Follow the star

We would be blind

if we saw everything at once:
every sunrise superimposed
to become a single conflagration,
each full Moon placed like a coin
on top of the last, until she was
a column of light that crushes us,

the planets' peregrinations
a web of light spun along the ecliptic
catching us in its retrograde snares,
but for the backdrop it is set against,
stars smeared by parallax & proper motion
to become a single solid blanket
of accumulated irradiance, 

all light years collapsed into their sum.
We are spared the tally of all there is to know.
Our reckoning could not accommodate it.
We are points the light passes through,
threaded by eternity for a while, 

our loves knots stitching us into time & space
beyond loom of the seasons
and the temper of tyranny.

Not knowing that is what we are
is another kind of blindness.
See, love has come to walk among us.
Setting aside His glittering celestial cloak,
He appears as a child, to tell us
that one day we will know what He knows.
Until then, follow the star.

(Written on Christmas Day 2022)

Alien

I was in deep space

breathing hard vacuum.
Impossible, you might say,
but that very impossibility
was what made it possible.
I don't expect you to understand.
It was an effort of pure will.
That's what I told myself anyway.
I don't think I could have done it
if I hadn't tricked myself like that,
hadn't found some excuse,
hadn't pretended necessity
was a superpower people would admire.

I wasn't really in deep space of course.
I was standing right next to you,
smiling, laughing, doing everything
I needed to do to seem normal.
Inside, instead of lungs, though,
there was this great emptiness,
growing with every breath I took
of this hard vacuum I had to breathe
to stay alive among you.

Sometimes I think maybe I am human,
because my need to forgive
is so much greater
than my need for revenge,
but your villains still have my sympathy.
One day I'll work out how to forgive,
how to de-orbit and navigate re-entry
without burning up.
Until then I'll breathe vacuum
as if I was born to it.

The departure of the gods

This world we mortals intrude upon,

whose routines we interrupt,

whose ancient habits we usurp

with our spurious priorities, 

in which we intervene, which we adjust, 

correcting what is already perfect,

spraying it with a cheap perfume,

applying a patina to suggest expense, 

a wafer of marble to clad a shopping mall floor,

a wood veneer flayed from some fallen grove, 

peeled from the amputated limbs of sanctuary, 

and varnished to panel a hall 

at whose podium we announce our dominion,

and whose shadows we infest 

to whisper conspiracies of rot, 

this world now lies shattered 

in the gaudy neon sepulchre, 

the bright alfresco mausoleum 

of our bustling marketplace,

where we sell off its dismembered corpse

and devour it like a dripping hog roast. 

We condemn its beauty as ugly,

preferring to pimp a sanitised parody of nature 

instead. We learn its love songs and lullabies,

melodies on which birds thread starlight,

and we sing them all out of tune, 

jeering and sneering at each other

in the midnight stagger beneath a sodium sky,

hurling their lyrics as insults or punchlines 

offered to alleviate our hostility 

and suspicion of each other

as we swagger, locked in our drunken waltz 

of alternating aggression and appeasement, 

performing an aesthetic of contempt.

Knowing they are not wanted, 

except, perhaps, to the limited extent 

that our torture of their world amuses us,

the gods that preside over it disappear, 

escape us, slip away, leave one night,

and go where we can't follow, 

never to return. Never to return. 

And in the desert of their absence

we promise to change. Desperate, 

we dislodge eyes, ripe with sight

bulging with spectacle, from their sockets, 

and press the wersh wine of all they have seen 

into an offering raised to the departed gods 

who we have insulted, gods who now ignore us, 

and the slurry of pulp lubricates our heresies. 

Some attribute the gods' indifference to cruelty.

They toy with is. 

These fantasies about the gods' whims

articulate only the sadistic impulses 

of those who express them. 

Others extenuate the inscrutable caprice

of the gods who have abandoned us 

with theories of righteousness:

we are not worthy. We are being punished. 

They make a virtue of necessity

as if that would magically 

make the necessary possible,

and pointlessly degrade themselves. 

The attribution of motives we can understand

to that which must simply exist, 

no more and no less, with no other purpose,

no motive, and end in itself, 

reduces the universe to a cosmic fallacy,

an appeal to a bogus argumentum ad divos.

Our altars are monuments to our blindness. 

Eyeless, we pray, and are slowly digested

by the acidic regret that heaves and surges 

in the emptiness of our words, our mouths 

stomachs in which meaning dissolves

as we consume the godless world. 

Coda

I feel no tension between opposites, 

no tightrope to walk along,

no tripwire to step over,

nor is there any balance to be struck,

no competing demands, 

nothing to reconcile, 

here, where I stand, 

between the obvious and the obscure. 

There was once, I suppose:

a fugue of guess and second guess 

with which we explored 

what we thought possible,

imaginary worlds we wished were real

until we found their limits: 

an interrupted cadence, 

a diminished seventh,

and the consolation of a promise

of divine grace

in the unexpected resolution

of the closing bars. 

I emerge from the shadows,

standing in the mouth of the cave, 

feeling the sun on my face

for the first time,

experiencing the moment of truth,

not as revelation, 

not as the answer

to any question I could ask. 

Yes, there is salvation. 

There is redemption. There is grace, 

but it is not what we imagine. 

How could it be?

How could we even begin to know?

Augustine

I have picked

the pears

that were in

the orchard

and which

you were probably

looking forward

to enjoying.

Forgive me.

By the way, 

the pears in 

my own garden

are more delicious

anyway.

(In Book Two of his Confessions, Augustine selected a relatively minor boyhood action as the starting point of his discussion of sin. He describes how he and a group of friends climbed into the orchard of a neighbour. They stripped a pear tree of its fruit "not to eat the fruit ourselves, but simply to destroy it". He admitted that there were better pears to eat in their own gardens.) 

Star

That star shines on other worlds too.

It sheds an indiscriminate light

with a generous and terrifying impartiality 

that, unselective, shines in other nights, unseen,

irrigating barren and unthinking alien earths. 

It is only in your sight, here and now,

that it finds that place among the heavens,

as surely as if you had picked it up, a gem,

found in the gravel of a river bed in Serendip,

and set it there yourself. 

Perhaps that's all we're here to do: 

bear brief witness, and by observing, 

see order in the rioting present that persists 

after we have closed our eyes forever.

Knowing

Maybe the universe only seems empty and lifeless

to the extent that we are empty and lifeless. 

Maybe, when we look up at the cold dark night sky, 

we see ourselves as we will be in the far future,

in a hereafter forever present, if out of reach for now, 

and we are that person's past, or an infinitesimal part,

at least, a foot hill tributary to a flood plain spate

that broadens into an estuary that meets the sea

in an embrace that changes everything, and maybe 

all that limits us to what we are now is not knowing.

The last ape

The last ape looked up 

at skies arrayed with stars,

above horizons that delimited

its million year inheritance of earth, 

and said to itself "this low place

cannot carry the burden of a love

inspired by the celestial vault,

"or hold mysteries that satisfy

the curiosity heaven provokes.

