Sunday 27 September 2015

Pretty, Little Stones

I sat in the library until closing time,
Penning the sharp-edged rime
Of pretty, little stones that shone,
Pretty, little stones dull as bone,
Igneous stones so light they float,
Little clouds caught in a mote,
I remember collecting the chips,
Pressing their lines to my lips,
Their names were all it took to seize
the mineral design with solid ease,
I always wrote things I couldn't hold
Promises that keep growing cold.

Fires That Spread

There exists a fire born to spread,
Find home in embers long dead,
Pull apart the weight of dreams,
Shake the hopes on hollow beams,
There are walks in the park
That you must take in the dark
To see the full wonder of your face,
Faintly lounging on the empty space,
Make the threshold of night
The balcony to relentless light,
Find your rapture in new bones,
See them breathe life into stones.

Confession Poem


If I wrote you a poem,
Soft, but grand in expectation,
You'd tell me I dream too much,
You'd tell me I know you not,
What scheme do I draw you on?
What remains of "you" in me
when there has not been "we"?
This is the irony of poems-that-make,
Of songs that bear themselves
like a universe summoned into being
out of nothing broken, nothing spent.

This is why it will not have roses,
Roses are gentle and thorny,
Any rough hand can take them
with fingers careful to feel,
No.
I'd tell you of the sunflower instead,
The blind seed grows to the Sun
when it does not know what moves it,
The ripe stalk bends backwards
as if it heard the rapture of being
inside the passing sunbeam,
stroking its petals with the glow
of fires that it does not see,
of fires that it cannot see.

This, then, is a confession poem,
I am blind and burning,
I know nothing of you,
But that is hardly the point,
And you know it.

Tuesday 22 September 2015

There are softer things than love confessions

There are softer things than love confessions
stoppered in wine bottles left on stone,
Drier promises feel crisp between palms
and stay quiet across telephones.

Open my diary and run through the bark,
You will find truth flickering upon liars,
The territory knows the map's unbecoming,
All of my cartography is forest fires.

There are softer things than love confessions,
I wear their crooning beneath cold skin,
There are promises I have never kept
and my breaking is slow burning.

Friday 11 September 2015

Loving Truth

There once was a man who loved the Truth,
He had gold-nibbed pens in pearly inkwells
and a sky-blue collection of recycled paper
upon which every night he would labour
to spill his research of the day's working
so that tomorrow made more sense than today.
One day, he swung his inventory on a shoulder
and set out to survey where the day pooled,
because the jagged shorelines held old names,
and the streetside music was inherited secrets,
These were names and secrets he needed to write down,
you could see him sitting against a dropping sun,
after a long day of hot bazaars and cold companies
and wonder at the arcana inside harbor air,
Every morning he would clean two squares of cloth,
write the Truth on its uneven fabric,
and paste them over his eyes as holy ritual
Thus he wandered the world with blind justice in day;
At night he would wax into his memoir
that the world was strung of a single thread
and that there is beauty to be found in its discovery.

Display Picture


I compliment your display picture
and become a superficial spider
strung on the world wide web,
I don't tell you I want to trace you
in my words like I know your lacework,
like I know your baroque and grotesque,
I know the cipher to the divine in them,
I don't tell you I don't know you anymore,
The furrow beneath your lip hides lies,
I am not qualified to know them now,
I skirt your inside with patchwork smiles
and pretend that the gold was in your skin,
that my temples were made to your beauty
and all your divine was always in hiding.