illusion and delusion, friend!
they don't come any cheaper than this -
mistakes forgotten, errors abandoned
for the price of a little sentimental excess.
tricks i conjure (hand over glove !)
visions to flood cavities of consciousness with light !
terrors to send your thoughts, clambering with haste,
into feral hideyholes waiting for night.
from complex strands of my creation,
i'll weave your deception in glitterdust !
do you wonder at origins as you search the strings
for a gesture, a touch or a hint of thought ?
seek an icon of invention to extrapolate
a snicker from the sidelines of a disinterested fate ?
this is all there is !
chuckling at interstices,
contemplating reversals,
streaming words
(drawn-out,
interlocked,
glittering beasts)
through justifications of ingress and exit,
i trace random thoughts for a random day.
i write in bits and pieces (nothing up my sleeve!)
anomalous constructs obscured
by the complex structures that we weave.
why can't we simply walk out of windows?
1998
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sundaze;
naked
sky-trellised
self
splayed beneath honeysuckle
earth-bound tendrils in a chorus of bees
caution hovers hope capers
(nanny medusa) pebble-chip ripple
heat-serpents hissing at noon- (summereflections aimless
concentric chronologies as holiday mornings in spring)
against a backdrop of sun
and pauses one moment
listening
for dragonfly wings.
1998
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kiss
your lips thought me a kiss and we became a smile together. is there a name for this? a whispered knowledge unperceived ? i chuckle to myself. i (writer of shadows, digger of graves) lift my eyes to watch a nondescript bird flutter at the edge of night, strain to hear the song... my darkness drowns, absorbed in your kiss - driven helpless before the sensual flood of the laughter embracing my being. 1998back to TOP>
she wanders in her spaces,
recumbent in the coils of her paper rosaries.
chaos clothed in the strands of her realities,
illuminatio a portrait in a gallery of closed doors
&
narrow spaces
evocatum conversing with the precincts of her silences.
somewhere in the shadows, an interrogative dances
scraping an unwanted graffitti of compassionate fantasies
upon sanctuary walls.
1998
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tell me: do we measure life by the scars we leave behind? we could have been, but no -- we remain as we are, distant... and we must satisfy ourselves with smoke - mist laid out by last night's rain. we grasp at final minutes oblivious to the incessant ticking of the clock, each minute more agonising than the last - pleading, even as our voices die muffled in our throats. who knows? perhaps yesterday's despair may yet return, clad in tomorrow's dream, or dawn bring the courage of hopelessness... tonight the stars blaze through infinities! though we bind ourselves to a single ending. 2008back to TOP
She dreams in countersmoke and furtive flirtations. Across the table a gesture rises to coherence above a babble of faces, a flutter of hands iterating unspoken needs. She smiles. Lost hopes congeal before her like flies in amber flicked away and forgotten - profligate illusions of an evening frozen in time. He loves her - lost in the boundaries of her studied lust, immersing his abandoned mortality in the sour grace of her sweat and the confines of her thighs. He sketches her languid in the light against a backdrop of flightlessness. 1998back to TOP
In my mother's house,
a bouquet of tattered lace,
abandoned in the corner,
awaits a gesture of remembrance.
She left it there,
silent memory of days past -
unwanted,
gasping for breath -
her existence spent in a cupboard,
waiting for release from forgetting.
too old to weep -
her life,
like the light from the stairwell,
eclipsed by the grime of years -
too old to hide a basket of hopes beneath her pillow,
too old to fall asleep...
In my mother's house,
there are things in the closets that whisper
of shadows I shall never escape.
I bump against a bedpost and startle the unkempt ghosts
hovering over my shoulder in their mouldered shreds.
My steps hush each other,
splashing through a wash of stained light.
In a moment of forgetfulness,
I reach to touch a patch of forgotten gold...
then leave her to rest.
1998
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i have walked seville … at sunrise in the moorish quarter touched the shimmer of her bones; dozed in the drone of her sidewalks at noon. i have gathered images from the haze of her sunsets, sheltered in purple undertones splashed promiscuously over bougainvillea; danced upon her silver cobbles in moonlight, heady with the scent of night-blooming jasmine. jewel-bright, she returns to me still - glimpsed through the alleyways of abandoned time - with the tang of ripe pomegranates shattered underfoot. i have walked seville... 2003back to TOP
the storm approaches, bestriding the horizon, wind raking flesh and blood and bone; shrieks of pain vanish in the tumult and die unheard, forgotten, alone... what of those once-beloved, unforgotten 'til time's ending? holding the shadow, to time and drift unbending? the storm approaches - remembered agonies flow through bloodied palms, stripped of all but despair. and so farewell... the melodies i've sung will take no voice, the dreams, no revelations. eyes tearing from the lash of the wind, visions crushed by the cresting dunes. 2004back to TOP
sailing past the promontory, i stand in the light of an ash wednesday morning striving for the gift of flight. the sea is impossibly blue while cockled clouds assault the sky, caught in the doom of the wind and the constant, unnerving moan of the rigging. where i am, the air sparkles --- the sky awaits a storm. angling past the sound, avoiding the shallow-draft spaces of tortured coral and green brushed sand, one wonders at the point of the charade: why the illusion of control of a flimsy craft over endless water is so vital... tacking into emptiness touches off a flicker in the brain, a luminous burst of electrical static numbs the mind, blinds the eye. what follows the light is what precedes it: a moment of balance in the equivalent dark. then something occurs beyond imagining, beyond capture: a glittering instant illuminates the darkness, and suddenly, all is possible. 2007back to TOP
frozen at a nexus of probability, cross-haired on a videoscreen, howling of the indignity of archetypes: i walk the same sane pathways. there are traces of me still - old documents dog-eared to mark their places. lusts loitering within memorabilia, lurking ghosts evading fate. emptying my phantasms into a basket of dreams; i watch them leap into flight establishing orbits fragile as may-fly wings, their tangible transmuted realities, gaudy as carnivals or summer parasols, careen precipitously past the second star. i walk the same sane pathways. 1998back to TOP
remembrance
i bring you a flower like a deep red stain, born of pain and frost-pierced flesh. if you find the blackened petals in your open hand (awakening beyond embrace, blinking the sting of my sweat from your eyes), will you understand ? will you feel on your lips the ghost of my kiss ? here, where your hand closes to caress, trace your memory into the sweat of my breasts; stroke into life chords long abandoned to silence - and remembering, bridge my darkness. the taste of you remains on my lips, potent and precious; your kisses both heartache and home. through you, my fears -splintered into sunbeams free and remembered - die without an epitaph. 2000back to TOP>
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