i know better than
to share what i call my
poetry
with the person i love.
as if for better, as if for worse.

my joints,
like my ideas,
often unravel.
my burning anaesthetics!
they leave nothing behind
but wasted time
and ash, whence no phoenix rises,
and potential turned to smoke.
i find only crude dreams that prop up this sordid reality.
oh my aching joints!
what escapes me: my escapes!
i should find new crutches
—at least then i'd have the capacity to read books of philosophy—
and i must forge a path
that heals my broken legs:
the path shall be made by treading it
though it shall bring great pain.
oh my aching ideas!
or - why not? - what's the harm
in one more attempt
at escape? i suppose it's no use: fact.
but what are these words now?
a true declaration must overflow with an act.

i'm undone,
thank god and all the ******* angels
in heaven, and fallen ones too:
i'm undone
before your endless, ecstasy-emitting body.
these ruins of the future
are a paradise
in this riveting flux; consecrated and desecrated,
made seraphic and savage
in the undulating ebb and flow of our flesh.

and so i guess it's a question of whether the possibility
             of being close to each other
is worth enduring the actuality of the distance between us
             that we'll feel all the more sharply in the heart
for having already tasted the fruit of intimacy
             and found that all other delights are unsatisfying
for want of what was and what could yet be
              if it could yet be.

terrified again
of speaking
of speaking but the words not coming
of speaking and the words coming but not reaching
of speaking and the words coming reaching but losing
all significance upon arrival
as if they had wings
but no feet to stand on
and so were always already destined
for crash landing—and lo,

what flights of folly.

was i seen and heard and perceived for what i really am?

unknown.
if anything is clear:
i must learn to listen harder
if i am ever even to dream of truly speaking:
this itself is what it is to think.

these things are most difficult of all:
(not to scorn, mock, or despair at human action, but) to understand
to be kind to yourself
to pledge your body to the Idea
to persist in being
                           kind to yourself.

all Ideas have been betrayed.
a philosopher says:
all the world will ever offer you is the temptation to surrender.
the ethical act is to resist
to transgress
the transcendentally
stupid
cruel
law of this world.

there will be risk, there will be laceration, and anguish
but no one moment
is unendurable.

mieux vaut un désastre qu'un désêtre.

and so what might become of us?

imagine the most beautiful being in all of existence
and you'll almost be there.

i know nothing of love
that is not an extension of the sun.

i have become light.

i know nothing
but fascination.

what chance
to have laughed and danced

and to go on.

our song will never end:
it will only be taken up
by other instruments.

i have become light.

all that is lost
returns in altered form:
disguised, transfigured.

we will be transfigured.

what you seek
is seeking you.

how certain i was the dark would find no end!—and lo,

i have become light.

stronger than time.

a site of communication, ecstatic love, art
in the eye of god.

a dancing star.

i have become light.

what chance!

—i and all the others that will love you
forever and forever and
forever—

what chance
to have laughed and danced

and to go on.

they wanted
they didn't know
how
if
if it matters
but what else
if not
if not

else if but not wanted
matters not how
not knowing knowing if
if what else unknowing
not wanted but else wanted
if wanted
but how wanted
if only how wanted

i reach into the treasure box of language:
what was once shining and vital, far off,
now rots in my hand.

it brought them something like catharsis,
knowing it wasn't working.
"that's enough now," one said to the other.
that was enough, for one, at least, and the rest
is the future.

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.

wings flapping, silent as death
and white like a ghost...
owl screeching in the night.

