Wish

I feel as the ocean trapped in glass,
Watching you walk past, before me.
I crash with vain fury against smooth wall.
I attempt to seep through the barless cage.
Only to become tired, and tread on,
Hollow, and lifeless. Drowning. . .
In my own suffocating tides.

I seem to be a trespasser,
Beckoning to something within you.
Something that seeks my unheard call.
A drowning ocean trapped in a glass.

I seek to awaken a slumbering form.
The quiet woman who is asleep inside,
Down in the depths of your heart.

I only wish to make her stir,
To draw her out past ivory columns,
While holding soft, her manacled©arms.

I would melt through these chains.
With my fires, eternal and pure,
And then just hold her to me.
Letting her sleep within my heart.


- 1995!

Date corrected. I should explain that most things labelled 1996 are actually because that's the last good round of backups I got, after a rather unfortunate fire. There is certainly older stuff, but many lack dates, or have the generic 1996 date applied as they were retrieved from an online backup. =\

Quark

Bottom no more tears from you dear charm.
Sweet night's strange vespers steal
her lips as silken feathers spin

Sweet charm, let me kiss you a gentle one
too soft the flutter of a butterfly

Evensong, rising top-down on a plume of
mornings turned silverleaf air.

Sing charm, let once more a song
of kisses brush up your sleeping eyes

Wan compline finds evening's sand
beneath the eyes of even Angeles.

Strange charm to Angels i attribute you
candles and sandlewood matins betide
a wash of kisses over yours and charm.

- 1997

Scratch

One night, I found myself again. I was scouring spidery old crevices of bureaucracies for an outdated treasure. I longed for blue screens and frantic block cursors. . . the faithful scalpel of creaky clerks, who scuttle for shade in the belly of governmental dead-letter offices.

I was drawn to the early glimmerings of technology that stealthily, stubbornly persist to this day. Such things are heavily watermarked with sweaty familiarity, an in-bred allergy to progress, and long forgotten sacrifices upon an altar to genuine usefulness, made by long discarded grand-sires.

A writer of a decade ago would have sought an antique typewriter. Something spindly and frail in its architecture, but famously reliable by reputation. He would have accepted the various quirks of such a machine, like adopting an old hound that likes to circle and prowl after the stooped little old ladies walking home from market.

There are the vicious junk peddlers who pretend legal sensibilities when offering these expired baubles for their original list price. Certainly, amazing given that the moment you drive a car off the lot, its value crashes. And yet, software suited to monochrome caution orange, greys and greens. . . for this they ask a premium. No matter. I haven't yet cracked my skull enough times to corroborate the tweed day-dreams of software's used car-salesmen.

Then again, there are the delinquents, with their perpetually black places of business. They offer in a breath, the object of your desires, surely obligation free erotica, and a wholly unrelated set of undesirable infections to co-opt, corrupt and kaput your silicon consciousness. I often have trouble getting over the enormity of their hospitality.

But this is the preferable path, to tread among the spare razors of sharks and self-mutilators; that the right bloody trail will float by. . it seems inevitable.

- 2006

Foot note

Memory moored in cargo net cradles
green eves, wood eyes
were all spectacles mine

My back, heavy with the perches of ghosts
all ways, dog-eared
in a pucker of time

My eyes widened by the marches of motes
touch worn. inhale
had we nothing to hide?

This stone, my chest, is a purchase of goats
for what else would you
before a god of eyes

Dearest

i call you this, for no other so fits the word,
and because no word suits you so, my other.

i am glad to have found you
words are easy by you, and for you.

we'll pass a streetlamp twilight
true in the brace of each others whispers

let us trade like dusty camel riders
waiting out speckled blurs of storm

i offer you the crux of my arm,
the murmur of my good company and will

and of you? what would i have from you?
only a corner of your heart to warm

i am glad to be beside you, for then,
my heart is right, and will right you.

and what other word suits you so?
because as no other, i call you this,

dearest

- 1999

Day's Ellipis

Petite white parasols stroll on the night,
What elegant patterns they weave.
Like a chatter on the breeze,
Sensing, a spider's leg in the air,

Always blown past your fingers.
Taunting faeries unveil the night,
Dancing out the warm summer.

When dandelions bloom from new seeds,
Katydids cease their nightly serenades,
And my fireflies expire in a jar.


- 1998

Did a few tweaks. Take that, past-self!

518,400 + Seconds

Sage and hickory sprout in my lungs,
As weariness crowds both flesh and heart,
Settle me, let me dream a breath,
Silence be warmed on memory's hearth,

Treading on daydreams with dandeli-umbrellas,
Let me one duet with my dove.
Seemingly, drippling on leaf, and dreaming me,
Hoping a twilight, doubting a dawn.

Clinging to a plume, a sane chord,
Heart dying to a darkening pulse,
Fearful forever of holding and being,
And losing to the endless distances,
Dreams . . .


- Definitely 1994

One of my favorites (I hope that's understandable). I absolutely dread the reality that I cannot equal these earlier efforts. I know for a fact this was not long after I started the Leonard Cohen drip-bag through a clutch of mixed tapes that would rattle around in my bookbag, all day and most nights.

I remember being very fond of the scents of pre-dawn summer days in that edge of suburbia where the dark woods are within view, gardens are English by necessity rather than design, and the scents bitterly overwhelm all other senses, as I started the long walks back.