.
Your face,
Tender, round and dimpled,
Framed with gilded, carved, tawny curled
Whirlpools of hair, long, lighted, and sparkling,
Your face is the face—
Of Ireland.

Your lips,
Full, moist and deathly deep,
Are wells, not well for me, not safe, taboo,
Tantric, tall told tales of brave Odysseus
Under Circe's alchemies
Of forgetfulness.

Your *****,
The zenith of blossom in fabled
Elysium, gateway to the forbidden gardens
Of sage and sinners, warrior-poets, Aphrodite's
Envy, Poseidon's drowning
And smouldering Zeus.

So seductive, she,
Never saw the coming stones,
Last cry— Lorelei.

He walks in stolid darknesses
At days zenith, hears whispers
In the dew dusted fens, lights
Leaves into sun candle flames,
Drew a lake sword by maidens 
Hand, alchemic shaper of water, 
Air, old fires and earth, bending 
Cold elements of moly and lode 
Rushing forth, in extra emotions.

Leaves stir announcing,
Seasons first Hazel nuts fall,
  .  .  .  Blue Jays return soon.

Treasure in forest,
Water dropping crystal beads—
Dew on wild orchids.

I have come to the temple
Of your body.  I kneel and prey
Like a sinner.  The holy water
Beads low on your forbidden
Tabernacle, sears my touch
In cleansing flame, what I do
And what will be done is all
For unrepentant confessions
And penances.  Let me truly
Learn the sacraments of flesh
Before I bathe in your wicked
Innocence and commit my sin
At being mortal in your nimbus
Chambers, let the mercies rain
After the fall of my fellowing
Creature, for this night is blood
Sabbath, and sacrilege under
A Pagan moon and let the dawn
In the rising sun of mute morning
Be my absolution, our benediction,
Let the moving waters enfold us,
Pure as lambs, as washed babes,
Baptismal.

Songbirds listening—
Her voice, fresh in my garden,
  .  .  .  Wind chimes grew silent.

Before even flight  .  .  .
Landed seagull chick strides, reads,
Waddles through bookshop.

Raven haired woman—
Bathes in lake with sinking moon,
Black swan drowning light.

Beyond the massif peaks of Europa,
Above the ancient pillars of Heracles
Where rain and ocean are weaving,
Lays a fabled kingdom born of waves
And noble strands, my beaten hearts
Haunting, the lost, lush sylvan lands
Of Galicia.
                   Where Incomparable, dark 
Haired women, mythic, of Amazonian
Fairness, side the valleys and moors
Of soon forgotten dreams and secretive
Wolves slide amongst warmed runnings
Of the ram and moans of ewe, where
Way bountiful seas are over spilling,
In octopus and pearly gemmed shells,
The scalloped pilgrimages unfolding,
Where incense burns with under stars
Encased, the lost Atlantean temples
Of Egyptian sands and storied Gaels,
The clad forests of wandering Titans,

Where snow white beaches end forever
Unmapped in told footsteps, castaway,
As was the magi gift of treasured yards,
Enlightenments, of old and golden isles
Pearling the coasts, sailing the sweet airs 
Crossing Iberian gates, to Elysian, eternal,
Galicia.

Man ends planet—quick,
Dinos last millions of years,
Birds are dinosaurs.

Troubled waters rise—
Sands march, locust lost in maize,
Harvest moon sinking.

November shades down,
Single colour trumping all—
  .  .  .  Bluebirds in grey sky.

She rides the chanting waves
At the seas horizon,
In fires of star sheen and moon shine,
Sweet Niamh of the golden hair, and aqua eyes,

Princess of the green sea turtles,
Of the coral sea grottos,
Anemone naves and kelpie skins,
Trailing the rainbow schools of the whirling fin,

The whole twining ocean globe of blue is swooning
Under the milky waving skies and unfathoming deeps,
Her laughter lighting the unremembered bottom of the seas.

Leaves dance as they die, birds sing as they fly.  Where is weeping?
Why such silence in the exploding heavens?  I know the desert thrives
At night, I know the ocean depths have light, what's left is always right
And the sun is stored in cells as the crystals are growing in the frosts.
Don't you hear the music that runs cross the tracks?  Can't you see
The Sirens floating on their backs?  Bound to a ship that tips and flays
About the maelstrom we are spinning bobs to the edge, we are blind
By our own hands.  The shape is the binding journey and all around us
The feet are worn with miles and leagues as many have been moved;
As many do make what was always ready to be born like a new voice
Ringing in the colour of absolution and truth.  The maiden Earth is all
A blossom, and our tears, are a salt ocean and death is a supernova,
Death is a Star.  Is those around us the shaping of the hardware?

