july 2020

                            (i)

...I am the never-ending wolf

the solitude that hangs in the air

I tell my retreating heart to stop

and watch as humanity drifts through the trees

an exodus of ghosts

passing each other without a word

I howl dissent

yet what angels sing for them

their heartache is indiscriminate

their love rapacious, greedy

such creatures as these

knew how to conjure snowfall

even how to walk across the heavens

yet they never understood

the immanence of their solitude

its intimacy, its taste

and now in the icy mists

I smell the fear of the man and the woman

the flesh of their foreboding

and I turn and disappear into their silence...

                             (ii)

...all my life I have shaken the trees

yet only the darkest fruit has ever fallen

I have even stuffed my pockets

with the sky’s flaming shards

but when I came to peer over the cliff’s edge

I saw only the smiles of my children

burning holes in the cosmos

pushing into my face

the remnants of all that was

this endless farce of circling nothing

of falling from the highest of high branches

yet never reaching the ground

and now a single grain of sand

taints my blood

with its thousand million years

cascading over my face

the remnants, the shards

even the shadows of all that once was

this wilderness, this pregnancy

that is forever...

                                 (iii)

...it is not the galaxies that hurtle through space

it is my heart

my exploding death

innervating the void

a blinding solar plexus

that stretches its brilliant, blue fibres

first around the earth

and then out towards the glowing monoliths

for this, truly, is where I belong

swimming among these alpha giants

my eroticism exploding

my body wet

hands full of flames

both love and death

streaming from my eyes

this irresistible flooding of space

with waters that can see

with fires that dictate

the heart’s rare valediction

words no mortal should ignore...

                           (iv)

...from somewhere deep within the daylight

a million mouths approached

they gaped and fed upon themselves

spitting down tubes in the ground

they were beyond rich

more anonymous than even leaves

they were the reliably brilliant

whose data always went viral

they knew, for instance, just how and when

to insinuate, to copulate or desecrate

they were the best ever

and this too they knew

and ‘though they fed upon themselves

yet they still relished just how sound they were

how cutting their citations had always been

‘we, above all things, are the most apposite,’ they declared

mouths full of steroids

steroids full of incomparable data

spitting the daylight

down tubes in the ground...