Coming back to old beginnings, soul on a platter, eyes on the road, past rivers and mountains and trees and lakes, the rising heart of day, the comfort cold of night – all seasons here forever, past fears and hopes and loneliness and dreaming, the diamonds hidden in the grass, the dragons soaring high, all [...]
I am drawn to darkness and the night has always been so kind to me. The shadows of hunter and prey: well-known, well-documented – as an absence of form or turbulent rain; a silent gutter, taking the confessions of a dying addict or the weird, obsessive clamour of sirens and the shocking, blinding glare of [...]
Your body, like the morning breeze that finds the shoreline and the lake and sends the gold-dressed reeds a-shivering, now moves and parts the wrinkled sheets that make our bed the surface of our dreaming and like the sun climbs up again and gathers strength at midday’s meet to touch the lake’s cool surface sheen, [...]
It is that time of year again, it’s spring again and songs come out to sing again of life and love: all things to do with hope again, while on the ground the branch that did escape the wind and rain of last November to hide beneath the white and soothing snow, lies naked now, [...]
Open your arms, like wings, like a map – in mid-flight. Come for me, like night, like these roads – outspread.
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.
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
New mornings These are the mornings that are wasted on the living: when a new moon is slowly dying, still vaguely above ground but sinking surly into this pale start of day. These are the moments that the armies of the dead wake to the trembling stops and starts of bird song drowning in the [...]
(Hebrews; 13.2: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers. For thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”) My stubborn coat and almost rainproof shoes and hair have always made a welcome mat for miracles and strangers, Gods and drunkenness, the dying screams of buttercups, the slow and sensual moving in and out of kittens’ claws – and [...]
Moist on fingers, scent on tongue; your muscles tightening, all of me undone: I could die now, love, slowly dissolving in song.
No reason to be faithful to the veins that do not know you; stupid to acknowledge time that is not spent with you. My whole life – if counted in those units – stops and starts within, without your warmth. I count my days in moments spent against your skin – my breath, your hair; [...]
Today I thought of dying more than I had thoughts of her but all in all things weren’t all that bad: she didn’t come but then again I am still here to mourn the fact.
Thoughts of morning landings on some distant beach: armed to tears and wearing some forbidding castle for a skin, expecting noise and bullets, time to slow, and stop, and grow and then the death of strangers and a strangeness closing down your breath – and then discovering the fear that ruled your childhood and this [...]