Maybe the glaciers must melt,

and maybe the forests must burn,

if the constellated sparks, 

rising in the hot air,

alleviate, even for a little while,

my new addiction to the stars".

Système du Monde

Whose advice should we take anyway, 

the mercenary's or the monk's?

One is not acting in our interests.

Any benefit that accrues is incidental,

or necessary in some way to maintain the deceit,

our association a matter of convenience

rather than conviction. On the other hand

we would most likely fail the monk's purity tests, 

and be condemned as a heretic, for our own good, 

or the good of our immortal soul, to be precise. 

Both claim to unlock the system of the world

in the motives and methods they permit. 

Both can't be right. 

Maybe neither is. Perhaps no consistent, 

systematic approach is possible anyway, 

and the question is: how do we live 

with these contradictions, these imperfections

that credo will not suffer and chaos will exploit?

Cherish them, like inclusions that catch the light

rather than let it pass through the gem unseen, 

rare impurities that confer on the crystal colour, 

or cleavage planes that let us cut the stone,

so that we may turn the mica pages of our days,

our irreconcilable contradictions inflexion points 

around which we poise and pivot like dancers

finding a graceful way to stumble through life,

the squall and up-draft that perturb streamlines

and pull the hawk into a bank and dive. 

6,500

The crowds disperse.

The floodlights dim,

and only then 

the games begin.

The ghosts emerge 

and line up

to compete for 

their World Cup

in the stadium 

that they built,

their victories

unstained by guilt.

Their anthem is 

a silent tune,

and their trophy 

is the Moon.

(It is estimated around 6,500 migrant workers died on construction projects for the World Cup 2022 in Qatar)

Why poetry

Sometimes I'm angry, and sometimes I'm sad.
Sometimes I feel good, sometimes feel bad,
and need to describe the day that I've had.
It's all about ego, but also about fate.
It won't make you happy or put food on your plate. 
It's both self-indulgence, and ecstasies shared,
a trance and a torment, and a soul that is bared.
It's not for the money, and not for the fame.
It's pointing the finger and taking the blame,
a voice for the voiceless, and a presence declaimed,
a tribute to beauty, a tribute to love, 
and witness to horrors that we rise above.
So why do we do it, for pleasure or pain?
To be lonely together with nothing to gain
except for the echo, except for the pause,
the moment's reflection before the applause,
when in the darkness, the pain and regret,
we, just for an immortal moment, connect.

October

Autumn's ovation of leaves 
celebrates summer's completion,
but once the applause is spent
the bare trees still stand

awkwardly in the stalls. 
Lift a leaf from the ground.
Read in that palm a premonition
of the performance of spring

after a winter of waiting.

This poem

This poem isn't for you. 

This poem isn't for me. 

This poem isn't for anyone. 

This poem is written by no-one. 

This poem is written by everyone. 

This poem is written nowhere.

This poem is written in a quiet place.

This poem is not written to be read. 

This poem is written more than once. 

This poem is all we have in common.

This poem connects people. 

This poem was already there. 

This poem cannot be banned.

This poem is all we have. 

All that will survive of us is love

We do not comprehend the arithmetic of God.

Our concept of number is not adequate, 

indeed may never be adequate,

to reproduce His calculations,

yet we hold up our flawed reckoning 

in every score we settle, every judgement,

every bargain struck with each other

or the indifferent and unamenable void,

invoking divinity to underwrite justice

and solemnly swearing oaths on story books, 

revered compendiums of revelation

where everyone finds their own truth

between the lines. We do not comprehend. 

Our numbers crumble like the clay tablets 

on which they were first baked

to record the wealth of cities 

that now lie in ruins. Nor can we speak. 

The curse of speech leaves a tongueless world 

on which we force the clumsy intercession of metaphor

with which we thumb and fumble things we find,

presuming to speak for what we have rendered mute

and taken captive within the limits of our imagination.

We are blind and call our blindness sight. 

We have forgotten everything that matters

and call our amnesia memory. 

We refine the grammar of our barbarity, 

elaborate the vocabulary used to describe it

over generations, over centuries, over millennia, 

and call the details of our cruelty civilisation. 

We are doomed, utterly, and call our fate luck, 

our overthrow opportunity, our failure success, 

and burn the world down to make ourselves rich, 

summoning disaster as salvation, 

and all that will survive of us is love, 

for we are vessels for love, nothing more, 

and sometimes not even that,

if we should scorn and squander it,

vessels that perish as inevitably as our arithmetic.    

Love occupies us while we are here

and persists after we are long gone

and no longer provide it with the label,

the letter, the record, from cuneiform to unicode,

of who and what and where and when,

which was all we ever understood about it anyway,

even if we were lucky enough to experience it,

everything that has a name that can be forgotten. 

It carries everything about us that is immortal, 

unencumbered by memory, untethered to attachment,

unconcerned with requital or regret, feeling no frustration, 

perpetuating no consequences, intended or otherwise,

making no accusation, seeking no redress.

Without it I feel lost in an ocean of absence, 

silent, wordless, a negative presence, a lack, 

a silhouette, an outline, a shadow, 

with no urge to do anything but drift.

Self-esteem, motivation, instinct, all sunk,

the position of their wrecks unknown

beyond all fathoms Man can sound,

beneath the silt and sediment of my inertia. 

The tarry sky kisses the bitumen horizon 

and seals my world shut. Undone and alone I drift, 

too limp to live, too drained to die. 

Constellations light up like fireworks above me

and fade. My brain is a crumpled bundle of shrugs, 

the costumes I wore for this recital of nonchalance,

a tangled clothesline semaphore of laundered thought

dancing in the tempest, shirts performing empty gestures,

my bed sheet surrender white flagging in the wind,

offering my unconditional capitulation to the clouds. 

I have felt madness rub my collar.

I can recognise its greasy thumb print

on the lapels of those it commands, 

those who change their sanities like outfits, 

a wardrobe of uniforms, one for every occasion, 

the catwalk of this season's conceits.

I rip mine into strips to bandage the world

where its running sores seem to weep. 

I console myself with the delight I take in nature,

the forest throng that is yet to succumb to fire or axe, 

wild flower meadows before they become a car park,

poor, doomed animals oblivious to their impending extinction,

and declarations of undying love spoken in fragrant air

that will someday become the caustic atmosphere of Venus,

cemented by vows made in temples whose pillars will crumble 

to eventually become debris littering an asteroid field, 

and, aeons hence, may become a falling star

streaking across some alien sky,

on which something unimaginable, 

moved by love, 

makes a wish. 

Lies

What purpose does the lie serve

we tell to others and ourselves?

You weren't the first to be deceived 

by what the deceiver needs to believe.

You were their chance to say out loud

what they had to say to feel proud

or less ashamed. Think not on truth

but on purpose and points to prove, 

not what they say but why 

they feel the need to lie. 

Would you deny cripples their crutch?

Recognise you need them just as much. 

How many times have you lied tonight?

It's lack of understanding that indicts. 

 

Eat shit

Dick: "But this pizza is shit. I mean it's literally covered in shit. That's the topping: shit. I want a different pizza."