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.

i am—i fear my continued being;
solitude trapped like my reflection;
half self-made into a slave, enabling:
the other half to be coerced freely
like the pig in its dear muck wallowing,
my semblances calling themselves happy.

in person sober always concealing:
depression has been my master since
the first memory worth remembering.
and we laugh of how life is a cinch
amid vital eyes where every smile
is beautiful—unwelcome: struggle, bile.

we, in politics still non-existent
as the spectacle explodes on our backs,
our atomisation as consistent
as series, as the urgency that lacks,
as our enemy's secret attacks that
give us illusions to keep us content

and indignant and passive and apart:
before apocalypse, and our masters.
every superficial wound or scar:
a signifier of something deeper,
a structure probably still gushing blood;
a symptom of unequal heritage.

i am a slave severed from history,
from forgotten strength of my fore-mothers,
from ignored conquests of my fore-fathers,
from my foreign birth-place and mystery,
grown comfortable in my tailored chains
and ideologies without ideas.

i groan through narcotic smoke for vistas
clear as the love i know is in your heart,
for shared stories of logical revolts,
for redemption of past revolutions,
for real collapse of tyrannical abstractions,
for my masters to fear my continued being—

for passionate thought, to be subject with you,
our loyalty fused, our direction true.

my love for you
was spoken into
existence.
the night is still silent,
the moon cloud-hidden.

what could i say that i am?
by the time the raindrop is
illuminated,
by the fulmination from zeusian bolt,
it is already no longer
itself.
its every relation pours into this world,
sustaining this green world,
sustaining this vanishing world
lit up like our raindrop.
and what if light was merely the shell
of darkness?
in any case: there's much to do, and much that can be seen
before the next sets of species make a home of our cities.

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.

i've lost what i didn't see coming
—i saw it go all too clearly.
i can only wait and hope to find
what i won't see coming again,
and again,
joy.

the raw heat
of your breath on my neck
sends shivers down this spine:
these warping bodies,
spectrums
of dread and ecstasy.

dark consuming thoughts:
cannibals
secreting themselves.
(out of the nothing, no longer,
that was the voice of truth.)

rattling in the canyons of madness,
where did you make this pilgrimage from?
where are you going?
or are you dancing, with no concern with where you might finish,
but only for how well you danced?
this man was given the world and this one
a space on the pavement
and hands to beg and a skull to contain a torturer and shame—
a thousand others pass by:
hollow, hollow, hollow! and i the same!
who wills the world to be as such?
it's not hard to know why.
who builds monoliths, piercing the gutted sky,
on the destitution of my connection to you
out of the concentrated expense of countless invisible victims?
in the shadows of their towering opulence:
sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.
i'm sorry, i do not know, alone, how to help.

dreamlike: absent when i wake.
never forgotten:
how unlike the dream.
another year.
the same seasons.

i behold the face
of beauty, desired, in the
rebus of a dream:
it wakes me, i wake into
a dream, the escape that is reality,
where i can forget.

morning came
not only the night we left

behind us
our dreams and intimacies

each other
all for the slow forgetting

distant star
light cast off like a shed skin

morpheus
adds us to the collection

letting go
does not come so easily

for those who
against fate, held others close

where are all these words going?
where have they been intended to go?
i whisper
an incantation that
resonates
with desire.
it ends up
a curse.

i was told the wind would tell me my name
that could not be spoken, so came the breeze
with secrets undeciphered through the trees
that one autumn of unheard of refrain.

but ever since that labyrinth opening
the walls have been moving and the winter
of eclipsed understanding will linger.
how briefly light comes, when you think of it—

what more could you need to transfigure a place?
the wind is coming from somewhere remarkably
far off to dance just a little with the curtain;

spring and it came all this way to caress a face.
we come from mystery and go back to mystery
and this alone we can say for certain.

stumbling through the endless
snaking valley of twisted letters,
lost, looking for you;
the shadows do not always inscribe fear—
what i fear is that you are
where i cannot go.

a whole sky to be turned to ash in my lifetime
whence no phoenix of our kind rises:
beetles, bacteria and capitalism proved immortal.
the train approaches the precipice; the closer
to the engine, the more comfortable and powerful the passengers.

children cry up from the depths of debt for bread and help and shelter
met either with the ideologue's injunction "austerity!"
or deaf ears and money
invested in guns, bombs and rhetoric.

