See it
Say it
Sign it
Sing it
Snort it
Short it
Sport it
Spork it
Snork it
Stalk it
Knife it
Fork it
Sort it
Sorted

Count the ways the world can end
Or wait until their numbers wane.
Everything that's ever done or said,
Outnumbered more than ten to one.

When it started with a word,
Did He foresee it all as now?
An instant of infinities,
The careful placement
Of each speck and star.
Or did He say, "My work is done,
For every one there is another"?

There's nothing I have ever dreamt,
That's turned out as I thought it would.
So now I'm coming round to think;
It's the counting that will keep us safe.

Early morning
I stand barefoot
On watered grass
As the rising sun
Kisses leaves of olive trees
With beads of yellow light
I am earthed
My static buzzing
Dampening down
Like the drowsy bees
Hidden in the lavender

My teenage kids have never been
inside their grandma's house.
I've told them tales of footholds
in-between tall piles of stuff.
What stuff, they ask?
Magazines and books,
bags of shoes,
boxes filled with cutlery,
a printing press,
tea chests emptied of their tea and
filled with things she doesn't need.
Stuff that's kept in case.
Stuff that's kept because
some secret now insists she must.
Does she have a bed, they ask?
Furniture once designed to guide
her eating, sitting, sleeping life,
now lies buried
deep inside her hive.
Is it like the Pharaoh's Tomb?
Perhaps.
I hadn't thought of it like that.
I prefer to think of it
as honeycomb.

It's as if that everything
We ever made or did—
Paintings in a distant cave
Every minaret and spire,

Each telescope or microchip,
Washing flapping on the line
As No. 5 sits down as a family,
Silently, to eat their tea—

As if all those things
Were only ever real
In the moments when a dream
Is shook out by awakening.

A distant eye will never spy
Another fading star in the night sky.
And when all we have to say is said,
We'll notice that there's no one left.

By morning,
the bright red peonies
that brightened our evening
stood silent and bare,
their petals scattered
on the table
like a soft snow.

I gave him money
He told me he would put it
Towards a hostel