Harry: "But what topping will you use? And have you considered the cost of a new pizza? You'll lose your shit loyalty points! No matter how bad the shit pizza is, the alternative is worse!"

Dick: "Look. There's a variety of other toppings there. Let's choose some."

Harry: "I think that introduces too much uncertainty. I don't want another uncosted pizza unless you can tell me precisely how many bits of sweetcorn will be on it. And if we want a different pizza we'll have to go to the back of the queue."

Dick: "Who cares? It'll be better than this shit"

Harry: "But look, we can scrape the shit off and everything will be better. We can even put sweetcorn on it after we've scraped the shit off if you like. Although, to be fair, I don't like sweetcorn anyway. But I might change my mind. Why isn't that good enough for you?"

Perihelion

I sang once of an unending solstice, 

all light drained from the depths of winter

to leave us holding each other 

by the throat in the dark

as we quarrel to attenuate our terror 

in the eternal night, 

but now I fear I was wrong, 

and the scales tip 

irreversibly the other way.

The pendulum is unhitched 

at its opposite extreme

to follow a different trajectory entirely.

Our orbit stalls at its closest approach

to drop into free fall, 

and the darkness I imagined 

is a kind of light,

the cold a blistering heat, 

the cruel and unrelenting incineration 

of a summer so bright it blinds us, 

the sun a projector bulb 

melting the celluloid of this disaster movie 

that we can no longer watch

as if we are not already active participants. 

The darkness was always in our minds anyway. 

We will fondly remember the monsters

that populated our oldest nightmares

as we struggle to understand undreamed fates.

We will recruit them 

to stand with us as unlikely allies 

when we face these new varieties of oblivion

and pretend these are battles that can be won.

Long term

Your digital doppelganger 

living way up in the cloud, 

woven and stitched together 

from bits of your data that drift past, 

the beat of their hexadecimal heart 

just about synchronised with yours, 

reaches down and fastens strings 

to your joints and your limbs 

with helpful suggestions.

You should be happy to be their puppet. 

In the long term you won't be needed. 

Why keep you while there's a chance, 

no matter how small, how vanishingly tiny,

you might behave in a way they can't predict.

They'll copy and paste the bits of you they like

and delete the rest. 

Zone

Deuterium Dorothy 

skips carefree 

through a radioactive, 

post-apocalyptic Oz

seeking a city 

made, not of emerald, 

but of Chernobyl graphite, 

where gas masked men, 

tin plated to protect themselves,

and wearing lead codpieces

to protect their unborn children,

shovel debris off the roof

and debate with each other 

using straw man logic, 

because they lack the courage 

of their convictions

and knowledge 

of their inevitable fate. 

Monkeys and munchkins 

make the world go round 

for ungrateful sorcerers and witches, 

so they say.

Do wishes still count for something? 

Surely they still count for something, 

don't they? I want to go home. 

How can I get home?

There's no place like it, 

certainly not here, 

over the gamma ray spectrum 

of our nuclear rainbow.

Wade into the poisoned marsh. 

Find a path through

that no-one else has found, 

because they all drowned

trying to find the emerald wishes 

they dropped in the mud

along the way.

Marvel at the mutants, sterile,

species of a single generation,

the children of the tin men, 

their botched forms uncoupled

from the mechanics of reproduction

in this world with no future or past,

the tragic toolbox of intimacy

spilling from their crotch

as ridiculous as love 

between a spanner and a screw. 

This is what we made. 

No twister or tokamak

or early morning meltdown

caused by an unauthorised

and unscheduled experiment

is to blame this time.

We made this stale hell, 

and what we see, everything, 

is all the forms things take

when we shirk responsibility

for what we make

in a world made legible by greed

and read through broken spectacles,

a place where all our fantasies and fears

conjure afterlives and otherworlds

populated by the ghosts 

of our infinite selves.

A war was fought here, 

once, long ago, I think. 

Our era of peace is amnesia. 

That is all. We have forgotten 

we are still at war. Belligerents lurk

in the margins of memory,

talking to us through disputes

we now find comical 

and free of context.

As we walk we think we see:

alley cats contesting turf;

birds tugging at carrion;

dogs refuting the Moon. 

The tripwire and booby trap

set by our complacency

makes a Pripyat maze

we wander blindfold

using boasts and banter

to echo locate obstacles

while pretending to see

the whole time.

There is no point bombing this city.

It has already been destroyed, 

and there is no retreat, no way home. 

In the end we find we were the oddity,

the meteor, fallen to Earth, the outcast,

the accident, the meltdown, the disaster, 

and our redemption is in decay, 

in radioactive half-life 

and biological decomposition

among the diligent detrivores 

burrowing and rioting beneath our feet,

churning in the moonless depths,

busy feasting and rebuilding worlds

beyond all purposes we can imagine. 

Brazil

The poor man had no home. 

He slept in the rich man's driveway. 

In the morning the rich man

wanted to open his garage door

and drive his expensive car

to the office where he performed

those acts that justified his wealth. 

The poor man's presence was an irritant. 

He started kicking the poor man. 

He kept kicking the poor man. 

The poor man begged him to stop, 

and pleaded with him that he was sorry

for sleeping in his driveway, 

and he was nothing more than trash

that wasn't worth the effort, 

but the rich man kept kicking, 

and cursing and kicking and cursing

and kicking and kicking and kicking

until that look came over the poor man's eye, 

you know, that look, when he's not dead yet, 

but he realises he will be in a moment,

in a few seconds, all he has left to live, 

as he is being kicked to death,

unable to do anything to prevent it, 

that look of grim understanding in the eye, 

that final evidence of intelligence 

that slumps into lifelessness, 

the look of a man who knows he is about to die

and there is nothing he can do to prevent it, 

and you watch it happening.

You watch it on YouTube or Twitter. 

You condemn it, of course. 

You feel disgust at the poor man's passivity,

and the rich man's appetite for cruelty. 

You think about how you would react. 

You wouldn't put up with this, 

you tell yourself.

You fasten the top button. 

Your shirt looks good. 

You tighten your tie, and pick up 

your car key from the table

and walk out the front door ... 

Like music for animals

Does love feel like music does for animals?
The creature does not comprehend the caress
but knows that it is good. It leans into it
and if the hand is withdrawn, seeks it again, 
and when we hear music we are moved,
without knowing why, not for sure, 
and return to be embroiled in its mysteries. 
Are we like cats craving a sensation
whose origin is remote, whose risks are real, 
to which we abandon ourselves entirely anyway?
How important is it to understand love anyway? 

Calligraphy

Everything and its opposite is true. 

All knowledge is coincidence

that will unravel given enough time,

and in the end there is time enough

to contradict every assertion, 

so let us at least record our errors

with letters that are so beautiful

they are admired after the ability

to read them is long forgotten. 

Balloon animal

As the illusion, the excuse, 

the performance, the pretence, 

the pretext of civilisation deflates, 

I retreat into the bicameral mind 

where the howls of mad gods echo 

in a maze of derelict modernity.

