On this day
it rained but was sunny

A small pawn shop closed in york
A man dropped his lunchbox from an unfinished skyscraper
Tennessee Williams took a walk ( a long walk)

The Aztecs struck oil and Cicero dropped his quill
People declared peace and the world ate its fill

On this day they shut down the earth
Swept up the stars and exiled the moon
and auctioned them off for all their worth

On this day we sold every star
except one

I grit my teeth at the thought of it
As if to sheer
The skin from them…
To brooch the
Kingdom between your
Whitening thighs
A
Bell pepper blemish
Roar and tumble
The apricot lull of tongue on tongue
You salt my ***
As I find my fingers
Finding the depths of you
We slip further into
Despicable blue.
Beautiful
Filthy
Blue.

If talk is cheap
then Poems are pennies
Long lost
Traveling in pockets
Or Saved for rainy days

she turned
as the page of a book
I etched my name in her
and
slow came
the burn of a quiet flame
and
slow came
the inferno in her name
that was ushered
into life
by the tempest
of our embattled hearts.

Her fingertips loosed the glass
bottle, which had
of late
gathered rain like the
hands of paupers.

Glitter in a heartbeat.
to be collected by old battered shoes
or car tyres
and streetwise magpies.

it joins a city evensong
this oceanic roar of nothing
fusing chords of cars and smoke
and lonely dogs
with hacks
and throngs
of perambulating suits
and suitors
trampling athwart broads of concrete
As swifts in summer.


We swim in it
through open atriums
and barren rooms of
magnolia and magnolia and magnolia.

All the while if you look harder
you see through chinks a sepulchre
in each greying tower
ranging higher and higher still.

Machines and machinations
stacking life upon life to
build pyramids
to gaudy kings
in pinstripe or herringbone.

Flumes of fumes ***** like floods
Into and out of train stops
and bus stands.
Circling lungs like hungry crows.
Crows which haunt
Bombed out chapels made new
resuscitated with waxen ivy
and ivory lilies.

And the leaves of saintly oak trees
chatter in shrinking crevices of green
story telling
Of how people and things grow old.
And you can walk these streets
And dive too like cormorants into
The platitudes of city living.

Soaked to the skin in sound
to tell your story
like the shards
of a broken bottle.