1 New Poem

Spatial Planes

I was part of the crowd,
watched bombs fall from
dream state shoreside,
said nothing,

Saw veins of concrete open,
spiling tar, oil fumes haze
like the anchorage of
ships capsized.

I lost heart and will,
for much more of the screaming,
much more than the ranconteur’s
words could extend.

Approach in the wedding dress aura,
beckon back to homefront comforts:
the forgetting of what happened walls
beyond.

Pausing, stand across and shape,
we whirled in the April skies,
setting off storms;

Your voice didn’t break the
cacophony, grim sights paces away;

It came like balms from
crosstown market, kept in
mason jars, pulled out

When keeping together got too
great for tender ears to
hear.

It forges a hardness,
a bloodless unwelcome
to these nights.

1 New Poem

Firework Scars

I stepped by the waterfall,
memories restless, awakened
from induced night slumber,
drugged with bottle contents
until the pain of tears vanished

Until the misery of wrought hands,
twisted iron becomes but another
breath catching exercise, a cleared
throat from pasts immemorial to

Walk beside in space and time
to final resting. A blackout
after wounded crackle of static
on the airwave, a signal taken
too little from words

We passed as codes in dark
corners, back and forth through
wire fence.

A look at the roadkill, the tar
paper pine, the burn rubber leavings
of last year’s party favour revolution

Tells of nothing, save regretted
rancor: the lonely scribe dying
with his head firmly perched

To righteous side he’d never take
in fear of too much certainty.

1 New Poem

On Lost Truth

Silt in memory, rubbish
pile to sift through,
weights heavy with worse desires,
same circle drawn in place;

No longer one, lost heart,
wasting water, air, time with
pre-drawn places, stopping

Distance. Wished for greater stature
life, found it wanting, found it
misplaced and bedridden with

Murky calling of mystic charlatans,
words I cannot recall from lacking
state. Feel no longer embers,

Only coal dust, sweeping wounds;
I am not afraid to vanish,
just to break the waves,

Like cries from an orchestra pit
(drip sweat down forehead, lip
wince), calls for warmth.

I am afraid of not enough,
in these bones to bury them
aloft, highly favoured in places
hallowed.

1 New Poem

 Fragile Places

A hidden stamp in mirror walls,
I walk afresh dawn up the
ground floor cavern, tucked-away
slots in Morningside Heights
chill.

Shuffle in smart-shoed attire,
cooking speckle-shined for this
crowded exchange, flipping off
a switch in time to save me.

From when that love of brickwork
and high places started to fade
into fantasies of pushing, jumping,
leaping, into the floating fire
escape.

I trap the madness in champagne
expression, glancing pleasantries
tracing the wax of shoelaces,
the falling of triple-redundant
words to marble floor.

A breath outside imagined, cigarettes
and motor oil combining in sweat
sense; makes the moving go by
quicker, picture-perfect marking
time.

1 New Poem

 A Look, Undone

A stare into gold gossamer pool,
liquid chasing down leaves left in
muddy wake.

A reach across pinched points of
stardust, temporal spaces shining in
hedonic glory.

A happiness extinguished, pen-scratched
out in regret for the excitement:
rainy, lost.

A missed thought for moonlit
Dominica’s shores, for hazy
Semarang noons.

A pulling thought that this is
all, rocking back and forth until
light snuffs.

1 New Poem

 Cooling Poses

The air was laced today, with
washing liquid and grown barley smoke;
a grand idea at the time,
lightning kisses and dreams
concrete lightened moods.

Not for me, though, a misty monk
hopping between half-ruin places,
torn and wavered, beacon burned
out from too many flashes.

“Live with disappointment”, with
posthumous fame and fortune,
waiting still for decoration day;
pinning the medals missing now.

You told me it was the right
condition of the ages, steamships
and railway gauge were last
worthwhile things to come from

Thinking after dark, and it’s just
us and the adding machines now.

I stood out in cigarette haze
on a corner somewhere marked

By summer’s muggy choking,
belted a few bars of Against Me!
and waffled on joining the ruckus
inside, flicking through responsible

Pieces of presence, finding
explanation wanting.

1 New Poem

 A Lifetime’s Second

I remember how the spark used to
light up in me, split like veins
of street lamps, spilling electric
blood into forest dark;

the cartwheels of hunger my stomach
would flip and tender-foot through
fields of running, stiletto cut
stories told of room breaths in dark.

I look now out at remnants of
rainfall, pitter-patter of birdsong
on backyard window glass, wonders
for the steel age dawn,

and ask how set-upon was this end,
how pushed out this stillness
in the moving plane, how distant
the warmth of promise.

Bitten once, the memory faded,
rotten apple nervous, losing sleep
and washing dreams through glass
pills and sugar water, compensating

for something I could not name,
but was lost.