Crossing

To quarrel with the one you love
Is to cross a boundary
The words despite their potency are irrelevant
There is only subtext

It is to push a boulder across an imagined line
It asks a question
Not because it does not know the answer
But because it wants its truth to be confirmed

In these moments
We dispense of our ammunition
We reach down into a base instinct
Love becomes a word for war

We will strike for the tender place
We will find the Achilles heel
We are so close
We have no choice but to invite distance
Distance will preserve us
Retreat to protect

I quarreled with my lover this morning
I felt his heart in my hand
And I squeezed it tight
In the absence of touch
I reached into him
Found a vein to inject the poison
Crossed the border
Declared myself at my best
The very worst

I can’t help but think that in that moment
Through the salt of my tears
That it was not to be unkind or cause harm
It was to be heard and be seen
And to say
Will you love me nevertheless?

Voyager

True to myself
The dog dances circles in pursuit of its tale
And the bride on your wedding cake ran away
This won’t be the end of it
Far from the point of no return
The prodigal son
Waits for the siren
To sing him off the rocks
3.43 am I sound the alarm of my own oblivion
Beyond the shipwreck of sheets
Tuesday is a symphony for a deaf man
And you have limpets for feet
It’s not that I don’t love you
Lesser men have died from such shrapnel
It’s just that in the loving
I lost a piece of myself
A part I liked and I want it back
We could have been great
Had the world not been such a bitch
You say it like you mean it
As you turn to go
And I can’t call your bluff
Because you aren’t bluffing
I’ve tired of salt and sweat
Days in the sun
For the pearl in your oyster
This game wears itself like a scarf
Easy come easy go
You say
Your heart
Locked like a tomb
And your eyes on backwards
I preferred it that way
The game and the glory
The heart quickening
Pulse racing
Promise of you
Without hope of definition
Worthy of poems
And Tulips
You’d say
Worthy of sweeping statements
And freshly ironed shirts
I have forgotten how to colour in the lines
Lipstick oozes out of the crease of my mouth
I bleed out
Lack depth
Float like seaweed
On the scar of your surface
We must be heading for some sort of grace
A crack in the skylight
A drop in the ocean
We must be
Raked smooth
Like Zen gardens
Feed off our own irony
Perish like plums
At nuances we fail to grasp
At innuendo at its best
At words that live their lives unformed
In mute mouths
In their Sunday best
So it shall be said
Before the disaster
Knocks the wind
Clean
Out
Of
Your sails.

(he)Art Work

You are a work of he(art)
Twice today
I have lost myself to space
The gaping wounds of valleys
The hematite hills
That breathe their dust upon me
And felt
That had you been here
I could have held you within me
Beyond blue
Beyond cloud
Further still
My kiss unstuck
Searches the steady incline of your mouth
Nestling like a swallow
Sipping at your stem
Reaching further still
The horizon pulls the sun from slumber
And wakes the fields with soft caresses
How easily the landscape learns your name
How tirelessly it searches you out
Beyond fields of corn
Beyond the rushing river
Beyond the moist cool forest
This deliciously dipped desire
That knows only the unknowing
The undoing
The undone.

Mind's Eye

I find myself
In this interior
Space
Laced with forgotten roses
Come full bloom
And archived
Books of childhood
Left open
To time and its mistresses
Ravaged
Memory
Calls for blood to make it sing
And familiar footsteps
Tread the boards of attachment
Light of foot
Fair of face
Here the bones bleached white rattle like wind chimes
And skin
Undone by nerve
Replenishes itself
With light elixir
And the promise of touch
A beacon on the horizon
Tissue and sinew absolved
Tear from muscle
And swim the current of desire
Beyond all reason
Impulses like demi gods
Throng through veins
To finger tips
That know only
Cerebral longing
Pupils dilated in fractured light
Spin resin and colour
Like Ferris wheels
And the tongue fallen mute
Sips the air
Like a serpent
Seeking knowledge beyond its shortcoming
Seeking out
An ally
In this reality
This border town
Of perception and plenty
That lives for logic
That ejaculates idealism
That spouts morals like a leaking tap
That swims in its own filth
But the mind holds court
In its viscous chamber
Where time floats
And thought swims
Beyond
The latch
And
Gate.


ii
Shards of broken glass
7 years bad luck
Your face running back to me
Through a maze
Of mind fucks
And burnt out promises
Spaces so dark
The light is afraid to travel
Buried so deep
The archeologist gave up
Fossil relics of old lovers
Dance with skeleton keys
Around necks that jiggle
Like sagging breasts
And unbirthed children
Laugh in silence
At repentant kisses
On a dead man’s cheek
Still cut up, shut up
Still the path of least resistance
We spit in fury
At the devastating decay beyond us
That rots
Turning further in on itself
Some scavenging rabid mole
Infecting the ground and all who walk on it
Swallowing summer swallows

