Ragged Claws

 
God (but you are beautiful)
I whisper,
half afraid to breathe
or close my eyes.
So beautiful -
so beautiful (and here with me)
and I am old and
I am hungry, lonely
and not used
to worlds of wonder.
Come (she comes to me)
now - and naked
and I die a
thousand miracles
of dreaming.

 
(A bit of character assassination)
Given that the play has moments of obscurity,
even before it tumbles into awkwardness,
and admitting further that a character
who has to face a bungled plot
cannot be held responsible for all his failures,
Hamlet truly is pathetic:
seeing ghosts and playing hard to get,
fleeing to England and then back again,
suddenly deciding madness is its [...]

 
Fireflies and flowers and mummified pharaohs:
everything’s dying with breakneck speed.
All of our moments are dying around us;
we’re shedding our breath with our skin.
Mozart is gone and so is next century;
now is the skull within.
There are no morals and there is no prayer
against or to Entropy.
Fireflies and flowers and mummified pharaohs:
it has been tried in bronze [...]

So, it’s bubbly
and what of it?
Drowning men
can tell you
that has nothing much to do
with taste

 
Full moon and out of whiskey,
almost out of money
and half out of my mind,
I scribble notes;
my thoughts are drawn
in black and Sartre.
I can almost touch
the lady of the lake,
the woman of all lonely dreams,
sitting next to me
on her pale pedestal,
ordering Daiquiris like so many ships.
And she couldn’t care less
about another soaking wreck,
drawn in prying, floating [...]

The dragon slept in the heart of the mountain. It dreamt of rivers of fire and molten flesh, that transformed the valley below into a lake of blood-red flames. It dreamt that the moon caught fire and broke into pieces, which came down in a red rain that wrapped the earth in a burning [...]

There was road rage and road kill
on each slippery stone
of the highway to Heaven -
and bumper to bumper,
drive-by hysterics
of mad, gridlocked souls.
Oh, the pushing and shoving
on the stairway to Heaven;
terrible cursing,
when soles stepped on fingers;
horrible screaming,
when the dearly departed fell off.
So, my love,
we won’t go there.
We’ll go deep down and dirty;
sniffing the sulphur, so close
to [...]

 
For R. 
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
Pablo Neruda
1) I love the way your colours run through me
I love the way your colours run through me;
the way your dreams like landscapes grow
(like road maps, towers, rivers, trees
mushrooming like crazy)
inside me,
till I lie - so full,
so blissfully aware that I [...]

I tiptoe through you
like some tourist lost in wonder in the Hermitage:
shy, in awe and undeserving
of this wealth of beauty and appraisal.
My worlds enfolded in your hair,
that drapes my thoughts like curtains;
the way your eyes, now closed, still find me,
like the rainbow binds the flood.
I tiptoe through you,
like a shadow lost in prayer to the [...]

We move. We move, almost as fast as light, faster than anything manmade ever went before. We move; we move
[...]

They do not look at you - not really.
You know their eyes won’t stop
for signs of skin and bone
and we are lost.
We love that soft skin mystery:
the purring alien and the delicate stranger within
We do not question that they live forever.
Their paws of baby skin and razor-blades
tell us they will live forever.
But they do not [...]

Head perched, like a little bird:
her shoulders slightly up.
If she could have taken to the sky,
she would be gone by now.
What is it she is waiting for?
What is her part in this machine,
she plays, unwittingly, so well?
Does she dream?
(She rubs her hands in glue
and even looks surprised
at how she slowly gets confused:
she rubs it in [...]

Part one: Tell me
Tell me more, you whisper, tell me more.
My love, what can I say?
I am that village that Chagall once drew,
dreaming its strange old dreams.
I am that violin, that sings this one old tune;
the violinist himself, that perfect stranger:
strange of colour, strange of form,
faithfully guarding his midnight town,
looking down into that [...]

The sea moves slowly, like a muscle
under skin of pearl.
The sun is near invisible,
a perfect burning pinpoint that transforms the sky
from singularity towards
a bruise of fading colours.
The trees stand without tremor, without whisper.
Even the tallest grass looks sculpted, still
and far removed from the unruly sweat of dawn.
Now, from beyond the woods, beyond the hills
the sounds [...]

I want these words to move,
like fingernail and tongue,
across the deepest blue
of patient, Southern skies,
onto the darkest spaces
in between the furnace stars:
to write your name and holy flesh
and all your glory there,
like I would move your fingertips and
close the soft rims of your lips,
your teeth and tongue and drawn-out
breathing down upon my fire-fed skin.

Going up, one more time,
by means of sheer imagination,
modern marvels of ignition
and old midnight oil:
noisy contraptions, coming apart
step, by step, by step
and going up: all systems going,
there’s time for some last words,
some thought, some prayer -
and then at last, at last we’re on our way
but somehow still suspended:
earth-tied, soul-bound,
so much that brought us here is [...]

(For Dan Simmons)
The dead lie still.
The ghosts are silent.
This bone-dry land is not
the land of arrows carved,
of sacred stone.
The plains are dead and silent.
In cities, ghosts of those
who never lived now dwell.
Their works are not the work of man.
Their tongues are pitiful and weak:
a noise far worse than graves, or silence.
Not worthy of [...]

All shadows are real.
All move with the light
that awaits them:
their substance a breath,
a thin layer of trust
in iron-set law -
and shadows, like love,
not caring for,
careful of causes:
a distant and powerful sun
or a trembling, hand-held
candle will do.

We take the sky -
I’ll take you with me.
I borrowed wings from an owl
that I raised last night.
It fed on bits and pieces
of left-over words and dreaming.
It drank what was left of my rhymes.
We take the sky -
your arms around me.
We’ll leave the gutters
and the golden spires below.
The beat of my wings,
the weight of your [...]

I drive my dreams this autumn night,
through potholes,
past the roadkill and the hydrants,
the washed-out poems of a dying day.
I drive my dreams this quiet night,
by the light of Dylan Thomas
and the sound of stars -
and I drive to you.
I drive to you:
I die and breathe and die again for you.
Another record and another glimpse
of the [...]