Sometimes it's black marble, igneous rockets into endless dark and space.
and then sometimes it's an echo, resonating shades of black,
the frown on a clock's face, or the absent moon,
the illusory balloon, the ball that you chip away, also black,
while following the garden paths,
which don't meet but collide,
and the dice that are rolled ricochet,
echoing back the old days-

what could have been, what might have been?
the answers stand either side of the street,
face to face, but neither seen.

The clouds circle round you, windows blink in sunlight,
glaring, the obvious that hits you loud and with spite
and then the ground beneath you shakes,
the crowd are all staring when everything breaks,
you're a pile of glass, the same way everyone else is debris
of earthquakes: a fist of lost teeth, the split in twine after the fray,
the twist in time, and mistakes made by the billion everyday
on each lifetime's path, and every path at some point meets.
They may, for a time, treat you like hot sheets,
like what makes up their headaches. Be brave-
you may, for a time, forget all reasons to laugh.

Love knows no boundaries, they say. All of which I'm sure is
that it doesn't know how to say please, or any painless ways to go,
to find the exit sign, yet on the contrary, it enters with ease.
When you walk alongside it you cross every line.
It’s not the task that’s small as they tell us it will be.
You feel little and funny until you find yourself
more than twice on edge of a line that drew
the rainbows you saw above the war,
you want to go elsewhere for more,
see light-shows in the sky, explosions, and
the roar of the Earth applauding, a deep
rumbling sound, like bones and rocks and the
walls of Pompeii crumbling down all around.
But go back home, go back home to before
you forgot what love poems were about or for,
before the cats all got out, no need to lock the door.