the flash is set to cancel
In the flood.  

Sometimes the lip of soul onto seal
Will not hold, before he first knocked
And let flesh enter, thorny pegs
Pricked nerve and pierced bone on his climb
To the rose, yea, some stars odd as
Meteors crash.

In the swan-sea, song-sangy-frame of crib,
Rough hewn words bent mold to scrape, like
Blasted coral, stood half-submerged
Amid sea and sky, for between the leaves,
Behind the eye, there are little stars
Shining like existence.

In a circle world he fashioned green
Blazons about the darkling day,
Fostered by celestial navigation,
Wrote a language for music, on a map of love
And charted the force of green in a wind-
Rose of discovery.

Sometimes the soul is not contained, it
Bursts in silent sound like well water
From the source.  And of men in streets
He saw the pennies in their grumble
Eyes, and of love and its course he rubbed,
Tickling dim stars.

It was his thirty ninth year in that fall
To heaven when the steeping cell,
Refused to push in its tide.  Homeless
And free on scaffold of bone the middling
Man retracted from sun to sink
With the moon, turn-tiding-toward sea
Like a changeling.

And as ever, nor often, unwavering eyes
Sprout through shifting grains.  And as he spoke
Quite rimless, Dylan Thomas was petrified
In undying light, and solid set within a rill
Of reef sparkling in concert betwixt gas
And sea, so becoming in purple sleeves,
This constellation of mute singers all,
Dried five-fingered-fish, bright embryos
Returned to the shell, they burn between the leaves,
Beset the grounded skies and show sprite flashes
In the dark where He has left his imprints, burning
Above and plastered below.  The first rock stars!

.
Her languid voice
Drew me in, drooped,
And tentacle hair wrapping,
My feet fell before hers,
Sinking in the faraway lost pool,
The mortality in the sands,
And even the stars, snuffed
Out of darkness and fire
Became the light of the world,
The hushed day breaking
With welling waters and salt.
How can dream be lived,
Within dream?  Must I swear
As I fall into bliss?

.
Do you remember me?
I am gem-eyed, strung on night
Vexed and closed in by time.
When I am dining with dearest
Friends there is always a set
Placed for you, there is always
A story, looming, untold to them,
But not for moon strangers
Who knew even without saying
What was never laid out to us.
Now, eyes are cracked dams
Above the beamed, flood plains,
My heart is rain dented brass,
Bent, out of gear and turns,
Mournful, dried, pocked
As rust, tarnished red,
Petrified.
If I gaze at the diamond moon
In its shock, I am hooked.
When the flower brushes my calves
The lifting scent caresses, teases,
Rising with memory of fire and stone.
If I travel home to the buenos air, the Paris,
White balm of the Southern Hemisphere,
La Belle Époque is wearing your column
Dress, the pampas fires and undulates
Like your hair, rays of Polaris star,
Points at me, in dreaming
Of you, dreaming,
My jewel, my,
Little moon.

~
The swelling brooks, so clear toned,
Rolling rounds over musical stones,

That unveil the rushed veins of May,
Race in wide cool stills, freshnesses,

Of the moistened soils overturning
And the chimes in the belled leaves,

Before they shout from buds keyed,
To syncopate in sun by bopping bees

Who buzz with jazzy pillowing waft,
Of daisy downs, in mid air to reeds,

Lips newly sprouted, banding green,
Groove myriad symphonies of colour

And the roots of trees tempo tapping,
Into waters plucked, earthy sounding,

All voice, with woodland birds, in joys
Do trumpet, O what new life to come.

.
Frozen in rains, cloistering,
So severe in the dark of day,
Is the walled clutch of garden,
No one escapes, a gilded reaper,
Born of fears, promises beyond,
Of joys on the oak nailed pews.

Above the lost naves, who stand
In worship to a ghost, bones bent,
There are cast arches of old sorrows,
Veiling the lighted eyes of the cosmos,
Shutting out even mercies, heavenly
Lights duly smoked of incense.