I press my skull like a shell

against the world's indifferent ear

to let it hear the autumn hiss

inside my head,

hissing as temperature inversions

refract the noise of distant traffic

until it becomes a constant faint surf,

or while a plane loiters at high altitude

growling its continuous complaint 

that it can't escape the azure

of this copper canvass dream

on which it lays its aluminium streak.

I retreat, and the conch I hold, it turns out, 

is one ear pressed against the other, 

my head elastic, inflatable, twisted, 

bent double, punctured, collapsing, 

and the hiss the sound my mind makes 

as it departs the clown show 

carnival balloon animal I am.

Immortal

Life is an illusion

because death is an illusion. 

There is no death,

and if there is no death

how can you live the kind of life

that is defined by the limits it sets? 

In the end there is only the realisation

that the person you thought you were

all this time, never really existed at all,

and all the choices you thought you made

were a brief elaboration of infinite possibilities,

and everything you thought you knew

varieties of error cascading one after another, 

and even your own worst enemy, 

whom you most despise, 

whose misfortunes you daily fantasise,  

is just you yourself upon a different path. 

So, knowing that, knowing all that, 

what kind of life will you live now?

Saint Giles, Edinburgh, September 12th, 2022

There was another Elizabeth, you know,
a girl born in Dunfermline Palace long ago, 
a girl who played in the grounds at Linlithgow
that lies in ruins now. Her father's crown,
his first crown, made of good Scottish gold, 
rests on your coffin, and courtiers mourn.
Through her you inherited his pedigree 
that you transmit now to your posterity.
There is nothing more you owe. Go.
Run off and play with your namesake.

(Written on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth lying in state in St. Giles cathedral. The British royal family derives its ancient pedigree through descent from Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James VI and sister of Charles I)

Throne

Imagine that head 

resting upon that stone,
dreaming angels. 

Since then, 

on that ground,

armies have fought, 

homes been bulldozed. 

and now settlers squat 

where Jacob slept. 

Time passes. 

Stones turn to dust, 

and yet those nations 

wrestling in Britain's womb

like Rebecca's twins
find in that Bethel stone 

a heel to hold,
a birthright to claim, 

and those broken promises
man makes to man, 

man makes to God,
and God makes to man. 

We were just kids,
just sibling rivals 

making power bids,
and now the king sits 

on a cistern lid. 

(Written on the day Queen Elizabeth died. Some familiarity with the lore associated with the Stone of Destiny is assumed, in particular the "Jacob's pillow" and "Westminster Stone" theories)

A season of endings

Worlds pass, 

and smooth skies of glass

slide their panels over each other,

lubricated with their doomsday stain

of blue and red and black, 

while the sun sets in our veins

and our briny blood runs clear 

and carries stars to graves 

beyond the heart's horizon. 

It is a season of endings. 

In the desert that remains,

silent, sterile and arid  

after the very last tear is shed,

we are memory and imagination.

We dream the present, 

existing as echo and evocation. 

It is a mirage, a fake oasis, 

a feast of dust, and we are drunk 

on the grapes of tomorrow's dry grief, 

and prophets' eyeballs are plucked

to press forth the humor with which

we fill our goblets of delusion

until we spill their inky draught.

We raise a toast to celebrate rockets

hurled like rocks at the sky, 

to smash it and let the future in, 

our petulance refined to a science, 

and from the falling fragments we make

a mosaic window through which to preach

a peasant's gospel to the post-literate, 

which we study to complete our ignorance,

while deep artesian aquifers of sadness

sunk far beneath the desiccated sand,

fed by ancient and forgotten lamentation,

mourn endless prehistories of disaster,

the eternal recapitulation of folly

of which we have no knowledge,

for which there is no consolation,

and which we are doomed to repeat.

Undead

Here lies a defeated, apathetic people, 

as accepting of the belt as a broken cur, 

grief-cracked hearts grateful for the attention,

dreaming distraction, nostalgia-racked for glory

like the bone's memory of a familiar old fracture,

loitering bruise-badged in the graveyard casino

seeking warmth in the worm's embrace. No riot, 

no revolution, no righteous indignation stirs them:

they rise up from the grave in search of bargains,

summoned by the corvid call and discount choreography 

of those who despise them, animated by cheap enthusiasms

and consuming the brains of any that do not share them.

The song

They bombed our church

but still we sang.
Among the reeking ruins
we raised our voices in praise.

They turned our gods into a joke
and made our temples brothels
where they pimped their parody
of what they thought we worshipped,
or what they were able to imagine worshipping,
homogenised, commercialised, bought and sold,
but still we sang.

They took every mirror
we would hold up to ourselves,
and replaced it with the cruellest caricature,
and taunted us with the impossibility
of meaningful self expression,
with the inherent ridiculousness
of the very idea we had anything to say,
and still we managed to sing,

even when it wasn't heard,
even when no-one was listening,
or when we were shouted down, or ignored,
turned off, unplugged, and banned, we sang.

They cut our throat, but still we sang.
We sang with blood pouring its red melodies
from every wound. We made agony a song.
We twisted every fibre
of whatever being was available to us
into the song,
whatever existence we could preserve,
for however long we could preserve it
from the void's rank claim,
every fugitive breath, every renegade heartbeat,
pressed into service of the song,

until at last the song no longer needed us,
and every law prohibiting it was a record
of the very thing it prohibited,
and every agent of that law sang the song
in every condemnation of the singer,
and death was finally defeated.

Atom

They said you were indivisible. 

That's literally what your name means,

making their statement a tautology,

a single idea divided by pointless repetition,

and they were wrong of course, 

as the victims of Hiroshima 

and Nagasaki would testify, 

if they could: you split and they ceased to be, 

your nucleus susceptible to division after all. 

But division is unity: 

all emotions originate in fear they say,

in one form or another, masks we wear

to conceal a single terror we all feel,

a pantomime where we pretend to be human,

not bears baited at a stake in solitary anguish.

It is a joke we play on each other, 

a pageant in which we all participate

in the theatre of common understanding.

I write this because I was not in on the joke.

I was too literal, so I will chronicle

your every brush with sulphur, 

your every gasp of argon, 

your every plutonium pulmonary.

I will catalogue these variations 

that are not really variations

on a theme that is not really a theme

to expose your fraudulent chemistry,

tabulate the variety of your periodic lies

that leave me feeling nothing but numb, 

like an atom, indivisible and alone,

like the joke was on me all along. 

Bug

Have you ever had to kill something?

Maybe it was easy. Maybe it was a bug.

Maybe you could even say it was an accident, 

something you stood on inadvertently

and were only aware of afterwards. 

What if it was something bigger, 

something that struggled, big enough

that you had to see it through, 

and there was no way to pretend 

it wasn't deliberate. You held it down

and waited for the struggling to stop, 

hung it up by its feet and shook it to drain 

the last few drops of blood from its carcass. 

Have you ever killed a planet?

Maybe you think the long, slow decades

it takes to wrestle the climate out of balance

and the blink of an eye in which an insect expires

are the same, and in that equivalence

you can file away your qualms. It's all the same:

the bug, the world, and everything in between. 