My ruby looks on stones to see the light.
While amber stars are flashing in her mien,
She forges facets with her eyes and mines
A rocky grave.  To bear as such, the sun
Un-sung, she could caul parhelion to dust
And still doom to shadow those fireworks
She alone ignites.  Here then lies a truth;
My ruby looks on stones to see the light.

HP is breeding  .  .  .
Forum for hack formalists,                                                                                      
  .  .  .  Dreck is deafening.

The lone stark bugle cry—
Horn of the great mountain elk,
Ripples down cold through morning
Dusted wood as the mushrooming dews        
Drop into dearly waded pools under
Fawning toes of forage and cool
Evergreen.

Tea and cup, ready,
Birds in garden weaving dream,
Kettle wakes, calling.

Her eyes,
Sunken, blue
With edges of ruddy green,
Of olive, kelp, fatigue,
A certain muddy camouflage,
Bright with purpose,
Ambition and fierce urgency,
Set their twin star sights
On me and I learned a new
Word that day—
Surrender.

I fell into formation,
Saluting her stars in the fullest light
Of the falling day.
I learned how to survive
Under such searing heat
And became intimate
With sneak attacks,
Friendly fire, sudden blitzkrieg
And the nuclear winter,
The dark sheet,
Of sorrows unveiling.

We came from the rain,
Into ourselves out of body,                                                              
Kissing— still dripping.

The small grassland hills are dancing.
The sky is blue and the breeze is long,
I reach out, I touch and I look—
Into your eyes, my fingers in your hair.

.
When your strung hair drops,
In any chamber, all is opened,
All is lithe, flowerfield of mirror
To the gathered stars unto fire,
Below as above is a universe,
Your eyes asking in surrender,
Were never so fair as your face,
My soul drowning in those blue
Orbs, what oceans of sparkle, so
Like jewels in a thousand temple
Reliefs of gold and safire offered
By flesh and thunder, waits to roll,
To wash and crackle firmaments,
Of earthly desires and obsession,
In your temples above and below.

And dreaming of Inisfáil, I was raised on Bolivar Pond.
Sheltered in my wake, I’d coo as the dewy’d morning dove
   And fern in my bed, I rose to greet
       The song-splayed sounds of light
   And work, I made it dropping slow
Bright in the summers swoon, I was adorned in forest eves
By rings that rang from tree to rook, and flung the wingèd down,
       Brambled in bay, garland in violet
   When blades could ***** and not make bleed,

And I was brindled by the moon’d many shades, that liken
To a brook, and mottled in my main, noted among moss
   In that glow, once knighted we must serve
       Wood, let me comb in peace!
Colored in the mantled cloth of leaves
And bonny and red, I was the brave and the boon, the deer-
Ants learned me, and herons stood muck, on stands spearing all mite
       And the vernal song sang lowly
   Swaddled in azure’s unfolding dream.

At each turn was a season, nascent life charming in marsh
Forays that brimmed the hollow rood, in clover yards, I saw
   The lilt of bees, sallied in clearings
       Brown as the yellowed beech
   Colored in sounds that beat the heart.
And forth into the field I sprang unto that shedded loam
And high was the sail that bellowed the raft that raked my pond,
       Bullied by the har-umph of frogs
   I rippled, rowing cat o’nine tailed tunes.

Windy and free in the hollowed bark round the ****** bay
I trailed the bear sniffing ****, heard the hoo of a swooping vowel
   And wild in hare, dug the fox-hole up!
       Damp fires hailed the rising
   Moon, as fire-flies dinted the troutling pools
And nothing I saw in my drowning sun could nettle or thorn
My piney ways, nothing could rot my wood-craving ears
       For the kestrel’s qweet-a-quee rang holy
   In the skunk-flowered fields of Bolivar Pond.

We kissed under moon  .  .  .
Pox of stars grew flowering,
  .  .  .  Nightshade of her lips.

In the house of the unsaid
Tears are glass beads that drop
The ***** on the bone china

Blood spittles the lips, hair
Raises the dead the cut
Rosary roils and dents

Harmony’s rumour spouts
In the sink. The clock’s twitching
Strikes a mongoosed hour.

