Lifelong I have walked in sole-bare shoes,
With the trapdoor of my thoughts
I am going through,
Like an inverse Damoclean sword,
Like a parapet above a bamboo pit,
Each stake sharpened
By your silence as wide
As a black hole’s gingival abscess
Or a behemoth’s grin.
I walk with a shadow
Owned by self-sabotaging indiscipline,
Infrequent in me, your company,
I trod the floorboards while you
Flossed your wolfbane teeth
With cider-froth and
Complacency.
Only lately,
That lateral door’s secured
By love,
A love that endures
Longer and more fast set
Than a Trappist’s bloodstone whetting,
More than the Gordian knot
Where once we tied to dogwood
In this self-same moment
An ageing satrap’s ox;
And I, my love,
I will no longer drop.
Tag: metaphor
Skylark Song
I find a form of comfort
In the ley-like lines,
Dowsing in our jumpers,
Rains from time to time.
A nimble skylark hopping
Between sharp rose hip drops,
Blessed as ivy on the tor
And snow on mountaintops.
Deft she pirouettes through thorns
Which prick a human finger;
I recalled a union there
Wherein my heart she lingers.
If you see a skylark rare
Within a trellised vine,
Consider how the heartbeat there
Is more and more divine.
Regensturm
Inward, windward,
Westering festering
Weatherfront;
Emerged from Europe,
Suffused into view,
Dragon-sky belly,
Saliva for dew.
Residing in psyches,
Abandoned paths,
In farmers’ fields
By knee-lowered calves;
Orchards bend backwards
Apple crops lost,
Retreated then eastward,
We’re counting the cost.
Haiku #696
696.
If I might walk then
Sometimes tentatively, see,
Your eggshells beneath.
Haiku #687
687.
You are the one page
In the one great book I wish
I had co-written.
Haiku #685
685.
These thoughts, organic,
Move through our choices like two clouds
Forming more crystals.
The Temple
One day all this will end,
Futile as the Sea to consider
Existence when the
Weeds reclaim the roads,
And far offshore offload
Post-coastline,
Fossils of litter
And a piece that once glittered
On the most beautiful chest
And wrest from the wrist
In swells and scallops
Of circadian
Harmonies.
The Sea then, endures,
Whole cities gone,
And even the parables
And phrases
Of sacred texts became
Little more than plankton
In the bellies
Of mammals with gills
And dreams about fish,
And ancient revenge
By growing two legs,
Just as ours were then, upright,
Two feet, unhindered by water
And waves thirty years
In their making and
As steep as Athena’s temples
And her garlanded head.
Irreparable trust,
Covenants rust
On the Sea bed
With traffic lights
Stuck on red,
And where once there were highways,
Rivers instead,
And then, a watershed.
And yet I would sacrifice
And trade
Ten oceanic years,
Arduous, longer
Than man-made metrics
Of time and place
And longer again,
For a day in the shade
Of my one beloved,
My one true friend.
Haiku #681
681.
Winter Mistle Thrush.
Touch wood, oblong fens and doves;
No need now to rush.
Haiku #678
678.
Watch without a clock,
And a clock without a face.
Time knows no disgrace.
Haiku #677
677.
My brief, short body;
Will I be re-used for fuel
In an age, or two?