special

Never close to death and further from life
Looking over the shoulder to copy answers
Orbiting dance floors like an irregular comet
The spit at the bottom of a beer glass
A collector of dead men drinking dregs
The photograph you burn was borrowed
The romance you had was second hand
Puking up Shakespeare because it was too rich to stomach
Fencing with [...]

replaced

Does it hurt to be replaced with a seven-inch piece of rubber?
Does it hurt to replace someone with a seven-inch piece of rubber?
The slow abstraction of the absent other into pornographic fragments
Shattered into tits and a cunt your face struck out
It’s all motor reflexes and junk information
Both coming to a point
He thinks he’s the zenith [...]

an understanding

God coming through in the correlations
Jesus in the timetables naming the stations
A ration of wine watered down spilt on a tablecloth
This is my station I better get off
Faith is a journey doctrine’s a branch line
The slow emerging bruise of cynicism
Goes from tooth rot black to urine yellow
And I hate it all much less as I [...]

Coined Eyes

The wise
Have eyes
Closed with coins.
Death
Severs breath
And knowledge joins
To the spent brain’s mind –
All truth’s bind
In the after.
Tears and laughter,
Fears
And the years
Of living in fear of the dark
Have kept us from the depths wishing
For the Ark.
Fishing
For a fate
Left too late
That’s growing stark.
Black dogs bark
In shadow home,
Heard by dead sages under the loam –
Funereal lessons taught,
Afterlife learning [...]

A Phase In The Face

Each frond and whorl,
Each twist and curl,
Is a phase
In the maze
Of the face
Of the girl.
Each ear and eye,
Each smile and sigh,
Are turned to
View
The new
Face where comparisons die.
Each mind and voice,
Each wish and choice,
Hope for that
Cat
With the hat
And Rolls Royce.
Each heart and desire,
Each emotion and fire,
Burn and
Return
To the sight where gazes retire.
Each happening and scene,
Each camera [...]

Cut Off

And he was blinded:
Eyes shut perforce –
A cruel blow
For an artist.
And so he flowed through his fingers:
Mind operating through the plasticity of clay,
And they cut off his fingers –
A cruel tragedy
Dealt upon a sculptor.
And his tongue learnt eloquent words:
A poet of deepest profundity was born,
And they cut out his tongue –
A devastation
To a man of [...]

Delicate Cuts

I have made my home among the delicate cutters. Ah, I see I disappoint you — you think I have damaged the dream you had of me as some beautiful and graceful creature that rooted out evil from the world. Well, I’m afraid it’s true, I am merely another scavenger of grief. Why deny that [...]