kissed by Spring at the gentle break of dawn
suffocated by Summer in the languid afternoon
seduced by Autumn under the starry evening sky
stung by Winter in the frozen-dark night

Three hundred and sixty-five times I've thought of you today.

"Nice to meet you."
"You too."
"So, what do you do for the living?"
"You mean...what I do for a living?"
"No."
"Oh."

"no gods were harmed
in the making of this universe"

Takes a hit of that Which
Goes a round
Comes a round
squared inside the ring:

:giggling fist: :connect the dots
Lands one on the nimble joke
to Which a Universe
is the punch-line.

To think
that future generations
might only ever know the feeling
of shivering from the cold
by catching a fever

Semantic stars collude, collide
until the brightest constellation of words
emerges to articulate for life
what cosmology would consequently liberate:
Emancipating sentence served in the unspeakable tongue
Oxymoron’s ill delight

In the pitch-black universe of language
Oxymora hide
the darkest matter

All it takes is a sharp word
pressed softly
against the semantic membrane,

And suddenly

Ideas Big; ideas small
Thirsty leeches that infest
the juicy questions in us all

Extracting them from grey matter
is mostly just a matter
of colorful wording.

Dance with me
in a language free
of ‘Love’, of ‘Truth’

True Love begins to die
the moment
it’s called by a name.

some thoughts
we think we love
were never meant
for thinking

The way to unknow
to the nth degree
in retrograde infinity
is currently: unknown.

(take a deep breath and sound all the phonemes out loud, continuously, moving from one to the next at a comfortable pace as you read the corresponding line internally: u, i, e, əʊ, a)

u: Liquescent hurricane pouring through my lips

i: Swarm of ballerinas moonwalking on my cheeks

e: Effervescent cavers interrogating my throat

o: Yawning black hole pulling into my mind

a: This body's answer to my every question

Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine.

When the wild god arrives at the door,
You will probably fear him.
He reminds you of something dark
That you might have dreamt,
Or the secret you do not wish to be shared.

He will not ring the doorbell;
Instead he scrapes with his fingers
Leaving blood on the paintwork,
Though primroses grow
In circles round his feet.

You do not want to let him in.
You are very busy.
It is late, or early, and besides…
You cannot look at him straight
Because he makes you want to cry.

Your dog barks;
The wild god smiles.
He holds out his hand and
The dog licks his wounds,
Then leads him inside.

The wild god stands in your kitchen.
Ivy is taking over your sideboard;
Mistletoe has moved into the lampshades
And wrens have begun to sing
An old song in the mouth of your kettle.

‘I haven’t much,’ you say
And give him the worst of your food.
He sits at the table, bleeding.
He coughs up foxes.
There are otters in his eyes.

When your wife calls down,
You close the door and
Tell her it’s fine.
You will not let her see
The strange guest at your table.

The wild god asks for whiskey
And you pour a glass for him,
Then a glass for yourself.
Three snakes are beginning to nest
In your voicebox. You cough.

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all.

You cough again,
Expectorate the snakes and
Water down the whiskey,
Wondering how you got so old
And where your passion went.

The wild god reaches into a bag
Made of moles and nightingale-skin.
He pulls out a two-reeded pipe,
Raises an eyebrow
And all the birds begin to sing.

The fox leaps into your eyes.
Otters rush from the darkness.
The snakes pour through your body.
Your dog howls and upstairs
Your wife both exults and weeps at once.

The wild god dances with your dog.
You dance with the sparrows.
A white stag pulls up a stool
And bellows hymns to enchantments.
A pelican leaps from chair to chair.

In the distance, warriors pour from their tombs.
Ancient gold grows like grass in the fields.
Everyone dreams the words to long-forgotten songs.
The hills echo and the grey stones ring
With laughter and madness and pain.

In the middle of the dance,
The house takes off from the ground.
Clouds climb through the windows;
Lightning pounds its fists on the table
And the moon leans in.

The wild god points to your side.
You are bleeding heavily.
You have been bleeding for a long time,
Possibly since you were born.
There is a bear in the wound.

‘Why did you leave me to die?’
Asks the wild god and you say:
‘I was busy surviving.
The shops were all closed;
I didn’t know how. I’m sorry.’

Listen to them:

The fox in your neck and
The snakes in your arms and
The wren and the sparrow and the deer…
The great un-nameable beasts
In your liver and your kidneys and your heart…

There is a symphony of howling.
A cacophony of dissent.
The wild god nods his head and
You wake on the floor holding a knife,
A bottle and a handful of black fur.

Your dog is asleep on the table.
Your wife is stirring, far above.
Your cheeks are wet with tears;
Your mouth aches from laughter or shouting.
A black bear is sitting by the fire.

Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine
And brings the dead to life.

This little lover went on a date
This little lover stayed home
This little lover had a honey to cuddle
This little lover had none

This little lover vowed never to love
ever again
all the way home.

I don't truly understand
half the poems that I write
and the remaining other half
I don't think I truly like.

Once upon a time there was a word named Like, which was used to describe either resemblance or affection. Like was very happy with its likeness, and everybody liked it just about as much as it should be liked, and not too much more.

One day as Like was just liking around minding its own business, somebody noticed how likeful it was Like and said: “Hey, Like, can we use you, Like, more?” And Like was all Like: “…” And from that moment the word Like became used in the most unlikely fashion. Everybody started using Like more often when they spoke, basically Like whenever and wherever they wanted to use it: Like became overliked.

Like didn't Like being overliked because all the extra likeness slowly made it forget the original Like, Like the things Like liked and the way Like had always been Like. Eventually everybody overliked Like so much that Like completely forgot who it was Like and stopped being Like itself altogether. Like got so likeable that it in turn started liking itself as the new Like. Soon enough it started overliking being liked and likewise overliking being the new Like, and came to Like the attention so much that it couldn't get enough Likes. So little by little Like started controlling what everybody said, until every sentence had to have so many Likes in it that it was Like practically the only thing Like anybody ever said. And anybody who Like didn’t Like to use Like as much as Like wished to be used was Like punished with not having anything interesting to Like say.

So everybody used Like out of Like fear of the likelihood of being Like punished and Like in order to stay liked by Like and keep Like saying interesting things, until Like became Like literally Like the only Like thing Like anybody Like ever Like said and Like...

Like became GodLike.

Gun in hand
to spill the colored truth
of poet’s own grey matter
Neurons dying to and fro to
figure out
if a stanza suicide is worth committing

Pen, on the other hand
dangles a juicy metaphor
from the *******.

is when you smash a soft-boiled word: Lightly
against a hard substance,
peel off the protective layer of semiotic circumstance,
reveal the gelatinous, inner white sentence,
and take it all with a pinch of salt.