Iii
Love
In its aching glory
Stands at the gate
She is a wretched thing
With her heart on backwards
She plays a violin made from your ribcage
The bow grates against it
Air gasping for a lack of lung
Her stopwatch has run out of time
Her hair white down the length of her back
She has become fluid
She has become a tadpole
She swims like sperm up the creek of our desire
Burying her face and fortune
Like pirate treasure in the sand

Iv
We hover above the cloudscape
Time zones
60 minutes ahead and behind
My autumn calls to your spring
These divergent seasons
Yearn for some kind of belonging
Phototrophic plants turn their faces to the sun
Their cheeks burnt black
Their eyes like embers
I have known you a thousand years
I recognize your face
Transitioning across our transition

V
My hands are cold
I threw my gloves in the river
You watch me from your perch
A majestic hawk on the horizon
We are travelling beyond distance
We are unraveling like thread
We have become the paths we hoped to take
Laced with bread crumbs and love letters
We grow into this becuming
Lovers made loved
We are walking towards the coalface
We are feeding the flames
We are tilting towards something greater than our collective understanding
I have abandoned my fears
I have unhooked the clasps of chastity
I am opening like a flower
I am a summer orchid
Heady with perfume
Stamen ready
Ripe fruition
There is no sting in this tale

Journey Home

Click here to begin
This will be the start of all our starts

We have discarded our failures
The road ahead is free of thorns

We have trimmed the jungle of self-doubt
We are paving a path to something
Pure

I will know you as you have longed to be known
The stars have not forgotten you
The day is yours

There are no stones to birth from this quarry
Rainwater filters the sand from its desire

We are bright blue

All my fears disappear
In the cup of your belonging
You
Have consumed them with your light
Even the shade knows sun

I have come to you with my hands open
I have raised my head to your fixed orbit
We can spin this any which way and it will come back full circle

What we knew of love is stitched to all our tomorrows
They unfold like sun-warmed sheets
Clean and creased
With your body

There is no sorrow here
There is no well deep enough to fill the spring of my hope
This thirst for you cannot be quenched

I could live a hundred years

And not want less

Breathe beside me
Hold me to the point of your compass

Write the map on my skin
For our children and their children

Light the way with the torch of your mega watt smile

I am blinking myself brilliant
With every step
I am walking on grass so soft and green

I smell spring
I taste a season I have yearned for
I am never far away enough to lose sight of your radiance
I cannot be close enough
To touching god

These are small things
I set them free at night
They have a name
It is yours

They speak your language
They remember to dance
They are all poets in the making
They are beyond beautiful

May I never lose sight of you
May I never grow complacent in my love
May I always feel you a minute away from leaving
And have enough in me
For you to want to stay

May I offer you a bed to take root
May I feed you the water and light that will help you grow

When you lie beside me
May your desire for me be as infinite as time

May I never cause you a moment’s grief
May I sing my way into your heart with kisses
May I curl into your silence with deep contentment
May you never want for anything

May you know me like no other
May I be enough

The words are swallows seeking the sun
They spirit themselves to temperate climates
They flap their small wings
They have crossed the ocean
There were nights they thought they would not make it
Their hearts are beating
They are alive
They have come seeking you

A nest
A haven

There is a warmth in you I feel across the divide
All my past lives converge at this place

I am weary traveler
I have nothing but hope
I am done searching
I am home

Aquarian

You
Have plunged me
Some water and earth woman
Into depths of aquamarine
The violet sky
But a memory as it swallows the sun
And filters through its radiance
To the floor of this consuming ocean
That knows no bounds
My mouth opens to its presence
My body yields to its powerful grace
I am cast out to its magnificence
As it mirrors your face
This water birth
That shatters the limpets from their God-shaped rocks
That coaxes starfish from their salt beds
That exclaims in muted symphonies from whale songs learnt long ago
Some kind of paradise
Some kind of luminescence
As I gasp for the joy of it
Immersed in its enquiry
Today
My eyes washed clear
The concentrated vision distilled as if watching myself anew
Clarity ringing its heart bells
Clarity no longer a shipwreck
Hope like a pearl in the palm of my hand
And I wondered
If this is how it must feel
For fish
To gauge green.

A Different Woman

A different woman
Wakes to stark light
With shadow kisses and torn up dawn
Where white curtains
Exhale the night
And hadeda’s eat up the moon