A spirit jumping from cumulo to nimbus:
lightning follows in its wake.
You, awake and dreaming, sense the other
world imposed in a brilliant second.
You, here and elsewhere,
are the saint that can see.

A billion songs driving into the earth,
dust rising and settling in their craters.
You, dimly away, hum along
to an impossible sonata.
You, here and elsewhere,
are the saint that can sing.

Good night, always a good night,
we are all together, hunkered down,
waiting for your windows to
subside, to darken.
We, here and elsewhere,
honour the saint that notices
little things.

It was written that
it would be written:

An improbable prophecy offered,
a lithic blossom snatched
from the periodic fist:

Then without words you wander
the bright heart of an eloquent world:
Then without rancour you wither
beneath a thousand tongues of flame.

Didn’t really like this poem very much. Trying to clean it up a bit.

Was I really ever without you? I suppose there was a time
when you were elsewhere in body, elsewhere in dreams.

I shudder now at my desperate economics in your absence;
You are my unexpected affluence, my blossoming prosperity:

You are the whispered promise of a day without night.
You are the promise of a night strewn with suns.

Were you always there at the corners of the world?
I would like to think so, that you were present

even in my poverty, even in my debasement.
I would like to think you were around a corner.

Was I really ever without you? I suppose there was a time
when I was elsewhere in body, elsewhere in dreams.

I shudder now at my meagre aspirations
Scrabbling in dust to disinter a sickening fiction.

I shudder now that you might not have offered yourself
as my shadow past and exuberant future.

That you might not have said, Sell everything for me.
I sold everything, and months later, do not miss myself.

What remains after the fire
is the undiminished stone,
the bedrock of your insanity.

Perhaps one day you will
mortar them into a cairn,
an altar to the furious gods
of your occasional holocaust.

Yet today you are sowing fuel in furrows,
in deeper and deeper wrinkles,
your nostrils brimming acrid,
your mind lost in the strati.

A cigarette tossed against the scree
blossoms like a sudden star.
Again an agonising glance at
the undiminished stone.

Twisted into shape you are a mute
whirlwind of form drinking from the sun,
still equinox you are no longer longer,
all things being equal.

Eyes inward you are unable to inspect
your irresistible fractal curls,
the mesmeric mercuric minutae that
draw me, eyes inward.

That you are that you are is
testimony and testament, the
unfurling world in jasper and gold:
the prologue and the plot running
through it.

It was a dream, a time and half a time:
that original sin in the tension between the poles.

My internal electronics sparking across the gap,
ephemeral imagined notes and the cascading
columns of maths conspiring to
havoc.

But it was just a dream, a time and half a time,
that original sin, that clumsy stumbling
away from it.

Is there a time when you wake up like a person breaking through the surface of an ocean and drawing a deep breath?

Air is life and your throat is a umbilical cord connecting you to it. But other things are life as well. They require you have such a percent of a harmful material.

Do you shudder at the thought of what you were? Of course, of course you do. Go back? Never. But why are you left bruised by the memory as if jealous of yourself being so… free, or complicated, or something. Why are you not happier to have pushed through your own skin to emerge something new?

I have done that. I am still shaking it off like a passing thunder shower. There is a place in my head that has clouded over and needs to clear.

And like that, it’s gone.

You will make his casket out of glass,
and put it in the kitchen on display
as if to say that nothing good can last
as you make dinner next to his decay.

They are the worst photographs,
dripping with vinegar and bile,
soldered to a goose-stepping yesteryear
electrically passing, draped
in slow-decaying binary light.
Insecticide in amber, grisly
tainted hollow ugly strange
isn’t it how my better angels
grow ever toward the light?
Past the six by four window
into another less favourable
time.

Blessed are the amateurs, the vanity presses,
the unkerned letters of the world.

Blessed who’ve not yet begun
listlessly manipulating English
and calling it verse;
who scribble relentless words
like quartz singing from the quarry,
jagged and still three quarters slag;
who have something to say!
who are going to say it!

They have not yet bent double
under the weight of language
and its gravitas.