He watches a life burn down to dusty ash
From a tiny, yellow gas flame
That lights the cigarette in his hand
That churns out words from his troubled brain.

A writer's violence hides, not in his eyes,
But in angry, quivering palms that trace
A venomous, untidy, familiar scrawl
Reducing her complexity to scribbles on a page.

Though he mourns the memories of happier days
He feeds it all to his carnage.

transferring songs and
lemon drops from under my tongue
to the inside of my gums
until they reach the lines of your
soft palms
my beautiful Nihilist
sugar and heavy whipping cream and berries
shedding the skin
of my cherished pedagogues
incompetence catching
violently in my
Alto-voiced throat
feeling too much
is dangerous.

Cup your palms around
that candle dear lazy
Spells to cast to the wombs
keep our ghosts outside
peering into tent *****
yellowing irises and
stamens strangely swaying
but nonsense
Butte no
out there
they stalk you dear lazy

Forests of coral adorn the rocky ocean floor,
Sheltered here in this sky-blue lagoon.
See the golden sand, shining through the still waters,
Fringed by plumes of palm.
The warming sun is smiling,
Flanked by fluffy white clouds.
Gulls are calling
Over the whispering sea.
A tropical paradise
Punctuated only
By impromptu showers.
Those colourful corals
Swarmed with teeming fish
Of every hue.
This is the place
To be.

Paul Butters

By my life's end and lost poem
the world will be covered with you.

Your name and scent and actions
will be written and then scattered

upon pages and hearts and stones,
upon date-trees, grape-leaves, and palms

for centuries to come.

A lithely swallow.

A dipping in--  
laying into the flesh.
Finding its
cracks, burrowing
deeper. Pushing
through that velvet sound--
the emptiness
the melancholy
the desperate cling
of the sweat.

Dangling just off
the tip of the fingers: a cliff.
Before the ragged
sealine stretches
its tendrils
all-engulfing.

I love your hands. I know it's a strange thing to say, but I really do. You were leaning back, drumming your fingers on the stage and I caught myself thinking how perfectly made they were, how every line was so important, so lovely and smooth. Long fingers, and surprisingly graceful in their movements, at odds with the rest of you at times. They are hands I could picture cupping clear water from a pure stream, holding that kind of liquid light in a very natural way. I could picture them parting velvety soil to coax young green sprouts from it, lines and creases made more bold by the clinging love the earth would show you. I could picture them, too, gliding along piano keys, although I know you don't play. I think you could. I think those keys would love your fingertips. They'd sing for you. In the safety of my mind, I sometimes long to hold them, turn them over and learn the valleys of your palms like braille, follow the paths the years have carved in them. Not in a covetous way, but in a soft, gentle way. Those are the thoughts that make me blush, that make me keep my distance.