I might have been twenty
when I had this thought.
Good family, material ease -
she really should
snap out of it.

This was before
I'd ever stumbled
into fruitless darkness,
when mood and circumstance
seemed one and the same.

I thought myself magnanimous
when rather than judging
I rationalised.
"Perhaps we're hard wired
to seek problems to solve,"
I pondered,
"so where there are none,
we create them."

But now
instead of second-hand accounts
of days in bed,
ill-fated relationships
and unaccountable weeping,
I read her own words.

And I am staggered,
inspired,
by her strength
and her insight,

and by how little
we can know of each other
until we are ready
to learn.

The bombs will **** only the guilty.

This time,
the destruction of schools and homes,
of roads, hospitals and libraries,
will be instantly forgiven,
because we will acknowledged by all
to be the good guys.

This time we will know
what happens next.
We will have a plan
and we will execute it
with wisdom, compassion and skill.
And it will work.

This time no vested interests will lurk,
grinning, in the shadows,
waiting to lap sustenance
from spilled blood.
We will have none of that.

This time, our victory will prove
our moral superiority,
not merely that we spend more
on armaments
than they do.

This time, violence will beget peace.
Violence will beget forgiveness.
Violence will usher in
a new and loving age.

This time,
history
has nothing to teach us.

Floating
Laughing
Smoking
Singing
Flying
Drying
And hopping in again
Something sharp touches your skin
It burns
A thousand needles
Of a jellyfish sting
It has a hold of your ankle
And is pulling you downstream
You look down
It's menacing
It's laughing now
And floating
Singing
It's quite demeaning
You fight and fight
But its grip is tight
It pulls you underneath the surface
As the trees around you
Become a world without you
What is that sparkle?
It's golden, silver, bronze
You see domes and towers
Fruitstands and flowers
You quiver
The jellyfish loosens his grip
As you wipe the blood off your lip
Who would have thought
The key to Atlantis
Was in a jellyfish's grasp
Either that or this jellyfish's secretions
Were super hallucinogenic
Either way
This is cool

*wait, how do they even have a swimming pool underwater
and functioning toilets
fish don't even have thumbs
i really don't understand
****

I think I loved you most the winter your heating was broken
And we’d stay inside all morning
Pretending to complain that we couldn’t get out of bed
Our clothes becoming little islands on the floor,
Ones that we could not quite find the courage to visit

Your hand stayed glued to my hip,
Your breath warming my shoulder
Like a long drag of whiskey
That kind that had a home so far away,
In a glass bottle on top of your refrigerator.
The one that would not be opened
Until that fateful day in February,
When everything went wrong

And on that unbearable night
When you joked that you’d freeze to death if I left you
There was a long silence
Like it might be true.

Now it’s warm enough
That I show too much skin when sitting in bars
And you avoid me like the plague,
Whispering in any girl’s ear that’s near to you
Every time you see me watching out of the corner of your eye

We should have stayed inside when the ice began to melt
Because I think
When those doors opened and we finally ventured outside
The world had changed,
And so had you and I.

They say to have a writer
Fall in love with you
So you will never die.
But I say
Seize the love of a musician.
Someone to write you
Into colors in the air
And star-****** behind the eyelids
Of any who will listen
To the tale of you that they wrote.

Musicians, like writers,
Bring light through a fog
With their love-speak and poems.
But music-makers
Can create flowers in winter
And warmth without fire.
Their melodies dance
Over the swish of grass blades
And between the tooth-gaps of children
Whose fingers are sticky
With sweet popsicle juice
While an oil-painted scene
Is painted in your mind.

So be cherished my a musician
And hear yourself forever;
Be sung by a hundred different voices,
Danced by fairies and pretty young girls,
Costumed in dissonance,
Etched into souls.
For you can never really die
When you echo forever in the cavern
Of a good song.

I went up to the hill
that Jack and Jill
once tumbled down
quickly becoming the talk of the town
a terrible reminder of youth
the scene from this hill
one fall down this grassy *****
and your life
becomes the tale of legends
of stories
of perverted wonderings
one tumble down this metaphorical hill
and you leave the land of butterflies and fairy wings
and hit your childhood crown
on the rock of adulthood

I've lost all my baby teeth
But I remember the ache in my gums
The ****** holes they left behind

I exchanged each pearl for a coin
From a glittering fairy tale falsity
A consolation prize for growing up

Bits of bone falling from my mouth
I bid my skeletal farewell
To the pieces of me I no longer needed

You planted kisses
on me like flowers, and from them
a garden grew