Invasive

I've said it before and I will say it again.

Spread the word, one step away form hysteria.

Decide who you are, bunch up in a corner.

Build an electrical charge: release the word.

One person on their own and the rest pointing.

I am a legion.

One place in your head and another in your body.

Awoke asleep and slept awake.

I have my eyes open all of the time,

it seems that there is light without respite;

like the radiance from a body that is burning.

A combustion of thought.

Projectile language on a dark staircase.

Arms in the walls.

Waiting.

Turning back the wheel.

There is so little that makes sense and so a little more chaos

could only confuse.

I came here uninvited, I will stay at my own pleasure, leave when I choose.

Feather Mammy - A La Deriva

Legs burning, full of pins; he felt without focus, surrounded by light. There was a tree at his back, solid and magnificent. He had been crouching at its base for some time, he thought. Long enough for the blood to leave his feet and a place to form, a hollow pressed into his back between shoulder-blade and spine where it met the bark. He picked up a leaf from the ground next to his feet and held it up towards a bright place where the sun must be. The veins spread out across its surface like a river delta and between them glowed a deep green. His head was full of noise, of words, sibilance and susurration; thoughts drifted past, turning over slowly, flashing momentarily, dazzling. Water rolled off his head from amongst his hair and disappeared into the cotton shirt at his shoulders. He wasn't sure if it had rained or not. Perhaps he swam. Yes, that was it. He had run, throwing his clothes off and his body forwards into rolling roaring surf. A wave had picked him up and turned him over, pushing his face into stones and shells, pushing the breath out of his lungs. There was a taste of blood in his mouth now from nose or tongue, and salt crystallizing on his brow. He let the leaf fall and watched as it span slowly around the axis of its stalk. The passage of the leaf through the air, its graceful descent, carried with it a veil of unconsciousness. As its saw toothed edge touched earth his eyelashes brushed together.

The Grass Was Dry

Hay pressed into the book of summer
but reading it now
hard to believe
a fiction in blades.

The grass here died and lies
indisposed upon the earth
in a suspended reality
between growth and
decomposition.

This made frame looks down
as if from a great height,
from heaven perhaps,
where judgements are made
because in hell no one cares
enough.

Hay to hay and
grasses to grasses
life moves fast and
nothing lasts
this grass is dry and
pressed flat so add water
and stand back.

The Song of the Moon

I dream of you in endless coils,

My love is an ocean that writhes and boils.

All the waters come to me

All fluid movements seep;

My heart is dry, will always be,

My eye can never weep.

I feel you through my dusty skin,

The liquid moving round within.

I’ll draw you out you blooded cells,

You bladders, ponds and deep lake stills.

All the waters come to me

All fluid movements seep;

My heart is dry, will always be,

My eye can never weep.

My drought is a muscle a singing wire,

Strung tight between us in lines of desire.

I dream of you in endless coils,

My love an ocean that seizes and boils.

All the waters come to me

All fluid movements seep;

My heart is dry, will always be,

My eye can never weep.

Lying

Ants crawl, but does that word work?

They angulate and populate,

taking determination to a place

that only insects can understand.

If I lie next to them then

a hundred hundred feet

will navigate and assess my

nutritional value over body weight.

Tied as I am by shadow I remain

and remaining am reminded

by bites unnumbered of my skin

in all its lined and folded subtlety.

Clothes, perhaps, are worn not for warmth

but because without them we might

have leather for brains lying

in a state of receptive ecstasy.

Beginnings

Walking through the forest with little light,

eyes on stalks

or sunk back into my head understanding that

nothing they could do would help.

Slips of white moon fall between clouds and cut down

in amorphous blooms that carve roots into portions of abstraction.

We begin in breathless anticipation

of a life's headlong rush into knowledge;

young mind open like a flower to receive all understanding.

At a later time the only thing that becomes clear

is that we will never know

and however long our petals hold back against inevitable closure,

we will always be at the beginning and not the end.

Each day I begin again with you and all previous knowledge

sheds a small light on the wilderness and wildness.

We look at one another and our eyes show us only

skin, cloth, a movement in the shadows.

But I am walking through you, however unclear my path

and I know that I will find the way.

Descent

Descent

After coming down, after

not flying, turning from

a bird into a man

in all realities there was a change

at which moment perspectives

slid like glass doors or

the opening brass tubes of a

telescope and in that action

I was at once bound to earth

and free to soar.

The bird dreamed it was human,

could not lift clear, drift out

across the city roofs and blue sea;

but that was a dream and

the shell is not yet broken.

The bird is waiting.