A dark rim hugs an acre of
A zinc ocean - no fish, no birds,
Save a pure body, no soul,
No words, fluttering on a bro-
ken sea, and grimacing
From time to time, from
Wave to wave, in lieu
Of lifting an imploring hand.
©LazharBouazzi (2017)

High on the O2:
Red Rossopomodoro, Wagamama,
and on the bus shelter, Marc Jacobs,
and again higher,
Habitat,
then Metroline moves past.
It's the 113
to Oxford Circus,
and the 13 to Victoria:
Thrilla Lives On,
shouts the slogan,
while National Express has
All Set For Take-Off.

They're gone...
It calms
empties,
nothing much
just the red lidless eyes
of cars
two, three, four dozen pairs
hover
over the asphalt road.

Where...
where am I?
Ahhh, yeah,
in the Oriental Star,
the road seen from a table and stool,
waiting
for food.
Where have I hailed from?
My lover's womb.  
No, no
NOT THAT!
The North Star, yes:
A pub on the Finchley Road,
Where Tottenham beat Liverpool 4-1
A pyrrhic victory!
Over a couple of beers.

Warm years, and tears.
A sense of place,
a home, a nest,
Receding in the traffic
Of a busy road,
Waiting on noodles.

What She Look Like?
  
…Like one
tenderly hushing
water in her lap
Elemental peace
No place to go
No more to be
…Like the ocean
in the background
of a photo on a warm spring day
belying
rage
and the random possible
thrash--

out!

at all guilty ******* in her path
Toss in the next sentient soul
who should happen to pass
within range
who should have seen
who should have known
what a storm could do….

Moody in the aftermath
and sorrier than rain
With the tide in retreat
grumbling excuses
Hiding out waist-deep in dusk’s Merlot
Waiting for night to sleep it off

to heal the rifts
cleanse the shame

Rising
yellow, bright— and

“What the hell happened, here?!”

____


Her hair
a winter’s tragedy of trees
upside down—
No wait— the wind has put her right
to ragged random branches
swaying, wet with intermittent hues
of dark and silver
caught in collar, flying inelegant and free
at the shoulders of the levee
tossed and softening shyly
sagging jaw and nose a stump of tree
All perspective changes…

if you watch a while—

She’ll raise her eyes
into the sunset
to catch an eagle
entering
flight

…and then you might…

___

She looks like—
a pudgy robin
querying grass
mud soaked
that hides the fire of her breast
tugging at a worm
more than half her length
“I will feed them, **** you!
Give it up, you son of a snake!”
_____

...Don’t miss her hour of music though
for anything
Encroaching darkness
from the rooftops
she listens to the hearts she breaks

Remember this in winter
she can give but she will take
it out on February
when you’re longing
for her

Love will grow in me sideways, a supine pine
sapling, shoveling mountainous glaciers of stone

embedded into my boiling erosions, melting
the anaerobic hot mud into a calmer froth.

We may kiss at the precipice of the abyss
our love has inevitably chewed through itself.  

And I will likely palm our weathers
into a river-swallowing sea

and you will hate me; desert of a future
companion’s ship—can I

swallow my dominance; that devotion
could bloom from this love’s wilderness,

foresting in perennial fullness,
prospering in the shared bed
rock we have carved into orchids.  

At the place where I will bury my bones
in the murderous entrancement of another,

taiga could storm from the soft ring of fire
between twenty interlocked evergreen fingers.

A pocketful of doom is flourishing
ceiling to wall in my cranium,

and though I tend to the tantrum of it
with fatherly, nurturing discipline

it acts as a nebulous cumulonimbus
fog seething with diffusion of void,
breaking through every window of warm

out to the inside I tend to become

an accidental abuser, flailing teeth
into over-ripened words, knocking
unripened fruit from the bough between us.

With nerves like coiled snakes in an apple,
prismatic minds are dulled to a fractal
of their former spectral rainbow
when expunged into the shadow.

Thorough rage—event horizon
clawing sides of deep depressions,
cusping manic at the fervor—

when the cliff becomes the shackle
of the neurosis-fed darkness jackal

open demise toward the mouth of the sun
and perhaps tongue at infinite light.

I often wish I were a gentler man,
pruning flowers from thorns
in the garden of words;

but what a small nuisance
as clouds eat the days
undulating cathedral
of red and blue sky

I devour my life to the bone,
is enough to not covet
much more than the dawn child of sunset.