Well, look'ee here.

I know that I am now speaking to the void of cyberspace, but I'd like to apologise for not updating sooner. The thing is that I haven't had anything to update with. I laid poetry aside because I was actually content for a while. But, wouldn't you know, I get back to school and life gets all screwy again. Surprise. Well, enjoy.

in Chronological order, from most recent to oldest:

Pillow Talk

Through the stitched lampshade
I can see the end of my longings.
Cursed are my bones in a
Silent sort of way, laid end to
End; an edifice of pain
Frustration and futility.

A heavy tipping silo of grain
Spilling life into the sandy
Dirt. An empty testament to the
Ubiquity of dust, known to the few
Silent men who sold all their belongings
To chase an empty spoon, a full spade.

Across the faded pillow cover
With whispered words, my jaded lover
Will say to me--
Who cannot leave the lap of some
Melancholy mistress--"Come
Again to me."

The sparrows nest in broken twigs
And pulled out feathers, with no sprigs
Of green to break
The sense of brittle life. A single
Painted hair, my lover, shingles
The house we make.

September 2007

September 12

13 hours left
Until one and twenty. One out of twenty-one.

The bright lights have burnt out
To flickering distant bulbs
There is little to do now but wait
For the anniversary of my mother's pain
And my father's name.
I never thought I'd live this long.

Where there is life, there is death
Like the decaying corpse of a barn
With the bones sticking through
The brittle tin skin
And the baby chicks cluttered
Under a dropped eave.

Listen for it, and you may hear
The sounds of dropping stars
And hoof-thunder across the sky.
But that is an old roof, full of holes.

I used to imagine writing the longest
Word I could think of
In the smallest space I could find
With a feather. I didn't even have
Any ink.

But there is so much space now,
And I can't think of a damned thing.

I've walked along the skein for
So long now, rolled it carefully
Into a stained and obtuse ball.
But if I dropped it now, would it
Burn? The tale of many days
And nights there, knots
Here and anon where I paused
For a moment, bits of colour perhaps
When I could, but the lights have
All burnt out to flickering bulbs,
And who needs a mess of soiled
String?

Guess when

Requests

You and I walked to where the world was a scrap of newsprint
And you asked me for something sweet
As we stood and watched the earth die.

I gave you a stone.
You laughed at my wistfulness.

You and I lay amid the tufts of carpet in a room
And you asked for something useful
As the sun cut your face in two.

I gave you my hand.
You laughed at my courage

And placed it on your warm cheek.

We went among the vine-ruined crumbling stones
And you asked for something proper
As the worms dug through bone.

I gave you a touch.
You gasped at my irreverence.

Then you asked me for something true,
Where the past lay before us like a dead thing
Twisting into the sand--

I take a stone into my hands and press;
Water drips through my knuckles.
I push you before me into the parched land
And orchids spring up at every step.
We catch and knit the clouds into a thatch
To hang between the mountain-tops.

The winds blow arid over crossed staves
And the hut is home to only lizards.
Twin mounds of sand-frosted rocks
Grasp at the blowing tumbleweeds.

But I give you something true.

August/September 2007

The Final Days of Ben David

he bears in his pinions as the plain he o'erflies
Naked corpses: now he will sink.
-Voluspá

The stars are out tonight
With eon-dead lingering light.
The road turns on beneath my shoes
And the drift is mine to lose.
The moon's a half-closed rheumy eye
Which I wander by
In and out of its sight
On this, my last night.

I left a dismantled Leyden jar
Upon a table, still charged--
A note for that smiling bone
As the past is never gone;
Hanged with the stars and swinging.
The scattered charge's electric singing
Robbed the celestial cage its fright
On this, my last night.

The grandeur of the broken spires,
Suffering's earthbound choir of lyres;
The stabled winds of gravity
Rocking the universal nativity,
Thrust the hanged god out his tree
Into a quicklime coffin to set the bones free.
My narrow fears take startled fright
Into this, my last night.

Blood worms and feasts for crows
Pungent shells the old wind blows
Dead leaves rattling across my feet
Towards the scythe and corpse-fed whear
The pal harvest thick
The throat laid bare at a razor's nick
The age-old earth writhes with blight
On this, my last night.

The leavings of the elder yew
Along the slow-felt turning of the screw--
Aging suspension which kept us warm--
Screwed us into our nascent form.
We blanch in the empty potency
That frames the shifting galaxy
And screams all we've been left is right
For this, my last night.

And for me, the blind seer
And for me, the deaf, willing ear
The old guy jabbering at a lamp-post
Flailing a net at the glowing ghost
That sits atop,
I can neither kneel nor sit nor stop,
The last to leave cannot douse the light
On this, my last night.

But the stars are out to-night
With eon-dead lingering light
Robbed of their ageless shadowed fright
Hung forever amid the night--
A chessboard black or a chessboard white--
Watch the distant shores ignite
Chewed my the moon-lashed ocean's spite
On this, my last.

June 2007