Stick my face in your neck
I started to smell you in my shampoo
I shower because the water running
Down my waist is just as scalding
As your fingers digging into me

I run my fingers through my hair
Wishing the strands were yours instead
Your cheeks aren’t mine to kiss anymore
I feel your touch in the blanket I bought for us
I sleep naked in winter as if
I’m showing you every part of myself

You wouldn’t understand it in words
I would know you blind
I would know you through smell and touch
Through the taste of your neck under my mouth
Through the sound of your laugh, even if
It’s just the sound of breath through your nose

Turn onto
Trap grounds
Spend a moment
Curated Eden
Silver bushed
Wet scuffing squirrel
Shoots under
Rooted upturn of trunk
Slakes back
Hairy tendril roots
Finger away
Dappled heat
Old breath of rhubarb
Chokes
Stumble drunk elder
Fizzes nose
Alerted fresh
Up there hear
High branched breath
Look down there
Mushroom home
At foot
Lowly  mauve
Modest flesh
Penetrate deep
Immense
Deep dark
Wet dark
Soil
Absorbs
Thunderous
Footfall
Unperturbed

The mantis shrimp
Sees all that I never could.
My creator, ever frugal,
Gave me gifts
Of word and tongue
But only just this once,
Bits of light cowed by the sun.

I peer through the window,
Too short to see those
Violet peaks.

I brush past reality
Like the eyelash fluttering past
My cheek,
Never to really know.

I remember it all, actually.
More than I'd like to have.
I remember waking up to
The scent of breakfast
I’d soon find was made for one.

I remember walking down
The stairs to lock eyes with you
As you were opening the door.
I remember the feeling
Of dread that crushed me
Under its weight as
I understood your gaze.
I don’t remember being sick.

Even though you were gone,
I remember the dark shade of
Canary that reflected from
The plate in front of me and
Tinted our home.
I don’t remember the lights being broken.

I remember hearing your voice
Call me from our room.
I remember the sharp ringing that
Endlessly reflected off the
Carpet walls of our home
Despite the silence.
I don’t remember picking up the fork.

I remember when
My senses returned to me.
When I was cured.
When the lights were fixed.
When I put the fork down.
I remember the
World refusing to warp any longer.
I remember the scent of
A breakfast made for one.
Your final gesture of kindness.
I don’t remember deserving it.

I remember sitting.
I remember eating.
I remember the
Overwhelming taste of guilt,
The taste of wetness,
The taste of salt.
I remember the taste of
French toast.
Though,
I don’t remember crying.

Perhaps there is a dragon palace somewhere
flowing with emerald scales, where ice-colored
sunlight rings in the wind, where soundless
mountains hide their bare faces in purple shadows.

This world, a transparent garment ,
blushes with the seagull’s shriek,
pales with the dove’s soft coo,
brightens with seasons singing
newness, clouds with the heart’s
sorrows.

The music of colors invades
the senses, scarlet sopranos,
jade’s deep base, distant ringing
of silver planets. rainbow banners
that gossip in the wind.

An arpeggio of colored sounds,
each unique in its own tone,
from the lullaby
of sunset to the ****** of
dawn’s glacier blue.

Seeing, hearing, naming,
assembling, each sensation
to its own order of allure.

all my past
      imposes on my breath today

i enter a grand mosaic public building
        and on goes my medical face mask
i join the back of the queue with my documents in one hand
            and my numbered butcher ticket
                          in the other
i admire the mosaics
               a jarring tide of art against the bureaucratic purpose
                     of these rooms
gauzed in with own product exhaust
       all my past  is attending    
exhumed
  patted  into my breath
    baiting remembrance with unsubtle notes
for example :
   integrated spittings of 'drum' tobacco (i quit a decade ago)
horning catches of cologne every boy used as a teen
seasonal scents  unweaned from deep in my system
(some reigned in from the different countries
                                                    i lived in or visited)
then i am frisked back to infancy   with breast milk and rusks
it's all there    a basking flippancy
all there in musk about my face
  one fragrance after another

it's an honest relief
     to host an alternative to my 'old man' breath
           but odd and concerning
something of the brain ?

As I sit on this cold bench
In nature,
Twilight rising,
Feeling the crisp biting air,
Smelling the dampness of the leaves,
Sensing and finding solace in the space all around me,
I am reminded of a similar November evening as a child,
Where I stayed out as long as possible on my own,
Imagining adventures,
Enjoying the moment,
And the assault on my senses,
Until too much dark had descended,
And mum called me in.

Only the smell of a bonfire is missing now,
And no one to call me back in.

I'm fully present,

my body, all my senses --


here, in this garden.