april 2018

                    (i)

...as with lovers sleeping mouth to exhausted mouth

I breathe in the earth’s warm breath

my wife and receiver of souls

my ancient, rolling grave

whose fields rise up and arch their backs

and then turn and, uninvited

slide their sufferings deep into my bones

this fateful  intimacy

this all too-eager conception

that ignites the blue abyss

with reasons that do not exist as reasons

nor as god’s stinking breath

and so our porous minds will again be left

to disappear into the sand

as though sleep and thought had never existed

as though the earth was a mere dream

left to crawl its way through our bones

the bad smell of eternity

already attracting scavengers

the opportunists who have never known fear...

                               (ii)

...strange how one’s words can become an empire

a voice behind the walls

a private city that worships echoes

that loves reflections

and rhymes which amass fortunes

and so as the cameras smile

and the napkins dab clean the excess sobriety

another idol swells with applause

and the empire again subdues itself

but, but the stateless, homeless, anonymous dog

sees only the bits and pieces

of an unconquered, wordless universe

defers only to the devastating music

that over and over shatters

its seemingly unreachable heart

but then, just who are the nameless strays of this world

the outcast and the mad

who have only infinity left beneath their tongues

who know that only silence rhymes with everything

the empty, wordless poetry

for which applause would be devastating...

                      (iii)

...once, from a great height, I threw a net

a soliloquy of defiant, baleful psalms

right across the world’s face

it was a hope, a need, a cry

meant to outface, to chasten

all those idiomatic thugs

whose clichés patrol the mind

whose every word sounds of a severed tongue

but my arrogance and psalms

simply rolled on and on unnoticed

out into the void

a fruitless idiosyncrasy

and although the world’s face

still swings by on a thread

I can sense its submission

I can still hear its excuses

those unmistakable, menacing sounds

of severed tongues

patrolling the mind...

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