Don't congratulate yourself on your petty guilt.

Spare me your meagre regret, your mere culpability.

I'd rather you know your indifference

when the alternative is cowardice. 

Meteor

You were a meteor,

briefer and more bright

than any star.

In the midnight of the soul,

when we lose faith in love, 

and despair

(for who knows anyone anyway,

and isn't the most we can hope for

infatuation with the masks we wear

in our mannequin embrace?)

you burned

and gave up everything.

We looked up,

and at each other,

and believed at last,

because there was

no other explanation

than your poem: something

it was impossible to say

until you said it. 

Quick

My limestone heart,

made quick and caustic 

by the proximity of your heat,

slaked with blood brought 

by this strange new beat,

shrugs off its oxide shroud 

and crumbles in your hand. 

My calcium heart, 

ductile, like lead, 

under the edge of your blade 

made of more stiff and brittle stuff,

is sliced and cut and shared,

a grey metal eucharist 

of apathy and unbelief.

Good morning

Beetle-brooched, 

the lawn confects a display 

of petals with the dawn,

the ruined rose scattered

in celebration of the day, 

and gauzy webs hang necklaces 

of dew between the thorns

to catch the fugitive light

where bees stravaig.

A sparrow complains 

about nothing in particular

just to advertise to the rest

that it exists. A well fed cat 

relishes ghosts of previous kills

that populate the invisible world

it surveys from a sunlit windowsill. 

A brace of streetwise magpies

scout the garden for snacks.

The threat of noon hangs mild

and neighbourly upon the fence

as the disc of the sun insists

through lingering morning mists.

Breakfast aromas coil in the senses.

The radio keeps the world at bay,

safely constraining distant outrage

to a reporter's polite monologue.

Does the world contain this moment,

or does this moment contain the world,

its daily recapitulation of bliss 

turning newspapers to confetti?

Blue

I remember the day 

the world ended.

No-one else noticed, 

but when I looked up 

on that clear, cloudless day,

I noticed the sky was 

a deeper shade of blue.

The difference was so slight 

it was almost imperceptible, 

but it was enough 

to register with me

as an irreversible change.

Some fault must have slipped,

some axis tilted, something 

somewhere forever altered.

I was ten years old.

I knew it was over, 

and nothing would 

be the same again.

Perilaus

We have made a brazen bull of the climate,

set a fire under its belly and climbed inside,

eager to impress the sadistic tyrants we serve,

keen to keep the coin they give, believe their lies,

and lie to ourselves. Our melodious screams, 

are attenuated through this ingenious device 

that transmits our empty bellowing, broadcast 

in a parody of distress as temperatures rise.

Will eyes become diamonds, bones obsidian,

cut, polished and set in a crown or dagger hilt?

Will our sacrifice leave an offering to be found

among the ashes, or only a residue of grief and guilt,

or nothing at all? For what remains of prophecy

when it is fulfilled? And beforehand, when ignored,

what is the point of words, when they may as well be

the spent rage of a doomed bull beneath the sword.

First light

We peer deep into the darkness 

and see distant galaxies swarm, waltz, sway

and pirouette in their dance with gravity

as it twists and stretches our lines of sight

through space and time. Their ancient light 

sweeps like the hem of a sequin gown

over a period piece ballroom floor long ago

in some elaborate costume drama cosmogony

where they curtsey and bow: intrigue, deceit, 

attraction, betrayal, victory and defeat

played out across billions of light years. 

They stick in the golden honeycomb of our telescope,

caught in the freeze frame of our brief existence, 

the span of time we take to contemplate miracles

a mere glimpse compared to the gulf 

across which the image of them has travelled

as if printed on the wings of a butterfly,

dealan-dé, lightning of God, lock and hinge of yesterday, 

carrying our soul from this world to the next. 

Our slight lens is nothing compared to the mass

that leads this starlight in its pas de deux, 

its cosmic cabriole, the grand jeté of its lensing arc

inviting us to make our own imaginative leap

that sees us consider how we might seem

to someone peering at us through the depths

of space, a distant observer in the far future,

after a similar interval of time has elapsed

and our first light finally reaches them.

With the flick of a switch that is our entire history

we turn on the light bulb of humanity,

imagining it makes our dusty garret 

here in the debris of star formation

itself a Pharos shining across the nights to come,

only to find its unruly rays tumble like tangled spaghetti

spilling across alien skies, or worse than that, 

perhaps the duration of our civilisation

will be cut short, curtailed by catastrophe, 

so that we can only be seen blinking on and off

for a cosmic instant, by an observer 

looking in exactly the right place 

at exactly the right time,

and what are the odds of that? 

(Written on seeing the first deep field images acquired by the James Webb Space Telescope)

There is no defeat

There is no defeat so final 

that victory cannot be rekindled 

from the dew soaked morning ash

of the defeated army's campfires

and carried to the highest peak

to beacon blaze against the surly night

and rally dawn to push it into retreat.

I will not rest. My grave will breathe, 

its uneasy soil heave impatiently, 

roots within tighten their coils like sinews,

if you should think that this is over, 

and everything I did while living was in vain.

The world turns. The past is not fallow, 

but yields to the worm if not the plough, 

and irresistible spring mocks your resignation.

The tongues of its famished fledglings offer 

their treatise on the art of war

that supersedes your articles of surrender,

so there is no defeat while anyone lives

and the world turns. 

Monsters

You may find the bestiary of my verse

an unruly brood, littered with deformities. 

Myths limp, tortured and bleeding, 

from their encounter with my pen.

Lost limbs lie strewn across the page, 

and are hastily arranged to spell a cry for help

which hopefully some reader will see

as they fly over the island at 50,000 feet. 

Perhaps, if they see it, they'll swoop down,

like Bellerophon, to kill my chimerical muse

and save you all from these obscenities

that I cobble together and shock awake, 

a seamstress of freaks 

like Frankenstein or Moreau, 

but all I reassemble is myself. 

My botched attempts, incomplete, 

some blind, others deaf, all lame, 

stumble and grope and wail and moan,

but test them and they will rally

to protect an ageless child, stunted 

by a caul of solitude pierced by these, 

the only companions he has ever known. 

Roll up

Imagine every star is a scale, 

like the scales of a snake or a pangolin, 

but rolled up like a cigarette, and lit, 

dragged while unseen eyes observe

galaxies of distance between us,

a universe of alleyways 

where spies lurk in shadows,

betrayed by their brief billion year glow,

a serpent peeled by the abyss

to indulge a whim whose passing

is measured in black holes

upon the satin night.

That is how inexplicable you are to me,

stranded on this rock. 

Interior Aeschylus

I prefer to talk

about gods and monsters
because I don't feel qualified

to discuss my own emotions.

The words within my reach
seem more suitable

for describing epic contests,
that decide the fate of the cosmos,

than how I feel, which I must leave

to "the tongues of swallows".
Everything must be absolute 

because I can't relate,
so please, remember, somewhere,
in some unimportant corner

of this chessboard
a powerless piece sits,

knees tucked under his chin,
unable to move and play a part,

able only to describe the game,
and use what he sees to say

how he feels inside. 

