bathed in these colours like petals falling

from the fragile mosaic of hazard

finding you far off shingles and caverns

far from me that is:

fragments, multiples, deserted islands

discoveries

stellar puzzle pieces of no design.

the passions rising the tides of asking.
in the grapples of night quenching thirsting
       more.

there is for lack of want no lack of want
of want, nor time lost in the direction
       of origins

of endings

of one unfinished.

before you know it you have set up a world
of selves and others
where one of you – more often more – is bound to get hurt.

the stories telling themselves
apart.
the whole remaining inconsequential.

the body will not be accepted
as easily as day
gives itself up.

treading the shifting waypoints
the choices waysides of occasions
of partials.

i set out like a madman
into the streets of alibis
looking for a word
as incongruous as love.
before i knew it, all the lights
were switched off.

it’s not a light story.

i just think before knowing you won’t know that it’s something you don’t want to know
so if you take this road
know i will be running ahead
and i may fall for all my looking back.
turtles all the way down.

i’m like the world, i’m in permanent crisis
but like the world i am vast
i hide serene places, and lonely places full of factories
and deserts populated by those sharing triumph
and defeats and misery and not the means for us all
and by all means let the flowers bloom in the ruins
but worker bees will be needed and the right dance to boot.

this pen writes out the end, my walking stick,
my staff for parting seas on this planet
that’s personal and purely arid.
this spells out the end, this called here and now:
new beginnings
tides summoned
sails set
ends of the earth reached and leaped across.

waiting
waiting for someone to have been waiting.

the empires that seep into the marrow
of the bones breaking under the weight of
ghosts from every time period leaden
with unrevolted tools – unreal futures
exchange on tomorrow collaterals
echoes of empty homes unheard amid
the jeering of parliament and bomb drops
racket media revolving doors all’s
for the taking when it comes to foreign
resources or big business building walls
and the means to defend them and to send
people fleeing as if turning treadmills
of off-shore profit in hoards and stomped on
for state’s sake or fossil fuels which are like
investment banking and nuclear subs:

we do not need them, they will **** us all.

i am just a shadow in the dream of a ghost
of these flows of light that are lost on you
like so many endless turning maelstroms
at a molecular level, i too
not noticing through all the commotion
i am in the orbit of a black sun.
your woman, your woman does not exist.
a man is made of insecurity
and all the history of violence.
the symbolic universe is not
big enough for freedom. it will not be
expanded by words: detention centres
must collapse – yarl’s wood, its whole idea, a start
to end systematic sub-contracted
sexist racist subsidised violence.

and man should rather perish than take and steer
and twice rather perish than make himself
hated and feared. he said from on high
paraphrasing a misogynist.
britain: two women a week are murdered
at home, by a partner or ex-partner;
one third turned from refuge for lack of space;
austerity closes thirty-two refuges
and counting.

by that time every body ventured
had been a surrogate. a gateless gate
left completely unopened wide
so too was i. pretending pretending.
they emerged out of nothingness like
heart valves. metaphysics could not hold them
shut or otherwise. these step-ins wear me
down and out like the street hands ignored
the talk of the place of the door replaced
on its hinge other not left unswung yet
yet, another could not find their way in
for lack of my trying, for lack of want
wanted, of a whole ark’s tender madness
where like palestine every olive branch
burns to cinders of grief
on no tv.

here no messages to be drawn, or else: struggle.