The Saint
A Devonian flower in Permian soil.
A song tempered by fire.
A forgetful light, illuminating
the nowhere that is everywhere.
Beneficent windfall.
Like a votive candle, this saint
flickers among the penitents.
A voice at the end of the rainbow,
this saint is a martyr to pins and arrows.
If you cut her she bleeds well water.
If you kiss her you're damned.
And still we kiss her.
In one hand is an urn
of the righteous's ashes.
In the other, a deity
jealous of her miracles.
At her feet of ivory and ice
is a garden of cleansing flame.
Is a God without love.
Is a heaven of cats and reptiles.
The saint dwells within a prayer
and makes her bed in the primitive earth.
She burns like phosphorous burns.
Her flesh submits to the dark's conscriptions.
The Uninvited
Ghosts behind a postal stamp
and underneath a tablecloth.
With large black eyes and swollen fingers,
sucking on icicles and clucking like hens.
Ghosts, shy of a miracle.
Making nests in a chimneystack.
Startling week-old kittens.
Knocking over the salt and causing
a bit of a ruckus, a bit of a stir,
and you in the throes of slumber,
deep in the earth of your bed,
swaddled from the mortal storming.
Ghosts in the kitchen
and dancing with mice,
singing the cockroach back into its crib,
an invasive species from another planet,
a world where everything is grey and green,
and you asleep, surveying night's damage,
yesterday wedded to tomorrow.
A ghost behind an eyelid.
A ghost in your earhole,
talking you down from your dreamy ledge.
A thousand ghosts in a choir of atoms,
offspring of a million-headed god
who does not love you.
To A Sorry End
A soldier lies dead in a ditch.
Maybe he's you, in another century.
Perhaps this is me, wrung dry
with war and warring.
Rain comes down in a wash of tears.
Blood flow joins with rivulets of rainwater,
dragging his soul to the edge of the sea;
the vagabond soul, the unwarranted sea.
For the dead-tired soldier, time has stopped.
None of the other universes exist.
The latest gods are drunk or sleeping.
Maybe this is a future war
and the soldier is yet to be born.
Perhaps we've mistaken his mother's cries
as yips of jubilation,
her tears blurred in a downpour,
a rain that's fallen since Seneca first moaned
about the twists in the human condition.
Maybe this is Rome after the fall.
Perhaps the Somme, its bloody mudbath,
death being timeless, a poignant proposition
of loser-takes-all in the come-what-may.
I can't tell you, it's hard to see and say,
the soldier's grimace ringing a bell
but his face unsettled by fear, a likeness,
portraiture of a singular downfall.
Corporal, you had your run, your summers,
the lazy mornings in a lover's bed.
A seed was planted in the heart of a cell,
and now the harvest.
Wearisome
A bad sleep is a bad road
skirting the Underlands.
A bad sleep is a knuckle gnawed
and surly argument of tendons.
Torque and torsion play their part
in undermining the body's tenements.
You become a nasty thought.
A simmering kettle of fish heads.
An abandoned kitten.
A bad sleep is acid splashed
across the face of reason.
We ask the same questions,
agents of darkness
nursing a bewildering angst.
Planets at the foot of the bed
wobble with uncertainty.
Unease and silence multiply,
the globe's axis tipping
towards the angle of repose.
I think I think I hear
night-apes in the cemetery
celebrating my eventual demise,
a bad sleep a thankless task,
the curious owls turning heads to hear
a song played out on bones and minds.
Sandman, it's a risible music.
What We Do Now
Truthfully, the past lies
beyond immediate recall,
intangible smudge,
illegible blur, faces gone
to hell, expressions
frozen in rictus.
The past stirs ashes
of a former fire.
What we have is smoke
and the rounding of edges,
yesterday a featureless scape
weathered smooth
with timely memories.
What you did then
is done; what you said
relegated to suchlike,
the old house torn down,
minds gone to seed,
beauty battered.
What we do now
is hope for the best
and plan for the worst.
What we do now
is grip the handrail tightly,
avoiding falls and doctors,
the future a short while,
the past a passing notion.
What we are now
are points of light
in the folds of sorrow.
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