Wind:
from the south,
carrying the smell of iron.

Sky:
a hinge between
two storms.

Witness:
a gull circling
the drowned bell.



.

The Conjunction Holds
(with a verb in the wings)

Not the leap,
but the plank between banks—
its grain remembering
both shores.

Not the shout,
but the breath that lets
two voices
share one lung.

I am and,
I am but,
I am although—
the quiet ligature
that keeps the torn cloth
from drifting apart.

The verb would run,
would strike,
would bloom—
but I stay,
a hinge in the weather,
turning both ways at once.

Here,
in the seam’s small country,
I keep the quarrel and the kiss
in the same sentence,
and call it
poem.





.

éclairs — bolts
sleek barrels
brimming with custard resolve
washers —
flat wafers of caramel snap
kissed round by a cutter’s rim
slid between chew and cream
to keep the whole from
unravelling





.

“Foment in the Firmament”


There is a stirring above the stillness,
a slow‑brewed unrest
braiding itself into the blue.

Cloud‑veins thicken,
their edges bruised with light,
and the air tastes of iron and distance.

Somewhere, a wind rehearses its entrance,
curling through the rafters of the sky,
its breath warm with the scent of rain not yet born.

Birds wheel lower,
their wings cutting arcs in the charged flush,
as if tracing the script of what is coming.

The sun, half‑veiled,
becomes a coin passed from palm to palm
in a game no one admits to playing.

And I stand beneath it all,
feeling the pulse of that high conspiracy —
the foment in the firmament —
gathering its syllables,
ready to speak in thunder.




.

Strike flint to enflame,
let the lines take flight,
They bite at the dark,
they shoulder the light;

No throne for the poem,
no chair for its nerve—
It walks till it bleeds,
for a poem’s a verb.





.

Stay with Me

Your touch is arson in my bones
Melting steel, surrendering throne
Choose: my chaos or endless night
Either way, love
— you’re my excruciating light






.

We’ve watched the tide turn,
not with the grace of moon‑drawn water,
but in a churn of noise that drowns the shoreline.

Once, the air here was salt‑bright with exchange;
now it’s thick with echoes of the same refrain.

We keep to the edges,
guarding the memory of what it felt like
when a single, well‑placed word
could still command the room.





.

poems for money,
no kicks for free —
ink on the counter,
pulse on a fee.
y ‘want the spark?
then tip the key.
poetry’s no money-tree

"eye of the beholder"

Inside the iris, a soft glitch—
not failure, a doorbell. Dust
rings the bell of the pupil: enter,
bring whatever light you carry.
Every eye is a darkroom,
every blink a shutter fall.

You call my freckle a dead pixel;
I map it as a star that never learned
to quiet itself. Same speck, two skies.
Your lens likes the hard-edged truth,
mine drags its finger through the wet paint.
Neither of us is wrong. That’s the mercy.

We look at the chipped mug. You see fracture,
a hairline future of split mornings.
I see a riverbed, mineral and patient,
a place to wash the tongue of the day.
Some images refuse to choose between
wound and water. That’s where I drink.

When the frame tilts, colours misbehave:
violet stepping out of its lane, green
ghosting the edge of a leaf like rumour.
Chromatic aberration, the textbook says.
I call it the soul trying out new shoes,
refusing to walk heel-to-toe for anyone.

In your gaze, the city is all scaffolds,
angles knitting themselves into verdicts.
In mine, windows fog and write back.
Compression noise makes lace out of smoke,
JPEG artefacts blessing the brickwork
with reasons to be looked at twice.

Trust the blur, the image said,
and I do: not as surrender,
but as consent to the many versions.
Your blur is a fog I can swim. Mine is
a veil with fingerprints on it,
names smudged into revelation.

The child squints, invents a coastline
in the static of a late-night TV.
The elder polishes the cataract’s cathedral,
letting light arrive as it decides.
We inherit a thousand ways to see;
we choose which ghosts to feed.

Beauty is not a verdict but a verb,
rendering itself at different speeds.
In one eye, the face is chorus.
In another, it is a single bell.
We meet in the middle distance—
and call that distance human.

So, here: stand with me at the mirror
where mercy pixelates into ghost.
Let our grayscale longing lift its chin,
let nostalgia host our clumsy data,
and in the soft glitch near the iris,
find the world we’ve each been making.



.