And slated roof, so statuary cold,
Of aged rock and moss under spire,
That even the doves, as they coo
Are grounded, up muted hollows,
Chimes that merely echo guilts,
By shadows of faithless pride.

.
It would not stop, the drop dripping
Faulty well and I was cornered in
Your eyes, when your love came down.
The gentle rain was a deceiving
Flood.  The softness in your voice
Was dim light bent, on my banishment.

I began to notice the kind indifference,
The doldrum swale, when your love
Came down, was like you were employed
Only— half trying to get along
With me.  My own dulcet music
Crashed in two, she wails a shamed—

Diaphany and darkness from the corner
Room began to grow, when your love
Came down.  The light that moved so dear,
Became a precious ration, it was
A black starvation and I began
To die from tasteless food, sad music,

Fading sun, no expectations—
And laughter meant for others.  I bled
For years on open wounds and I—
Could hear the wind that rails at ones tomb,
When your love came down.

.
Still pale grey earth is turned,
Deep is the loam moisted,
Lone by the Ploughman.

The rows of the brushed patches,
Sweating the breakneck blood,
Are painted by labours.

Messiah doors out cathedral,
With iron plod anoints the soil,
Exposed unto mercy sun.

His hands are knobbed in stone,
His eyes searing of the star,
His face dark as deep loam.

Each day ablutions of sod earth,
Heaved out tilling unfree wills,
Burdens of harnessed beast.

Dark is the turned loam moisted,
Water flame heat of veined mist,
Seeds sown explode to bloom.

After thorny works, crowned blood,
Sun leaves to wine red fruition,
Ploughman maker is done.

.
In cool light of heavy air,
The lovers worked at song,
Whittling the oak as it grew,
Wrapping time in knot, a gear
By the rounded dial of a snail,
Even the sun waltzed forgetful
And antique moon soon forgot
What it knew under wink of stars,
The field was all in hushed flame
As the new ant trails always were,
Saying in the grass that May, windy,
Is all we can know ever beneath trees
As they burst from breaking blue earth,
Will always, grasping, be this evergreen,
The lovers became here truly, new witness,
To themselves never more, but only this once,
Eternal, fresh, undivided, jewels of sun, divine.

( reply to Sappho )*

I took my guitar to the sea and said:
'Come now heaven, these fingers bled,
Wrangle and rain for thoughts you deign
And all the listeners dumb shall proclaim,
Strings are merely— vibrations of the soul
And soul is merely one mirror to the gods,
Take my dying art and throw it— to wind
Hear my song, strung, sept to your kin.'

~
By scratch and scrim and keys, a poets write,
Parsing the eyes drop, lancing the buried ear,
Under the hewning gaze of hazel trees night,
Streams forded, moon and yew stepping, stare.

.
Lear wanders in stormy open, bares warring elements,
The heavens blister, crackle, night is balmy shroud,
Wretched monarch babbles in sprinkles of wind cold,
Arguments lost by ones own pouring perturbations
And raining sky said 'nothing will come from nothing.'

Howl, howls into blackness treed in lightning splits,
His outcast soul, reels, fleshed, cut to smithereens,
Tang of salt burns on the bluffs and the sea rages,
So entire and ceremonious is Lear's fall meted out,
Air spoke, 'nothing from nothings ever yet was born.'

Sky proclaimed to man child King, here is a reckoning,                                    
Each mad choice was self infliction, now wind flays
And sweet Cordelia lies in her innocent **** grave,
Sky, in thralls of thundering asks, 'what say thee now,
King of highborn follies, even purple heaths are rags,

Yet black and above you and night shades, whine,
Unworthy King, done in by compounded effects,
The might of maelstroms in low butterflies wings,
How now, bare trees, knifing reeds, skeletal flashes,
To rains of night are ever your lanyards my lord,'

Sad Lear so near oblivion fell mute, sky went on,
'Howl and cry mad King your reaper calls beyond,
The icy brisk heavens await to brusque you away,
Your slipshod kingdom was mere and fools' dream,
Howl, til howls abrupt abate, for nothing now comes.'