The echo

"Never again," they said, long ago, no doubt,

in a language lost to the mists of time, 

although we all know the translation.

Who knows? Maybe the first words uttered

were distilled from a mother's howl of grief, 

time itself the corridor down which they echo,

reverberating in the hollow mouths of men

in all their atrocity punctuated chronicles,

the tunnel twisted into a brass trumpet

from which fanfares herald new horrors

ushered onto the stage in the name

of whoever was the last to cry "never again".

Maybe time itself exists only as recapitulation,

an interval we must imagine to hold our grief,

and the floor is not level, but inclines down,

our path not steady progress, but descent

from shattered bliss into a common grave

where all these echoes gather in the end

and are fulfilled at last in the final silence. 

Thoughts and prayers

If health, to you, is a metal heart,

its chambers loaded, pumping clots of lead

down stiff sclerotic gun barrel arteries,

if your thrombotic state merely tickles the law

with a trigger finger, then your only prayer

must be to tell God he was wrong

when he stopped Abraham 

and spared Isaac. 

(Written after the familiar gun lobby response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas)

Schubert

At times like this one must retreat

from all of life's little defeats

into that labyrinth of mists 

that is his last sonata, 

and hear how he negotiates 

with premonitions of his fate,

until he settles what persists

and all that truly matters.

The cat

"What happened?" he said to the cat. 

He wasn't really talking to the cat, 

at least, not to this specific cat, 

but to all the cats he had known.

He had always had cats growing up.

They represented a constant feline presence in his life. 

He felt so completely altered by things now, 

so utterly estranged from the person he had been, 

he struggled hard to remember the good times.

He knew there had been good times. 

A word or phrase would sometimes ignite a memory,

like a little spark struck from a piece of flint, 

and for a moment he would recall 

a thing he used to do that made him happy, 

but eventually the spark was doused 

as the darkness descended on his soul again.

The cat seemed such a master of nonchalance,

so aloof and circumspect,

he imagined those eyes were amber,

preserving everything they saw like fossils,

immune to the desire and regret of others,

and so they glowed with ancient memories in the night 

as it patrolled the eternal present of its indifference.

He knew it was not inclined to divulge an answer,

but it was enough that it might be its keeper.

"What happened?" he said to the cat. 

We life the afterlife of angels

We live the afterlife of angels

in a paradise turned inside out, 

tripping over the scattered debris

of Eden's drystone boundary

in a wilderness of perimeters.

Feathers fall as ash. Footprints map 

futures long past on soles of clay. 

The bulb of heaven, that bright bubble,

burst upon the sky and left it star-strewn

so we may trace with impertinent fingertips

imagined exploits of gods and heroes

and truth is reduced to an opportunity

to utter as yet undiscovered lies

as we describe this fabricated cosmos. 

We live the afterlife of angels,

stumbling retrograde in the abyss

with no understanding of grace

and no memory of bliss. 

Epistemology

What if everything's a coincidence?

What is it possible to know

if everything of which we're certain

will, in the passage of time, be contradicted

as inevitably as constellations yield to parallax? 

Only this: we must let things go 

with as much love as when we held them dear, 

for only then were they miracles while they lasted.

Crawl

 

Christina can't walk. 

She isn't on the ground
because she's resting. 
She refuses a wheelchair.
See that house on the hill?
It doesn't represent anything, 
not sentimental reflections
on a happy childhood, 
or whatever. The distance 
is how far she has to crawl.

Vulgar fraction

I am a fraction of a person,

a simple, common, or vulgar fraction.

I am not a whole person anymore.

I am remembered only as one of many. 

I have no individual existence.

The unit of which I am part, the 1,  

stands as a monument on the ground, 

the virgule, the solidus, the fraction bar

covering the denominator that tells us

how many people are buried here. 

I am a fraction of a person, 

a vulgar fraction. 

(Written following the discovery of mass graves in Bucha)

Mazurka

The cat is beautiful.

The mazurka is beautiful.

The cat cannot hear a mazurka,

The cat can hear a sound. 

The mazurka is a recording. 

The cat is alive. 

The performer does not know

the cat hears the sound. 

Who hears the mazurka? 

Kino

Only sadism could relieve the tedium 

of their unchallenged privilege, 

and so they entertained themselves 

with arbitrary evils. War, famine, 

and pestilence served as distractions, 

horsemen maneuvered 

with knight's move afterthought

across distant criss-crossed time zones 

and continents that tiled the masquerade 

in their villas and cavernous chateaux. 

The planet was a Riviera casino 

for their casual coin toss apocalypses:

billions of lives placed on red or black,

billions of minds taught right and wrong,

lies rolled like dice to cascade through their press.

A roulette wheel of diagnoses for their disorder

was attempted by the wise, to rattle our intellect: 

psychopathy, narcissism, dialectical materialism, 

none ever quite discerning the root cause: nothing, 

the green pocket that gives the house its edge,

the fathomless, oceanic, unending boredom,

that accompanied their vast, purposeless wealth, 

fuel to their toxic and ineffably remote indolence. 

They withdrew to their yachts 

as history broke in waves upon the shore

where the Rights of Man were written on the sand, 

under their indifferent and occasional glance

while they sipped their quarterdeck cocktails, 

for they were impatient for the End of Days.

They had a concession agreement for the Rapture.

After all, the foyer is where the money is made. 

Amelia

She hides in shelters from their bombs.

There's nowhere they can hide from her song. 

They can't escape it in their fast jets.

It's wings will carry it higher yet

than planes from which their bombs fall.

Her song is the smartest bomb of all. 

It scores a direct hit on the heart.

(After seeing the little girl Amelia sing "Let It Go" in a bomb shelter in Ukraine)

An astronomer in Ukraine

The astronomer descends from the observatory to the street. 

Stars are siphoned by her telescope into a silicon net. Caught, 

displayed and studied, their ancient light, their long cold heat,

the fingerprint of their spectra, the exoplanet's swagger, the beat

and slow sway of its waltz with its companion: her thoughts 

turn from here to worlds where perhaps things thought unique

once, divine blessings bestowed with complicated benevolence,

gifts from God with strings attached that later act as precedent

and prototype for the more worldly forms of puppetry

attempted by those who think strength confers authority,

turn out to be a cosmic commonplace, miracles on repeat,

and she descends from her observatory to the street,

exchanging precision optics unblemished by the merest speck

of dust for a dirty old bottle, filled with fuel, rag in its neck,

fuel formed from a miracle of life on which our sun once shone 

and as that ancient heat and light is released 

it helps bring about an earthly dictator's defeat.

The invention of time

No-one wondered 

"Where do we go?

Where do we come from?"

Yes, people were born, 

and people died,

but all remained here,

living, dead, and unborn, 

caught up together in the eddies

of the eternal present.  

There was nowhere else

for anyone to wonder about

so how could they go anywhere

or come from somewhere else?

Then a man looked at a star. 

He stopped seeing it

the way he saw the rest of us.

It was far away and different. 

He started looking at it,

and discovered the idea

of somewhere else,

somewhere different. 

