Born To Rue
Chimneyed houses set against a red sun
Frown at the morning, as under cover
Of distant car-humming, things that hover
By lorn windows begin to worm their way
Inside. Past the net past the bars past
The lingering stench of frenzied spraying
They come, fly, mosquito and bee, flaying
With their taunting greetings the slack faces
And tousled heads that trusted their sweet rest
To these fuming bricks. Thus broached, quiet walls
Turn into a death trap. The visor falls:
Bars come crashing down. The hunt begins.
Homesick, Or Sick Of Home?
Our hair, if they did more than just exist
Would they be exiles or adventurers?
If hair too could love, crave, yearn and persist
Like those incurable old desirers –
Brain, stomach, heart, soul, tongue, foot, finger-tip;
If the tendrils of hair caught in a comb
Were looped gently over its teeth, let slip
Into the wind, sent from their plastic tomb
Out into the world, would they learn to fly
Free, or plucked from their hearths, wither and die?
Obelus
My life is harnessed to red,
The colour of blood,
And the dead,
Dead flames of festering rage
Forged from time’s ruin
In a cage.
Its gushing artery-trains
Run into the bruised
Sluggish veins
That you cut open
With your pen.
Photographer
Your shield-shaped sword ever on the qui vive
You come, modern quester, without fanfare,
Without flourishes to alert the quarry.
Your fewmets are emotions that receive
Scant attention from the unquesting. Snare
And prey share life’s strange, guilt-rift complicity.
Spontaneities scattered about cities
Like stubbed toes wrench you from tranquil streams,
Unsheathe your tempests. The immortality
You crave finds so entwined inequities
And sublimities, your sword learns from dreams
And screams both, to reap all indifferently.
So you catch and grey the unguardnesses
Of a staircase that believed itself stone
Impenetrable, and of hands and faces
Lured by the seeming-safety of tresses
Of solid steel, and bind them to make known
To every rapt gaze their myriad graces.
Xylem In A Brown Study
Through a dozen leaf-falls the axed tree’s stump
Searched in sorrow the skies for each fresh fate:
Digame, sky, shall it be rain clouds, one
Huge storm cloud to destroy all we designed
Or the fluttery white wisplings assigned
To keep the peace twixt the earth and the sun?
In dry leaves it sat, tended by a clump,
Affecting a stillness regal in state,
Remembering promises boldly made
When the first axe was buried in its side
By a deep young voice that faded and died
Over the hills ever green and ice-staid,
The withering of branch and flesh, the jump
That to both start and ending proved the gate
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