Ragged Claws

Cities and statues,
churches and gardens:
we garnish the world
with our Gods and our graves.
We’re always dreaming
of something beyond us,
forever leaving
bits of our souls to blind faith.

Yesterday’s full moon
went under a sharp knife.
The snow falls,
like the light leaks
from silver, soft trombones,
the weight of rising smoke,
the murmur of Monk and Davis;
like sudden sparks of lighters
in no-man’s-land,
half hidden, half proclaimed;
the laughter of a girl,
sitting at another table.
Now - or now
is it time to say I love you
or move on?
It’s snowing and the moon [...]

The man next to me was very drunk. He had first tried to talk to the barmaid but she’d been too busy. Now he was trying to start a conversation with me. I wasn’t really paying attention, so I was slightly surprised when I suddenly heard the words:
“In a perfect world slot machines would drink [...]

Outside, the neon and the rain;
in here, the heat
that like soft prayer
rises from the radiator,
slowly moves the curtains.
Distant armies march.
Night’s colours rise again,
to break upon some waiting shore.
There’s dying and soft laughter -
desperate prayers.
We are born again and die again
and we become our nights,
become our stories;
breaking and forever falling,
while the cello plays.

I follow the veins
that run from your wrist
through the pulse in your throat,
to the walls of your temples.
Then we move to the rhythm of blood,
the chords of the night.
We are skin to the drum
and the hand that bind us.
Running like shadows,
hungry and wild,
we move like the darkness
into the light.

I’d like to be what lingers
while you sleep:
the smell of jasmine
and the drops of rain
that cling
to trembling leaves.
I’d like to stay with you,
when you are far away
on private journeys.

God is out drinking;
the Devil is asleep.

The angels linger in the outfield;
who is there to guard my sleep?

Caught between the stony banks
the river now flows meekly
to whatever sea awaits it.
It bears the sun, the mist, the rain
as it endures without complaint
the lonely angler in his boat
and the fat merchant ships
transporting coal across the world.
It flows without comment or speculation.
But once, beset by some dark fever,
its placid waters rose
and broke its stone confinements.
It [...]

It was a competition and a carnival: each tower a candidate and a cacophony of blue. The whole city watched while the twenty carts, each  one representing a tower, held their annual race. In the weeks before the race, every morning, streams of people left town through the six gates and late in the evening [...]

Standing on the bridge,
talking to the white-capped waves
that are not truly there,
I whisper to the ghosts of trees,
somewhere on the other side
of what I left behind,
before it came to this,
I came to this forgotten bridge.
Burn the sails and set the candles.
(I do not really listen to the words.)
Burn the candles, set the sails:
I did not [...]

Long, grey plumes rise
from the chimneys
towards the darker canvas
of this early winter night
and the red triangle lights
of a descending plane
break through the cover of
snow-filled clouds.
Behind me, here
in this fourth floor room,
more present than the world,
more imminent than time,
the warm, soft rise and fall
of your half-covered breasts,
the slow sea murmur of your breath
calling me home again.

Too tired to tell you
the stories you gave me;
too tired to show you
my latest tattoos.
My body is covered
in bright, fearful colours
that keep me awake
with wild fever dreams.
My Lady, I’m tired.
The shadows are rising
like flames
on a funeral pyre.
Too tired to fly now,
to follow the sparks;
too tired to bring you
this old, burning heart.
The light is now dying;
the [...]

So old, you cannot see the summer,
cannot bear the sun
or hear the other trees
whisper ever so politely:
is it death;
is it death
or only sleeping?
So old, the colours of this autumn
fall blindly on the waiting green.
The whitening spiders whisper;
in their webs the spiders shiver:
is it death;
is it death
or only sleeping?
So old now, winter seems the only answer;
the [...]

Why?
I remember now. Like a match struck in some prehistoric cave reveals the scratchy figures of hunters and  prey, I remember. You were always asking me why and I could never find an answer. Now though, I see clearer. I see everything much clearer now. This - this is Paris, yes, some twenty years ago [...]

I want some perfect sentence
fit the night:
the dark and dust of skin and blood;
the hush and dying of the embers
and the stubborn, hidden roots
of life and love
but I’ll make do
with stumble, shadows;
shapes and distances -
wild births and all
these common midnight causes
that I try to work for you.

Por qué una negra noche se acumula en la boca?
- Pablo Neruda
Your muddy shoe-prints,
dried now,
look like fossils:
grim grandfathers
of unlikely fish.
(You’re gone though
and I’m left
with memory and ghost.)
The two door gate still creaks
like the badly oiled wings
of pterodactylae,
with a touch of dying forest
and a rain of warm, dead rust.
(You’re gone though
and I’m left
with intervening shadows.)