september  2016

                              (i)

...for years the nights have overrun my sleep

with deception, sex and lies

with unrepentant criminals

and the dark focus of human revenge

just a wee selection y’ken

of the firmament’s host

laughing behind the curtains

this gang of interstellar bastards

who come and go

with their chainsaws through my head

when all I have ever wanted

is to have infinity as my lover

and to feel the obscenity of its terrifying weight

up hard against my body

but instead I have been colonised

by a fatal brood

and most nights I can feel them

moving around beneath my skin

their little, hot teeth

cutting out some triumphal arch

just above my heart

the firmament’s dark focus

the curtain between myself and revenge...

                            (ii)

...what do these clouds bring

as they swirl about the tower

and glide so hushed between my bones

what is this reticence, this shy discomfort

that creases my skin

is it love’s muted anxiety

or just a lifeless planet’s titanic solitude

hanging in the sky

an effortless whisper

the one apocalyptic word ‘why?’

I wish I knew

for if I could speak the cloud’s tongue

this dissembling narrative

might just breach the untamed truth

seething beneath my feet

the miles and miles of fossilised sex

the caverns full of frozen hearts

yet this is no time

for the cloudy magic of words

dissent lies at the foot of the tower

its back broken apart

and my love’s whisper

still hangs in the sky

still creases my skin

with its reticence

its wonder, its ‘why?’...

                                 (iii)

...I want no dreamy idols to encase my mind

no brilliant ghosts to shadow me into daylight

I have become an eclipse

a tremor, a sonnet

threaded to the universe

an incoherent thug

standing alone always

my toes curling the outermost edges of reality

do I then leap in order to live

and maybe out-face all the boundaries

I have ever crossed and loved

or do I see in this breathless cauldron

the illicit dust of every dead mind

coming to claim me

a hectic, incoherent tremor

an eclipse that tries to break

this lattice of iron words

crowding my soul

I have become the ghost with no mind

no heart, no world

a sonnet threaded to the universe

what, my friend, has become of you...