The moon dangled hard through the city
and the moth-lamps hummed discord with the wetness.
The dripping stars like accidents in spilt milk,
waited for a mop.

Walking home I hallucinated men
coiled up with the smoke-stacks.
They pressed through the brickwork and
as shadows flickered in the street-light.

Though my torch cut them down like saplings
and the moon ripped off their heads like scarecrows,
each man was a sermon,
a vastness straining the borders of sight.

A tailored uselessness hung there arms,
waspish currents tore from their mouths.
Starlings turned on their cross-wind,
as messengers of some sleeveless silence.

The moonlight fell on them like whorls,
like hurricane petals, hostile
were the shopsigns, they moved backhandedly.
The gulls raged. The crows filled silence they left.

The shadows all danced to the back of my head.
And when I turned they were gone.
I'm plucking for life and a body.
That shrinks the world to their size.

I

****** fire
   Scattered with
salt of sacred youth
  
   Split & dislocation, your empire light
          (A memory/reproached by vines)

          Replaced by hills of small cosmic stones
formed like a scream in the sand

  Pagodas wrinkle beneath
The sunset's ardent temper
                   (nobody can escape the smoke)

Mothers give up their daughters

Heroes are marked by volcanic glaciers

Anthills are suffocated softly and without sound

Death has taken up other hobbies

Cheeks resemble the shade of a dream

I am greeted by your wolf of absence
it's hairs are thick and knotted

whimpering
(a shadow)
of what it once was

The toothroot maw of distant islands
tremble as a foreign vessel
curves around the bend of florid pine

Sails be blessed
              & branded with
                     symbols of balance
                    
Islands echoing polyrythm

    (Small stone houses, ritualistic, romanced by careful horns)

The old are tempted by decorative
horses crafted of leaves which dance and
enliven
                 the warming sea
                
Ladies dressed in Batik patterns
     carve quietly at shopsigns to capture their stale glow
    
I realize now the black underbelly of May

I see
Performances of it's ancient verse in all
who bear children

     All who practice with the weapons of abuse
          & the perfumes of mortal love

In thought
and acknowledgment

(Accompanied by tenderness & pull of lavender in a basket)

II

I have been taught to no longer fear alive

(alive) at the will of taxicabs

Of eyes which haunt the heart/

   (tears)
            
  The strangeness of
  mental carousels/
              
Rapid entanglement/
          
(death)
  
          Palaces conjured by the Sun/
          
Basement conversation/

Iron candy that worships your body/

/////

An ever present sound of black
        
           The black of love &

  nightfall in yearning

Where the Northern sky
dies with adoration,
swallowed by an
orchard's olive skin

       (A wine for exchanging poetry)

& like a static Summer unrehearsed with cathedral orchestrals

Or willow's wind flowing in through my bedroom

I will miss the black animal's fur,
of the silk you covered me with
in my sleep

(midnight shelter)

III

Lamenting with another woman
for another time
devoted yet fractured

A landscape scar
for Springs Bengal hunger

paused
on a door as wide as the mirrored
cavern where promises were forged &
betrayed,

what happened to the Tsunami which drowned your past?

IV

On the truth of time gone by
I wake with the burden of
every season
& you remain even still

You are the day's end

Could they have known, their chin’s tilt angled high,
At towers that grew to cast a twilight gloom
Unbroken by the sun’s slow chart ‘cross sky,
Fluorescent shopsigns starring streetside flume?
Flux and stasis flowing through their time,
They held against the ticking clock or bomb;
Strobing, flickering, dimming down a crime.
New buildings bloomed, with holes cut in their side,
For dragons peering for a South Sea gain,
Crouched high on boulders, astride mountainside,
Sun sparking on the dragon’s mark of Cain.
Though dragons loom and shadow out the light,
The Fragrant harbour’s lustre blazes bright.