The door needs to be kicked in.
No gentle open and whispered hello
It needs become of splinters and dust.
The glue of its joinery to shatter and crumble.
The latch which would open smoothly
With the simple request of a raised hand
Needs to be driven shattering through wood
Sending formal wooden trim embellishments flying.
The myriad of small retaining nails will be extracted
Reversing a collective hold they held resolutely,
Pinned by hammer blows so long ago.

That door needs to come down.
To lower hinge will give way completely,
Leaving some screws still biting desperately
Into a fragment of the wooden frame.
The hinge at eye level will twist apart from our blow
One side remaining stuck in place on the frame
The going with the door as it disintegrates.
The pin that held it together in smooth harmony
Soon will dangle pointless on half a binding hinge,
Still now – the mechanism prised-apart.

The door shall be destroyed.
Our collective force irresistible – it will fragment.
Once trees were felled and sawed into planks,
Smoothed and shaped and joined in the build.
Now we need to render it all into firewood.
And where once stood a blank, heavy door
There will be light and air flowing through.
And the only hint of the barrier that was before,
Will be a final clear, metallic note
From the pin that finally falls
Upon the smooth stone floor.
A single note will ring out
And lead into a song of freedom.

Inky darkness fills the late afternoons
And doesn't retreat until well into the mornings
November rises, standing slowly taller
And carries arm-loads of damp, chill days
Into December’s crystalline, grasping reach.

Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.
Ah! she did depart!

Soon after she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.

What is the matter with her?
Is it dark?

She keeps it undetected
Except for occasional silent tugs and pulls
Upon the large things in her universe.
Does it stream through your hair like the solar wind
Sparkling and glowing upon your brow with aurora,
Or emanate the blue of your lowest mood
A Cherenkov glow
As the unbreakable light-speed barrier is surpassed
In the medium of your blood-filled heart?

The dark stuff is everywhere and nowhere.
Never seen before by science
You hold it deep within you
Sheltered from prying eyes
Or hungry Nobel-seeking hands
Or the silent sentinel listeners
Of the radio telescopes.

She gathers more now,
Until her fragile, silk-over-bone frame
Fills with swirling black axions
Until they spill out of her eye sockets
Like the streaks of wet mascara.
She tugs and pulls at us all,
The em-ones and em-twos are unknown
But not the universal constant
Between human hearts.

Snarling words, biting and dark
Bark and leap at the gate
Demanding to be set free
In hoards and clouds like locusts.

First they are placated by gestures upon keys
Performed by compelled fingertips.
Pixel-by-pixel, the screen is slowly darkened
Black against glowing white
As more and more are released
And they squeeze in to all the spaces
Blackening all until the there is no more light.

Then to runes upon the pristine innocence of white crisp paper
Their only resistance, the tip of the dragging pen.
Still they come like insects,
Thick and tumbling over one another
To stain the pulpy fibres wet with thick, sticky liquid
Dispensed by the rolling steel ball
Until all is encrusted with the dried ink.

With all words unleashed
There is no end.
There was more
With fewer.

'Thirty days has September,
Now it's easy to remember.'
'How do you do it, my good chap?'
'I simply use my iPhone app. '

Twelve to six to three
Twelve to four to two
Divided and separated
Stark white eggs stored cold in fibrous cardboard trays
Warm eggs, just laid, strewn among the damp straw
Twist a plastic tray, it cracks and squeaks releasing ice-cubes
Chunks of ice kicked along a frozen asphalt road
A rusting metal bolt from an unknown car, sits against the curb
A drill-bit bores through metal revealing shining inner steel
Razor sharp shavings curl from the oily machine
Thorny thistles offer velvety wisps of cotton
White drifting seeds float on a warm spring wind
Sticky sap from a tree trunk you touched for balance
Fuses to your skin and tries to stick your fingers together.

Five ten fifteen twenty
Twenty forty sixty eighty
Tiny black seeds like pepper scatter on the snow
From a hard octagonal pod that cracked between your fingers
Black hockey pucks spill out of a bag upon the ice for practice
Players spill out of a gate onto the ice to take their sides
Spectators spill out of the small arena into a parking lot
A new snow during the game has left it covered in a white blanket.

One hundred two hundred five
A thousand a million a billion
Stars pour out across the sky
Clustering sometimes thick as milk
Sometimes scarce and as black as molasses
Thick and deep and going on and on forever.