a whole body to decay and to bloom,
to stray through the fields and into the tomb,
with hands
to give shape to screaming heard only in the shadows of my eyes

to trace out the grand design of my doom
to articulate on pages my sense of suspension in dread

to caress another body and forget it all in our ecstasy

or perhaps to lend freely, so as to build sandcastle-utopias
together, on the shores of the blood-red sea of history
by the monotonous waves and the sorrowful, joyful,
invisible, indifferent, post-anthroposcenic tide approaching.

a whole body to be wasted or used,
to be thrown into the fray or a figure of privilege abused:
an opportunity, or a catastrophe.
we must chose, we must chose.

opening up,
driving
them away.
opening up again,
the only way.

most things are ****.
the spectacle goes on.
the last **** of the human species.
we're all doomed, but this has nothing
to do with you and me
now in this room, our bodies
and the heat between them.
let's get high and ****.

i lay down the full weight of my sorrow
on a bed of letters
and pray the night lasts till the end of time:
rest, rest, wake not tomorrow.
alas, every word turns like the days.
perhaps i would have fallen in love in the dream
had i not stayed up to see the heavy dawn.
i'm used to it, i'm fine.

are my lips to utter more lies?
if only i was a caterpillar
with a new world to look forward to
merely dreaming i was human in the meantime.
are my lips to utter more lies?
if only the past
were shed away as easily as it is
for moths and butterflies.

my demise, like a delicate flower,
grows in the palm of my lonely hand
and on the tip my withheld, powerless tongue.

a leaf falls,
it all comes too soon—
be ready, prepare,
if you would have it.

you can be
the dream
they forget the next morning.
i'm up all night
thinking about you.

did you notice when the words shed their skin?
the hour was late in the idle day
and the light of significance grew dim.
at the shore, the waves compelled you to stay

and you saw, in the waves that slid away
all the ways in which you could have altered
the course, and return, of waves come to claim
what was only ever borrowed from them.

two serpents of galactic consequence
are coiled in the incommensurable.

twenty years gone by
like a dream.
still not woken.

who am i to deny signs?
footprints in the snow,
a sign that someone has
walked this path in
the cold, alone, before i did.
everywhere scattered, these worldly signs.
who am i to deny signs?
this midnight blue on
Barnett Newman's canvas
is not blue, but a blueness embodied—
not some scattered object or
amorphous person, but the open, what it is
to see, the difference
between this instance and the beyond,
this sensuous encounter.
who am i to deny signs?
these eyes, that look at me and see
me seeing what it is to be
seen, not as footprints
in the snow, nor even a work
of art, as no thing among
other things, but outside, outside this
universe of interpretation,
signs that speak of
an entirely other world of
experience, perception, possibility, of
love
that i can never
really know, for all that,
but still it calls and
demands that i decide
if i'll risk what is precious to me for
what could be precious to me or
nothing in the least.
but who am i to deny signs?

escaping the body
i live with
into fantasy
becomes just as tiring
and repetitive
and repetitive
as the days of flesh,
and produces only blank maps
and nebulous passion,
little ecstasy in comparison
and not even a trace of edifice.

in search of time-images and full-body-moments
that send my heart
pounding like a thousand drums;
i know there are eyes out there, i know, i know,
—that aren't hell—
that can suspend me in that sublime kind of vertigo.

where is the time that drips like honey from the ark of eternity?
under the starry skies that are you eyes!
and yes, i've used that metaphor too many times:
so be it! so be it!

soft are the lips of truth, unworthy are my own.
up, down: my ever undulating tongue.
sinking into your seraphic image,
i slow dance with plasma shed from the sun.

humans will go extinct.
all memory will vanish
like it never happened.
look deep into my eyes
as you take me with passion.

having
not having
having but not
enough
enough but not
wanted, saying
if but not for having                
nothing
not having but saying anything not
enough
but enough
if wanted but not enough.

