untitled4

found your mouth in the dark
like a weed through a wall
searches for the smiling sun
and climbs blindly toward heaven

god is a christmas card that used to be a tree

5a.m.

grey sky frozen
and there's beauty
in the smoke-stacking chimney that billows
from the hospital furnace
where souls of stillborn babies
rise to rejoin the Universe
and cold streets awash with rats and windbitten faces
that would smile at me if they could.
this conquered city, making tired love
blessed and empty with litter
like the pages of a book
I dare not dream
where the dawn is a darkening day,
and a memory erased out of need
crawling from the shadows of itself

where are you now
little thing that i love
lost in hospital
here and there
making the world feel big
i remember the moon
looked small in your eyes
smiling like a crooked morning
from the corners of your mouth

untitled3

you are that windswept sparrow song
torn through tangled trees and gone
you are the bleaching bones that sing
on dusty shores of everything

further

Further out this time
Into the dark dragging sea
Eyes clouded and black
But with phosphorent green swimming
In the depths
Where drowned lovers labour
And the bones of the old sailors sing
The cold blood and lungs of the Universe
That rolling engine of time
Roaring in my ears
Rusted with the ash of stars.

observed

Old Woman on the bus
Coughing like a wet bucket
Rasps on every breath to her husband;
The silent foil
Aimlessly on-and-on
Like a break in conversation could kill her.
Something desperate in her recollections
As a fading photocopy, that thins and forgets itself
This inward outward monologue
Reminds us she's alive
But running on vapour now
Her memory dissolving as she speaks
About what she said, to whom, and why
And I am slowly nodding, along with her old man
At this mouldering ember of life
Tottering on the edge of oblivion
Knowing that the end is really nothing
But a break in conversation
When a husband remembers his wife.

fags

there's a world without cigarettes
but i can't find it
beyond the tips of my fingers
further than the end of my face
this taste of things to come
this slow subconscious suicide
has swallowed me like a secret

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underwater
far from here
the ocean breathes
like a sleeping giant
on a bed of murdered mountains
in the arms of sunken sailors
a barrelling roar that only bends with distance

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in the corridor
shadows lick the wall
like smiles after sunset
deep in a memory mine
with the cold rattle and shriek
of a shiver that made you smile