I could become a tree,
some garden growing
season-shaped
and silent:
lust and love and language
growing quiet in the night.
I want to be your lover though
and friend,
a darkness bleeding light
and hope,
a dance of strangers
coming home.
I want to love you,
be your skin
and waking nights,
the quiet places burning,
changing - yes:
I want to be inside your secret, sacred places.
Too many thoughts,
too many doubts:
my head a poison shape balloon,
filled with nightmare gore;
my body swollen with the kind of questions
army engineers turn into acts of war,
where dreams are raped and tortured
in the cold steel light of day.
My love,
come rescue me
and take away these mirrors
that became my universe.
Break the glass
and tear this blasphemous old skin
off lonely [...]
Rossinante,
take me to a hospital,
muffle-hoofed
and not too eager to oblige.
It will be my final stay,
my final stage.
The crazed man fighting white-coats:
it’s not the noblest of quests
but one of means,
one that will do;
a grinding to a halt,
not worthy of a song.
Rossinante,
having endured my lonely madness
for so many years,
my friend,
deliver me from dreams and longing:
this puppet’s work [...]
When I enter the cathedral,
touch its portals for good luck,
walk these isles,
where left and right
the dust of ages
dances in the light
that shines through stained-glass windows,
do I think of God,
some mad Creator?
Do I think of death,
eternal life?
Do my footsteps
follow some old prayer;
do I look for answers carved in stone?
Or is this just another way of saying:
life [...]
We were out for the day,
back in the forest.
I was looking for firewood,
dead wood;
you were bravely ducking dragons
and low and sneaky branches.
Rain was falling;
squirrels were so busy
rushing up and down a final summer rain;
leaves were whistling, wrestling, whispering,
singing and still sinuously clinging
to the soaked and laden trees.
You were looking for fairies and witches,
trails of bread-crumbs
and [...]
What strange trombone or clarinet
pierced through the skin of night?
What tone, now quiet, high or low
left echoes of some soft lament
and left me in its quiet wake?
Some half-remembered dream
(of wings and snow and island trees
and hair made of the morning wind
and strange deep pools of hungry flesh)
like sheets still clings to me.
The dark is like [...]
What I sometimes want
is to be Shakespeare
or John Donne,
lying in some famous grave,
my face on postcards
and my bones revered,
visited by love-sick pilgrims.
My words still copied
and soft-spoken
by a world of lovers,
who find meaning in their shadow fire,
whispered through some endless night,
when strangers meet
and fall in love.
But mostly what I want to be
is whisper on your breath,
a [...]
Birds are doing summersaults
against a rapture sky.
This our city,
pock-marked with the best intentions
mankind had to spare,
lies against this summer sky
like some old beached Leviathan.
Statues dressed in pigeon
melt inside the summer heat
that melts into these endless nights:
so camp-fire soft and slow,
made for lustful sleeping-bags
and whisper throat-capped laughter.
And whisper wisdom has these nights
belong to shadows talking
of this [...]