This knowledge brought grief.

The dead no longer stayed with us

now there was somewhere else to go.

People dug holes, or built pyres, 

raised tombs and temples, 

left offerings on altars

and replaced them once they rotted,

because decay now existed,

because the dead had gone,

and the world had to be changed

to fill the absence that they left

and stop the void suffocating us. 

The man had created death,

at least, as we now understand it, 

which assumes it existed all along,

so complete is our overthrow. 

All delight in the world stopped. 

Everything could now decay

and be discarded, disposed of, 

sent somewhere else, 

as easily as a body in a grave.

Everything fell from our hands

and fell forever, into oblivion.

The world fell into Tartarus.

So he resolved he must go

where the dead go, 

but he must go without dying,

and he built a vessel 

that would go in a straight line,

an arrow that would escape

the cauldron rim of his horizon,

and instead of the eternal present

it would carry him to the stars

where he would build zodiacs

to carry time on their shoulders, 

a calculus of sunrise and seasons, 

and the future was invented

to replace the past. 

The hunt

They haven't got round to you yet. 
They will eventually, like all the rest.
You think you're different? You're just the same.
It's just a matter of time until it's you they find 
when they're looking for someone to blame.
We're all illegal. We're all fugitives.
Don't confuse respite for safety,
even if you've enjoyed it your whole life.
The books will burn and it'll be your turn.
They'll knock on your door one night, 
because rules are all unwritten,
though they drift on and off the page,
and even though you think you're in charge
the dogs will turn on you one day.

The wrack

We idealise our fellow passengers 

because reality is too painful to consider.

We forget the cruelty, absolve the sadism, 

so casual, so relaxed, so unremarkable

that it is not remarked upon. 

We disregard the teeth bared in every smile,

the snarl in every laugh.

We approach the subject in a controlled manner,

crop and collimate it in the aperture of our words,

and manipulate it into an acceptable form 

with the molten lens of our sentences.

Polite lexicons inventorise 

the locked archive of our imperial mischief, 

the derelict war museum of the mind.

We are drowned citizens of sunken cities, 

the sea surrounding us an amniosis of amnesia.

Crabs escape their ruined ribcage creels

in the barnacled marketplace. 

Statues personifying virtues we extolled,

gestures frozen in a paralysis of hypocrisy,

marble faces clenched in a rictus of righteousness

as they clinch some pointless argument,

wear the kelp laurel of futility's triumph, 

monuments to the broken compromise

between competing cruelties above the waves.

We slip past mines and sink to this place,

following our anchor to the seabed,

any grip on the world above purchased 

only by loosening someone else's fingers first.

The storm gives expression to a rage we deny,

an anger of unknown origin that will never be satisfied

and consumes our vessel. We abandon ship, 

abandon each other, abandon ourselves: 

the individual is what remains of every doomed collective

after their successive disintegrations;

the sinking ship, the lifeboat overwhelmed by the swell, 

the flotsam and uncertain fate to which we cling, 

hope bought with coin minted from the despair 

of those left for dead at every increment of disaster

until at last we each drown alone in useless wealth

and all that is left to do before we go is ask our children 

to forgive us for the fragments of humanity they inherit.

Narcissus

We live, 

not on the surface of things,

but on the ripples,

motion, not substance,

and to stand still is to cease,

fall forever into the infinite regress 

of our own reflection.

We tell ourselves great lies,

the monstrous myths

of static and simultaneous being,

the annals of time and space, 

so we can escape into our imagination 

of everywhere and now

from the nowhere and never

on which the evanescent ripple rides.

We are ephemera, rumours, 

whispered from star to star,

the gossip of atoms 

whose burden of reality

we cannot share. 

Orphans

Those without a mother find her in the earth. 
Those without a father find him in the sky. 
Those rejected by their peers,
as awkward, unconfident, and inept, 
accept the wider world's indifference 
in all the astronomies and excavations
with which they explore what they don't have,
and find in it a kind of divinity to celebrate,
and consolation in an oblivion less bitter
than the cauldron of emptiness inside them,
where the lost can lose themselves at last, 
in the embrace of their mother in the earth 
and the embrace of their father in the sky. 

The diegetic audience

Cinema is a stomach, 

the auditorium a cavernous gut

in which we are digested

by light and sound.

Aisles slick with spillage

like ducts for bile, 

bits of foyer fodder,

soaked in soda, stick

to the soles of your shoes

as you take your seat. 

At one time we believed

the soul lived on the tongue,

at another, in the lung. 

Greeks spoke of πνεῦμα. 

Now when songs are sung

the head and heart

make rival claims

to be seat of the soul,

but as the titles roll

and celluloid thoughts

unspool upon the screen

we see the soul sits in the gut.

The windows of Saint Denis

once filled our world 

with lux aeterna

and lumen de lumine.

The projectionist kindles 

a more earthly light

and we dissolve in it, 

the diegetic audience,

the digested audience. 

Dogma 22

Camera position and movement are diegetic, but not in the style of "found footage". The audience should have the perspective of an object in the scene rather than a participant in the action. 

Therefore zoom, rack focus and hand held movements are excluded. 

Pan, tilt, dolly, track, pedestal, follow, crane and aerial shots are limited to movements that could be made by an object in the scene. 

In general, the position should remain static unless the movement corresponds to motion of an object in the scene serving the narrative. 

The fundamental tension that cinema navigates should not be between the role of the audience and the actor, but between the individual antagonist and universal inertia, between personality and objectification, action and futility. 

Cinema should allow the audience to experience the annihilation of character as a consequence of narrative, not use character development as a vehicle to indulge fantasy and arrive at a destination that merely re-articulates and confirms some set of values or assumptions that have been contested within the narrative. 

Therefore the narrative should portray a process of disintegration rather than development. The narrative does not serve to develop character, but dismantle it. Cinema should reduce and degrade the character until it shares the same status as the audience, of being an object in the scene. 

This can only be achieved and understood if the audience is already an object, as they cannot contribute to the narrative. 

This status of the audience is not because of a theatrical arrangement, where action is viewed in the round, or through a fourth wall. Cinema can place the audience within the action, but only as an object, if the story is to avoid all possibility of wish fulfillment on the part of the audience and remain independent of preconception and agenda. It is only as powerless spectators that the audience can be part of the universe the characters become part of as they are annihilated. 

Cinema has the capacity to communicate truth directly, rather than just dialectically. It is only as an object that the audience is released from the need to engage in a dialectic that would interrupt and obfuscate this transmission of truth through direct experience. 

Any music is diegetic, for example, You Were Never Really There (2017), the kitchen scene, as "I've never been to me" (Charlene, 1977) plays on the radio. 

Delta

The river is of uncertain source, 

woven from squabbling tributaries

whose rival claims of precedence

are lost in clamouring torrent

from which the cartographer 

must braid a single name

as they wrestle each other 

in a meandering bout

across the flood plain.

Those with no sense of direction

insist they lead the way, 

and with the best will in the world

do the most damage. 

They finally unravel in marsh

as the river approaches the sea.

