Silver Spires

This world we must leave
departs so sharp
While silver spires grind


The pound and hum of so many strangers
Will strobe to sweet distance
And soar from scent's borrowed clothes


Refined in space, this sanitised view 
twenty five floors above the stars
and stained and broken paths


This world we must leave 
dissolves no boundaries 
though silver spires tremble 


And those who surround you take one moment 
then fill the room with time 
that which defines your edge-to-edge life 


Laughing in our face the whole while. 
And silver spires crumble.
This world we must leave so reluctantly behind.

Uninvented

No escape from the discomforting body 

bound to this earth

No reprieve from paying debts of a free heart and freer tongue.

When flesh and blood no longer nourish

but fall as all flesh and blood does

And the last remaining freedom form the stubborn impermanence of life

is your uninvented death.

Landing

So much time spent enduring that pounding chest

as frustration slathered like a wild thing and

impotent desire could not free itself and run.

Knowing the air is thinner outside than it is in,

though, there is some physical trickery that holds the flesh together

as you reach for the first time into a place where otherness is sewn

to the silence and the vacuum.

Now it is time to paint yourself into the world

as that undefined space that is called self, or soul, or some such

will never quieten until the soot and ash are scraped off

against the pebbles of some waterless shore.

Appleflesh

Dredging words

With a sluggish brain and a sluggish will

It is simpler to give up and lie down.

In and out of sight, language takes shape into great black birds, vanishes.

Strong arms and stronger faces wrap memories within a mountain of skin.

Eyes looking onward while seeking that soft spot below and under and in.

Unlucky enough that with a million wings I would not fly but to jump anyway,

knowing there is no comfort where the body lands, its busted appleflesh browning in the sun,

but finding life in the fall itself.

Cells

The night will close around this forest like a dark hand around a soft and silent throat.

I love you and I don't know why.

For each cell that spins inside your body is identical to those that all crowd this tender space.

I love you and I don't know why.

Its your visage alone, flickering dark, then light, then dark again

With the thousand changing attitudes sweeping over and across, as distant as clouds

Unsettling my own fixedness, with cold wind and shadow.

I love you and I don't know why.

Waterwait

Because the last trace to fade is always that of scent

it will linger, a disrupted after-burn of a different place

where time, measured in the meaning of another, bleeds across two worlds.

Not even an echo survives this vacuum

And the fabric that holds it tight,

a precious seam in a dusty mine

of memory made real, is gradually corrupted

As time between now and now is lengthened

by the waterwait of interfering distance

embrace this pale signature, lost so soon

Sweep

Lose, find, search and stare.

Roll in, slide out, uncoil and deepen

Arrive departed, both endless and finite.

Full head and empty mind

spinning relentlessly.

Never remembered again.