And the scattered stations run
The rude wood splinters
As the unsaying are floored

Clouded eyes pain the glass
Outside the house, bare
Trees are leaved with ravens.

She came upon a meadow, then she undressed;
And when she was naked, the meadow blushed.

Softly she tread, floating above the clover
Seas.  Suddenly lost, bold honey bees forgot
The scent of flowers blooming.  Iridescent wings,
Humming birds, monarchs, dragons, flying in
Procession and the mushrooming dew now rising
Began to swell, raining upwards into the mystic
Blue heavens and the trees beyond that clearing
Stood longingly amazed, so green their spying
Gaze, when all the myriad flowers loosely fell
And all the gathering of colours faintly dimmed.

She came upon a meadow, then she undressed;
And when she was naked, the meadow blushed.

You've asked me how can I see a future when love, in all
Its numinous beauty, is waning?
I reply, the immortal stars still shine above the veil of clouds.
You say, why are the salmon swimming to their pools of origin
Only to die as they spawn?  Only to die?
I tell you their love is unconditional, like mine.
You ask me did the giant sequoia know it was shelter for the burning grasses
When they walked from the seas?  I reply yes they knew.
You question me about the lofty snow cranes that fly over the Himalayas
And I reply by describing
How the priestly flocks, chanting on their mission, honk—
Announcing the mantle steps to the heavens.
You inquire about the elephantine manatees gracing the shallow banks
And wonder if the sea mermaids remember their lives beyond the latitudes
Of capricorn and cancer?
Or you’ve discovered in the wind a new reasoning as to why
The talons of the paired eagles lock in midair as they court?
You want to understand the nimbus garden, ocean slate, of lake Titicaca
Where resides the Andean sea horse gliding above the clouds?
The whales that circle dance in unison collecting krill?
The noetic display of the birds of paradise, the songs of nameless creatures
Playing in the wilderness like a forgotten melody only lovers lips remember?

I want to tell you that true love knows this, that life in its
Prismatic shimmer is all the myriad colours of infinite existence wrapped
In time to the sublime structure of white and bones.  I must tell you
That the flower is mighty in its opening, the humming bird is a sorcerer
Who needles ambrosia with vortex wings weaving his way to the Gods.

But I am nothing beside your disbelief which has arrived, before
I can even imagine the sweet awakening, like doom, my shell is the iridescent
Hollow of the one eyed Abalone, discarded in the deep fathoms
Of the ocean pressures.

I swim the tides as you do, investigating
The endless tendril seas,
And in my chest, during the night, I woke up empty,
The only thing treasured, a golden face
Trapped inside my dreams.

                                                                  
                                                             ­­                       — after Neruda

.
“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.

Helios ****** his seed of light— Phaethon's act,
Pleasures born of pain, in the balled glass eyes,
Frees a moat of grey matter cloud, light crackles,
And one blue silent flash— mirrors zodiac skies.

Raven haired mermaid—
Moon body murmurs and sways,
Black waves roll white seas.

.
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.

1

The chards rising.  Am I the praying bird?
In the gleaming sun my bones are negative,
My flesh a cypher walking through the plains
As ghost I move, my dark lord, above me
Flocks swirl and spike. I stand accused,
Your pointed face divining oblivion,
And no redemption in the rains of my
Cliff walk days.


2

I see my shroud pinning on the wires
His legs are razored forks spinning my
Compass from True North. Your dark brush-
Fire wings, the swept wind, wheels and strings
My fate. Such black rhetoric in a burn,
Your caws, loosed perches, on the stakes, picks
My crowning grave. Black dove, your feathers finger
As they slice.


3

Smoke, the cardinal blood caries my teething
Bone, spades my hand without a flight.
Taut, the pulled noose my hooded one
I see my scarecrow’s reflexion, the scar,
Let blood, the seeded droppings end trailed
To my door. Feathers, ferry to carry on
Dowsing downward, black knight of down, to sticks
On extended wings.

In the fall of light,
Trees turn to stone.

This time the sun removes,
Told in tales of the rise of moon.

Light winds rustle rusted leaves—
And a fur will soon be feathered in a bed.

And silence screeches as some flying bark embarks
And the very trees are hollowed in their grieves of the newly
Throrned, red, running rose— of the dearly claimed, arisen dead.