Go on, ask me

Ask me what a poem means:
I will tell you who I am
And how I got lost on the way to words
To find myself knee deep in a field of pictures.

An evening spent
Getting lost
In the softness of
Your own momentum

Morning

Light bleeds
As light does
From the frazzled curtain veins.

Sleep receeds
As sleep does
From that crackling golden shore.

He pleads
Though he knows
That the dream-waves crash no more.

Today... Remembering

He came down the too-high steps
So that I could hold his infinite hand
And read something in his palms
That I had lost before I ever knew it
Lying rinsed in the cattle-trough
The helplessness who saves the world
One flowering splash of colour
In a world of black and white bones.

You should never pick your nose
When you are sitting on a train
No one wants a booger finger
Pointing at their brain

A Poem

This is one just for you
Electronic ink on a page that scrolls
Like paper used to,
When the desert sands were younger
A few drips of thought
Sucked from a puddle of words
Trapped inside a chunk of bone
By the life-pulse regular as the minutes

This is one just for you
A poem, the last I'll ever write
Till the next one
Something to keep the hidden in sight
Long enough for time
To carry us all to a place for looking back
And gazing like tourists at the Canyon
Full of wonder, emptied of size
Pondering the patient water chisel-work

This is one just for you
A reader wrapped in a mind so alien
You couldn't be me
Hold it like a mirror: Cutting edges.
Silvered backing. Scratch too deep
And there'll be nothing to look at
Only a web of words glued
To the corner of an evening
Waiting for the fly to stray too far.

Just a Rhyme to Pass the Time

How do you keep a secret
When a secret doesn't keep?
Can you refrigerate it overnight
Before you go to sleep?
Can you stop it keeping you awake
By counting all those sheep?

He loved everything enough,
To lose it all for me
I cannot look him in the eye
Afflicted on that tree

With the strength of three men
I will hold a summer flower
Up against the wall of my name
Gifting life like graffiti
To the hard empty stone

With the strength of two men
I will pour the cool water
And wrap a cotton blended waist
Reaching first for the feet
Most heavy skinned in dust

With the strength of me alone
I will hold myself at arms length
A cat curled on black leather
Purring unearned contentment
In some dusty forgotten alcove

I smell your smile a mile away
Meditating in other people's expressions
Like the soul of the old oak tree
When the front yard now huddles in pale exposure

Regret

A line in the sand that bears your footprint.

A fork in the road that's two ways to wrong.

A framed photo of an absent guest.

Speech-notes that never leave your pocket.

A drowning swimmer in a dried up sea.

A ghosting fox in a forest of rustling thoughts.

Sheets still tangled in last night's sleep

The seep of water between slippery fingers.

The stuck hands of a stopped clock.

The monster wearing in your worn reflection.

The hand that leads down tree-lit streets when the night aches too brightly to put on companied stillness.

My Brother keeper

I'm the reason that Creation
Bled
Tearing through the garden as I
Fled
Fists that shook the heavens clenched in
Dread
He seeks for me, and only sees the
Dead.


My Father is a painter all in
Red
His brush is every hair upon my
Head

I'm alive because my brother's
Dead.
He looks at me through Him
Instead.

Here Lies the Smile

Dither then a while and see
A sliver of a smile from me
All paranoid and full of glee
A Polaroid facsimile.
By heartlessly effected grin
You have been played and suckered in

For what it is you seem to spy
Is only on my face, not I!

Sunset

Tis happy when
The daylight dies
When softer moon and stars arise

Tis joyful when
The sun bleeds on
The skin of distant horison

With glee today
Is history
Tomorrow may yet never be

How it aches
When bloodied claws
Castigate the midnight pause

And so I wait
When dawn arrives
That moment sweet
When daylight dies.

Procrastination

Waiting for enough time to pile up
Like folds of cream
A crashing wave, sucking with eager lips
At the sands of plans
Till in the tumble of scattered seconds
Who hide their preciousness
Like breath smuggled underwater
Realization dawns in my warming chest
At once urgent and diffuse
An alarming wail,
Spilling through a thousand alleyways
Birthed by the kiss of a brick
On a single glassy pane.

A Walk

I will cut through the grasses in the night
A sea asleep at the knees
Rustling waves to keep me in the light
Hanging fat in heaven's window.

I'm too heavy to sink beneath this surface
Forever ill and at my ease
Peace an antidote for poisons
I do not have, at war inside of me

A snatch of verse scratched out on paper
Crinkled in a crumpled fist
I'll let you know when I finally get them down
And not the other way around.

Friends

Stranger
Tell me
Would you walk a mile
With my shoes
In step with yours?

Some of the shape of the sound
Slips in deep
A stiletto in an unexpected dark
Black and warm
I am comfortable like a couch
That's seen too much wear
All frayed and unafraid
But warmed by some foreign sun.

Awaken patience
And put him on a lead
Tie the string so tightly
You and I will smile on the
Other side of our faces
Like the sunrise
On two different planets