The builder on the roof is not money in the jar and the burning tree not a fire in the heart just as the trigger plant waiting to be earthed is not a gun in the artery. And why these words cohabit is not gratis, by permission of the state, but a self-investment, their own autogamy. Whether they stumble or glide across the page as they thread the eye through space (whether the eye can waltz or not). Except for the words caught at the margin before they can imprint themselves and instead become detained at distances away from welcome. Arrested in the act is not what their voices expected, or that apprehended and becalmed like prayer flags in the soulless they must wait like refugees for admission. Jostle or blend, however the mingle, each word abreast in every other, en mouth, en route, en masse.
STEM
Derelicts and Discards
Words as strays adrift for want of connective rythmn. Written and abandoned somewhere between nuance and nuisance, they litter the years, birthed
but not raised. Now on the edge of their existence I am forced to exhume. Self as sabotage doubt as espionage
though sometimes faith tiptoes among the forensics not to furbish a toxic majesty but to retrieve images, thoughts, lines with life yet embedded
even shadows will yield to the sun’s fertile lick. Time’s genitals though cannot promise success. Mind must sex itself play the fool embrace the feast
as on this wet July day. After dreaming of creation’s furnace I wake to old jottings burning my tongue …little pallid operas …the clarity cellar …isobars of insanity …fallacies by tinpot gods
equally potent the tug of resistance is akin to the wrinkle on my cheek after having lain all night on imagination’s precipitous ridge
if such proved to be a finality, a shipwreck of the senses, Breathe me Raptured could not survive as a title-in-waiting
as always it is the irritant subconscious who taunts with what I already know… do your best do your worst no mythic key can turn a poem off or on.
I call her N – M – S – S
She who has been with me always dedicated, vigilant formless and faceless
she creeps, pounces If I could detect her phon her subjective unit of loudness I could deflect her chosen misfortunes her dubious rewards are unwieldy
packets of conscience hubris versus justice
malevolent or benevolent she is ever implacable to deplete her
I drop each vowel from her name but the tricks of elision
cannot banish her only the umbilical I fail to detect could sever us
Rainbow elegy
a leach of colours
gratis over and _____ under lord-ism 👁 👁
a-b-e-r-r-a-n-t dimensions of human peg and hole
👁 🌈
ties family ties cultural ties political 🌈 👁
oppress * excess * digress * success
as invested statistics frighten the polls
👁 🌈 👁
and each new hour slowly turns dark
🌚
Fruit
Night throws vision a mass of shadows my hand tightens its grip on the knife as strip by delicate strip I peel the skin from a kiwi fruit the dark hour’s last flesh green, succulent the first bite instigates a new cycle of return another rebirth in ancient soil the kiwi’s black seeds like tiny digestive stars which have fed the earth we till with care or with greed’s sweet tooth the complicity of appetite its servitude to hunger ever compostable and alive centuries of playing dice with yield anxiety, creativity, denial the best the worst the intimacies of truth lying always with fruit.