grasping
ungrasping
grasping and letting go
grasping and not
reaching not enough
not catching not
holding
on, but go on
grasping, in the mud
ghosts for the letting go
not reaching but
again
again not catching but
closer
if still not holding if only but not
but saying enough
if saying is enough.

either me, here, wanting
for what isn't here,
what is lacking,
or,
the wanting, in its own fullness
drawing me in or pulling me out
from where i am not.
either way,
the waves ebbing up the beach
and the sky emptying itself
into a valley of time
somewhere where words
alloy with bodies
and metamorphose.

tiny raindrops fall,
dancing,
helpless in the wind.
i think of politics:
inevitable struggle.

a shock in the heart,
a brief glimpse (of the artist's divine),
a long aching memory:
a smile,
an opportunity
missed.

i’m always amused watching people
wake up from naps.
i like those sounds they make,
somewhere
between hums and yawns, not
ungrateful
but not impressed.
they remind me of cats, stretching,
the way they
softly feel about for a world they
aren’t quite ready for
just yet.
i like their eyes that don’t want
to open straight away,
as if it were too bright, or
as if they were squinting
at something in the distance, receding,
or
approaching,
or
impossible to tell.
it’s true
that the closer i looked at people, the more
often they would ask me:
what the hell are you doing so close to my face,
have you never heard of personal space?

that smile inspires a desire,
a desire to inspire that smile of yours myself.

plenty of the future
will not be consumed
by the ensuing seconds,
probably
(depends on geography).

take your time if you can, come what may.
you've lots of history to wrestle with
before you can truly reach a new day.

better to have slept and dreamed
and dreamed and dreamed and dreamed.
staying up all night
where you are far away dreaming.

i cannot let go
of what i cannot
hold on to.

stumbling through the endless
snaking valley labyrinth of twisted letters,
lost, looking for you;
the shadows do not always inscribe fear—
what i fear is that you are
where i cannot reach.

greeting faces just to watch them go.
slipping away, the makings
of fragile eternity.
finding traces of you here, traces there:
i grasp them so close to my heart,
so tightly
that they are crushed.

the path between us
is made of words
and with every step i take,
i step on something jagged,
and i have so far to go
to a place i cannot even know is really out there.
(i go on, there's nowhere else
worth going.)

by that time it was the second worst time of my life
by now it was the third

unless you’re a mathematician
infinity
is a dream
but this set-up is not-all
keep your trans-finites, we'll keep our dreams

if Nietzsche teaches us anything it’s that we had to invent laughter
if only to live with our tears
but he teaches us many other things, useless and wonderful things
like dancing

and Seneca asked why cry over parts of life
while the whole of it calls for tears
and well
perhaps because its parts come too few
or too many at a time

all we lack are general and special theories of error

decisions
against decisions

it’s true you have to repeat the same to reach something new
but it only happens through that final repetition
that infinite fold
where you’re told

you’re untold

again

rest

yet

your wisdom will get old before you do

your unrest will outlive you and i know it’s no comfort but resistance is never futile
just look at the ant slaves stolen at birth with no future who revolt against the empire of their oppressors to spare their former homes where their same blood struggles on again nameless
and drop the drugs if they impede your work and stop you from being the animal at your limit
if they cut off your body from what it can do
there’s even less than no future for you

‘my dear sea up in arms at the wrong shore’
i was a beached whale
but yes Don Paterson can **** the time like no other before it kills me

and as for the tests to come, sum(s) will have cheated you all out of two or three centuries at best

unless

may i become the rains where the drought persists,
and strength for those who need to resist;
may i become the pole star for those lost at sea,
and shelter for those who need to flee.

may i become a twilight for those who've known only night,
and healing balm and bandages to ease their pain;
may i become a ladder out of their pit and up to new heights,
and may i become a hammer set against their chains.

may my soul become a song
and may its melody become a protest and resistance,
may it find harmony, echo, and resonance,
as struggles go on and on.

oh my body,
may i become
all that others have been for me,
as struggles go on and on.