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

drowning anguish in
tantric abandon.
a smile like the sea at dawn.
the body glows
in solar eroticism.

how are you?
who knows?

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

i am attached to you
as is the rain
to the cobble stone clouds.

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.

i can't get you out of my system,
you poison.

if only i could be the night
so as to find you looking,
full of wonder,
into my eyes and abyss.

in every field
let language be the bees
to our flowering ideas.

i grow tired of my repetitions
i grow tired of
well, you know.

i know there is solace somewhere
between the pages
i haven't the strength to turn.

i let you go
like the smoke from my lungs.
something remains.

most people leave an impression on me
like footprints in the sand,
washed away by the waves that encroach over time.
you're more like the meteorite
that wiped out the dinosaurs:
you re-cast the dice of my world.

in-between cherry blossom
faces,
the dragon.

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.

glass goliaths steal food from the poor without voices
to feed fat pockets.
eat the rich.

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.

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. the step-ins force me
down and out like the street hands ignored.
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.

in the beautiful eyes
of my staunch comrade,
untold suffering
of the voiceless countless nameless.

in the dim grey light
of a rainy afternoon
tires roll over wet road.
if i could stretch out the night
the world would still be lit
by the daybreak of your eyes.

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.

in the true temple
of solitude,
no emotions, no passions
are forbidden.
but no pilgrimage has been made.

in the waking night,
the body's muscles ache,
but secretly,
its imagination gallops.
crossing distance, never reaching you.

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.

is that it?
no.

it feels like you died
and now
i'm afraid of ghosts.

in the garden of my life,
the seed of death is planted.
the seasons roll over me
like the winds over the ocean.
the tree of love bears no fruit
and the ivy and vines of isolation grow tighter.
the night sky is a mirror:
every star is collapsed.
each gulf is expanded by the absence of all the yawn of time;
half the moon laughs at my misfortune, justly,
while the other half, unseen, weeps.
dreams that fill my silences are destined not to come true.
every word has become flimsy and untrustworthy,
but they're all i have to build a bridge that reaches you.

(if hell is other people
then submit me to the devil's reign.
if solitude is freedom
then slip me into the heaviest chains.
allow me my weakness—for now, for now.)

i want to know you
like wet clothing knows your skin.

i want you
to be another
world i can explore,
and someone to reveal
the hidden vistas of my own.

i would never have found you
had it not been for the dark,
oh star, cold, distant,
long accepting star.

i am learning to love with my ears
for if there is such a wonder as love
beating hearts are too frail a vehicle.
a heart hears nothing, a voice is the all.
i could not want for more than a voice.

awake
waiting

for the call
that isn't coming.

laughter and smiling
faces of friends,
adumbrations that
reveal my loneliness.
speak up, tortured soul.

i am a prisoner of my past,
i am a shadow of my future:
caught between a collapsing star
and a nova, perhaps close, invisible:
there, courage - vision - is demanded of me;
an abyss looks into an abyss;
am i up to it? on your head be it:
catastrophe is the opportunity missed.

what's red, green, black
and packed full of empowered women?
the future
if we're to have one.

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.

alas, i've heard it asked: how can we
write poetry after Auschwitz?
i don't know. and prose? i don't know: gone mad
the whole world implodes and dips its dove's foot into my purple brow:
in a dream, ink erupts from under my dirt encrusted fingernails
and it is the transubstantiation of my rainbow stained blood,
and the void was flooded:
what's a word? more than i—more than i can show.
how did they write poetry after colonialism?
after other slaves and other genocides?
i don't know. Rimbaud traded in slaves, and, before his fury,
wrote masterpieces... perhaps its obvious; a bad pun, to help us cope,
—he even left the path to his divinity,
but all this has nothing to do with anything—.
perhaps every genocide needs its herald poets.
and the rest, how did they write? i don't know.
perhaps it was not their concern;
they desired to write, and there, they did not give way, and so
were right.
and is it the same with us, as we write
through the screams of the however many millions coming from Congo
and from however many other scenes similar? i—
perhaps i do not need to know,
perhaps, in fact, i cannot write poetry.
if i'm to try, it pertains to me to be of use in case this comes to a fight.

and life, if life is drama,
then there will always be roles:
there will always be the part of the villain that needs playing,
an immortal space to be filled by actor after actor,
we cannot stop them, we cannot stop them;
our enemy is a hydra's head!
the task, then, is to re-write the script!
ad lib won't cut it!
cast away your hope, boredom and wonder:
we'll need fire and a pen mightier than a golden sword,
and softly spoken words that can split history asunder.

you spend so long looking for the right combination of words
they took your silence as a final answer.

the discovery
of others
is the greatest discovery
anyone
could ever make.
recovery is more than an empty sound.
if you
don't know
this truth, then know
you are close.
closer than you could ever know.
resume the struggle
and you shall be
rewarded
in full.
between one and another
there is a pilgrimage without end.
a friend will save your life.
the body
is the location
of grace.
all the beauty of the world
can be witnessed
in a single caring face.

i've spent my life so far
collecting advice
i refuse to follow.

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

moss on the rocks
fed by the stream passing over
—slip

the wheel turns
and gains no ground.
the wheel turns eternally
and in this endless moment
gains no ground.
the wheel turns,
wearing itself away
in the void and vacuum.
where is this place
if not where i find my love
without you?

the world turns;
how many more rotations
until i turn
—as the apex torsion
of all movement in the universe—
to see you?
there the world will be still
and true.

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

my tasteless escapes
always end up escaping,
leaving me trapped.

a world for us all
or no world at all:
it's not a motto,
but a question, yes, solemnly,
and a call.

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

yes, it is
so, that
the word
is the ******
of the thing—
but it
can happen

that a name
gives life.
it is so say it is
so. say it is. it
remains.
a trace.
at least
forever say forever as if forever
will never
have been
the same
again.

we
will always
have
always
come
what may.
say come what may.
as if always would be always.
a wager.
if you can. if you can.
for you can.

how they are enjoying themselves!
I want to tell them a haiku
or a senryu or a tanka or something
but no one makes time for minimalism.
(how they must maximise everything!)

my life
is going to cost me dearly.
i didn't ask
for any of this.

my body and soul,
signed away before birth.
the devil takes me.
i try to sell my time into slavery:
it's all i've got, it's all i've got.
but i'm dead labour and depressed.

my life
is going to cost me dearly.
i didn't ask
for any of this.

and could it even be
that i'm in fact a lucky one?
aye, but there are luckier still
and always those less fortunate
while history remains that which it was made into;
the higher up you go, the less gratitude there is.
in retrospect, to never have been
would have been more than enough for me.

my life
is going to cost me dearly.
i didn't ask
for any of this.