A delta is a step change

but who will draw the line

to say where the river ends

and the sea begins? All we know

is that there is a point of no return

we recognise only once it has been passed,

an increment that we can reckon

only after it has been accrued,

that makes the difference 

between distraction and futility,

and the end of our journey 

is a process, not an event.

All dooms are relative. 

We can persuade ourselves 

we are wiser than fools

while fate hesitates to contradict us. 

At some point we know better. 

We cannot predict when.

A dance before dark

Substance becomes process.

A barricade of lipid protects
the first dance, a swirl of steps
watched and copied by bases paired 

in purposeless replication.

For a billion years blue bacteria plumes
belch an oxygen atmosphere for us.

Mycelia discover minerals,
excavating the stuff of life from rock.
Vegetation thrusts roots
through soil made from its own death
in resurrectionist curiosity.

We watch vapour trails criss-cross the sky,
connecting departures to destinations
that lie beyond unbreachable horizons
marking the rim of our saucered lives.
Children play beneath the blue sky

on the sea ice in winter
oblivious to season and hazard.

The expanding cosmos whispers
heretical panspermic mysteries,
as the vacuum itself stretches 
like skin over something else

growing fat on something less,
some dark wine pressed
from still-born grapes grown
in shadow soils that compensate
for life's invasion of the wasteland,

vines growing upside down
under the sea ice, fed by roots
that sprout upwards, invisible,
to coil round our hearts
and siphon off our breath
into a crop of lies,

as stars deplete

what we describe as fuel, 

as though it was deliberate,

as though there is a point,

to illuminate, for a little while,
in this dance before the dark. 

We never learn

We never learn 

from celestial indifference. 

We never learn. 

We demand stars care

when we wish upon them, 

dream moons weep and dwindle

when our hearts break, 

imagine clockwork orbits 

make manacles for the divine

with the names we give planets,

and never learn. Prayer needs air, 

being just words, just sounds,

and remains forever Earthbound. 

The vacuum listens

only once we stop speaking,

but we never learn to be silent. 

We never learn. 

Instrumentality

What? 

What did you say? 

What kind of thing is this?

This sound you offer me: what is it for? 

A word? Is it a vehicle for meaning?

Is it a tool for creating meaning?

Maybe it is like a spade.

It seems to me it is like a spade.  

We can use it to dig an escape tunnel,

imprisoned in Château d'If, like Abbé Faria,

using words to tunnel towards each other

from our solitary confinement, 

or perhaps it's a stone.

We tap out an insistent jailhouse Morse 

upon the plumbing that passes through our cells, 

infiltrating the isolation of others

with news that our solitude is fictional, 

or maybe it is a ticket for a train, 

taking us from some tense internal exile 

in some chill northern town in Siberia 

to a warm Black Sea resort and a tearful reunion 

with those who also always knew the thaw would come, 

this day where we reveal to each other 

secrets we already knew but couldn't say out loud 

across the kind of distances that describe the steppe, 

knowledge of love shared long before it is confessed

in our cheerful comparison of heart-hoards.

Is it a crowbar, a tool to extract the abstract 

from the everyday objects in our hand, 

to prise and peel the colour red from an apple 

so that we can use it to describe the hues 

that blush in the distant mists of Betelgeuse 

and stain the sands of Mars,

or is it a pick-axe, exposing precious ores 

that glisten in the marrow of our meanings, 

each blow splitting the seam of all our seemings,

or a pen, chronicling tautologies that taunt epistemologists 

from the misgivings of Meno to the ramblings of Rumsfeld, 

a tool to label everything unknown, to give it name?

Maybe it's a bellows, fanning the embers 

that illuminate the mansions of the heart 

with breathless protestations of admiration, 

filling us with love's strange surgery of heat,

reaching into our flesh and altering us forever 

in each other during the intimacies we share 

and contemplate later alone.

Perhaps it eludes our grasp, 

slipping through the net of benign cross purposes 

from which we weave those conversations

in which we imagine we catch the world, 

skipping with the unmoderated joy of a child 

over the hop-scotch of coincidences that occur 

when we think we understand each other:

a living sound, created but not controlled, 

making each tongue chime with the turn of its heel 

as it dances out of reach,

and when we wonder why it avoids us, 

it laughs at the absurdity of our question. 

Our world is what happens when absence of purpose 

is observed by one intent on seeing reason, 

one determined to see meaning, whether it is there or not, 

and in doing so, binding time in knots of thought, 

knots that eventually unravel in ironic and depleted silence 

when we try to describe the impossible worlds 

where we can finally be together.

Veal

It behoves the beeves,

on calves behalves,

to reveal that veal's

their aftermaths. 

Portrait

Your job is not to paint a likeness. 

No, your job is to show people 

what I look like,

which is not the same thing. 

Nothing looks like itself. 

We all see something different. 

I am hideous. I am beautiful. 

Attempts at accuracy are doomed,

even, or most especially, 

when they seem most likely to succeed, 

for in that sense of reality you create

what do people see but the impossibility

of what you have attempted. 

Certainly not reality. 

Images are intercessionary at best, 

but we still need them

because nothing is possible 

without the impossible, and so 

your job is not to paint a likeness. 

Eulogy

When we consider the few scraps that remain

- the melodies he could be bothered to write down,
those bon mots that peppered his conversation,
a lyric he repeated when his own words failed him,
that joke he always told,
those embarrassing opinions he repeated,
a few chapters of a novel he never completed - 

what can we say? The rose we reconstruct 

from petals strewn in memory

blossoms entirely in our imagination. 

All we can say is who we imagine him to be, 

not who he was, which has now gone forever, 

and which we never truly knew while he was here.
So let us do that much at least,
inadequate as it is, for to do less
is to surrender to what he fought
in his own way, on our behalf. 

Downer

I've heard a successful poem

must be easy to understand
and immediately relatable.
Fuck that. I'm not writing this
so you will understand and relate.
Poetry is a compulsion.
Inspiration? The Muse?
A Tourette's syndrome of the soul,
not so much sparks of genius

as splinters from a shipwreck,
as I struggle to make myself whole.
I'm not trying to please you. 

You are the sea 

and I'm scared of drowning,

and this poem is how I keep that fear 

under control,

so just you sit there and shut up,

and don't ask any difficult questions,
like how do I feel. How do I feel?

I don't know
except it's not the same as you,
it was never the same as you,

it will never be the same as you,
and that's why you're down there
and I'm up here,
because otherwise you'd be up there
and I would be down here,

drowning.  

Curtain call

"Love me one last time," she said

as they lay on their bed.

Curtains drawn, light dim, diffuse,
he held her as he summoned himself.
They had rehearsed this embrace
for half a century,
learned each other's bodies
so completely since that first time,

that even though age 

had wrought its changes upon their flesh,
all memories ignited now at its end. 

Intimacy came easy, automatic,
caress muscle memory
in the tender repertoire of their love,
tempered now by that greater care
her precarious condition necessitated.
Afterwards they cried.

A bouquet of flowers stood
in a vase by their bedside. One week later
he lay them on her grave.