Ways I thought were comforting,
Turned opposable truths;
And days I lost while wandering,
Hypothesis turned to proof.
My many mistakes are constant,
My fathers did the same;
We light our candles yearly
Yet never feel a flame.
An etch in time on vinyl,
Assembled rhymes unsaid;
Words my blue revival,
My gothic heart beats red.
I miss those frosty mornings,
Snowfall on a ridge;
Icicles on the awnings,
Amethyst laps the bridge.
I’m not for city dwelling,
My heart is with my love;
But she resides in times gone by
While half a soul’s above.
And so I miss those winters,
For winters warm as this;
Where we walked a lakeside path,
And found a moment’s bliss.
649.
Baltimore body,
Blood on the seventh ignored;
Death’s door is the floor.
648.
Bulbous white mushroom;
Don’t pull it up, it’s poison
For mortals like us.
I’m sweeping up your worries
They’re going in to bags,
I walked a week to market
And slept beneath the crags.
I heard that there are traders
Who buy and sell our fears;
They hide behind disguises,
They whisper in our ears.
I’m sweeping up your sorrows,
Flung from a coastal talus;
The market’s shutting down,
Love is now the ballast.
Meditating, yes, on your beauty again,
Master climbed in to my thoughts
Zigzags a pebbled path to Zen’,
But I’m not keen on blizzards there,Where do they go?
Soaked in grief,
I walked to the valleys
On a road with two.
Hallmarks, a white van,
A lost dog still howling
While as dead as the moon;
There is no end, no, not soon.
For years, insomnia grew
As empathy clotted
In violets and blues.
An empty bed, a job or two.
Some returned later,
Much more as survivors,
Adults and artists,
But all were haunted
By what men might
And some indeed do.
Memories shrink in my wash,
So the leaves, once verdant,
Become delicate and almost
Imperceptible, sometimes lost,
Yet nonetheless loved,
Nurtured and now as fresh
As when you placed my hands
On your hips and your obi
Slipped – I can’t remember
The music but I do remember
Your kiss, fleeting,
From where I fall recurringly.
These thoughts are the size
Of bonsai, ornamental,
Propagated, wired
To my wabi-sabi sense;
I walk through the forest
Of their sorrows then,
Counting steps to my death,
Diminutive, less than I was
Back then, when your kiss
Felt like bliss briefly lent.
647.
Goldfish in the tank
Of my mind, those colours died
From feeding my sight.
Time heals, said my master.
Yes, I nodded, and it also
Pushes and bites
And my bruised legs.
My master looked away.
She gave me a spade
To dig holes for my grief,
Where blossom fell briefly,
Though not today.
