august 2021

                     (i)

...can words really reshape the air

or replace humankind with a dream

or even this universe with a single vitreous eye

whose glances always become flesh

who then can honestly expound the truth

that wildest essence of all things

for there is a seam of quartz

which carries the imagination

and a vein of silver the heart

trust, they say, is an unimaginable gift

and so it is

because beneath these mountains

words are being hewn out

by beings without eyes

pages and pages of salt

that seize upon the dreaming mind

a pantomime, a circus

an applauding world

this seam of gold

running through the walls 

the unspoken essence of all things...

                      (ii)

...what birds are these that sip illusions

from the eyes of ghosts

their beaks always open

reaching for the moon’s opioid blood

this flightless erudition

this endless wittering

that merely pushes the grotesque

from screen to screen

from one likeness to the next

this brave, mono-syllabled world

and I, the scarecrow, just stand here

in this empty field

my heart stuffed with rags

watching infanticide

phantoms, birds, blood moons

my feet stuck to the ground

stuck to this cheap deception

that I am still doing what I can

to taste the truth

through the mud and straw

that fills my mouth...

                       (iii)

...and then came this hominid

caught in the cross-wires of some apotheosis

its knife-edged supremacy

a world swimming in semen

this cortex, this pith

that has never sincerely known itself

for in the falling hush of rain

there has always been

a strange benediction

an incomprehensible narrative

of how these supernumerary light-years

never let go of the heart

or lose sight of the cross-wires

those knives that shape the universe

this hominid, this inseminating angel, this wasp

caught in the act of apotheosis

splitting rocks, biting trees

closing slowly on the trigger

that moment when even the gods look away

and supremacy explodes...