june 2020

                                  (i)

...once, without warning, the night walked

right through me

leaving behind its transgressions

its similitudes, its sins

the fears that I became

and the dreams that arrived soon after

tumbling out of the heavens

clusters of stars gibbering with light

the darkness drained of purpose

no wonder our words have always sounded

like intruders bullying reality

insulting the millions already butchered

and no-one knows this better

than those who travel with the night

scattering their conscience as they go

this cohort of the damned

with their fearful confetti

celebrating the end of words

the end of truth

this transgression stripped of language...

                        (ii)

...take the autumn, take it away

no-one wants its fast grins

its wily, me-first cunning

throw it up there onto the moon

where its scent cannot reach the soul

hideous magician of decay

waving its death-caps in the air

its bright-red conceits

this lover of slime

whose eyelids are always half-closed

whose jagged fingernails

always snag on everything they touch

but what, in that case

are these squealing primates doing

pouring out across space

mothering worlds

and kissing every mouth they can find

with the fevers of the autumn

can they not see the deathless eternity

watching them approach...

                    (iii)

...it is the sun which writes the poem

but it is the poem that unmasks the man

laying bare the hieroglyphs

and icons crawling over his face

like beads of slow blood

that suddenly seem to rhyme with everything

these dreams of dreams

transcribed by stars

by colossal shrouds

of imploding fires

that perpetually eat the universe

swallowing even immensity itself

until everything begins

to rhyme with everything

and a day and a night

are the strangest of all things

and as men sit counting pebbles

to understand the logic of their existence

poetry shall as a slow shadow

pass unnoticed through the earth...