Moving too fast across the Moon’s face

Drums pound.
The world is dark
save for the moon
and the clouds
moving too fast
across its face

Hours pass and years
mistakes are written
and erased, written and erased
and rewritten again.
Life fritters away
to nothing but
a dozen or so
cheap party tricks
without punch line or
any discernible moral value
and what it all comes down to
in the end
is how many times you’ve
held your breath
and prayed for
a single moment to last
for all the rest
of the moments
you have left.

Isn’t that living?

Bretagne in the raw.

We lie
hand in hand,
your head in my lap,
under the shade of a low tree
beside a Normandy coastline,
in a field full of
white stone crosses.

And as the wind blows
huge, silent, grey-white clouds
across an otherwise clear sky,
and the hair across your still face,
I think about how many lives were lost
how much blood and tears were spilled,
so that we two could lie here,
so that I could watch you sleep in my arms
and dream of the future
and your silent charms.

Daly Grind

Your love
is like sitting here
on a gray, vaguely wet morning
in early june
waiting for the train home
after the night that was:
disappointing.

Forget Sentiment

Sometimes
you pour your heart out
in to a few empty tea cups
to see how it settles and warms.

Sometimes you chew
on the remnants of days
to taste their dull bitterness again.

Clouds pass
and rain falls in the garden.
The wind whispers her name
and you fall asleep
knowing that it isn’t for pity
but for a brighter sense of the world
that you strive everyday.

Spreading out a map of the world,
you colour in all the places
you’ve been in your dreams.
Paris is deep blue
and all the southern states
are gently shaded in pastels.
The coasts have been highlighted
so that they’re slightly heavier.

This poem that you have been writing
is filled with too much of her.
It imprints the ominous outline of her smile
and pulls the strands out of you one by one.

Forget history.
Forget sentiment.
Perhaps some things were meant
for you alone. To hold and harden
like the brightest diamond.

Love as a Metaphor for Life

January days are wet
and love-soaked,
like my heart.

Walking for hours:
god’s face appears
as a carpenter or
a stonemason.
A magician
or the dead.

Calmly removing raisins
from the sky, words splash
against my awkwardness,
leaving it bare and
essential.

Maybe it wasn’t you,
per se. Maybe you were
just an instrument. A
vessel for my fear.

Corners are crooked
and dark. Decisions
are easily made and
quickly regretted.
The day begins again.
And you weep for the end
of it, every night for the
rest of your life.

Alcohol and Anticoagulants (or Warfarin and Wet Kisses)

Your open lips I have
encountered of a night
when, dulled and nulled
by phosphorous light,
we may have danced.
I cannot be sure
for eyes were blinded,
memory poor.

I entered this dream
like a room without door,
the ceiling all stars
and a blackened wood floor.
A small gentle mouse
with some grays in his coat
breathed his last gentle breath
and opened his throat.

And I knew then that life
would be always like this:
that the ones you had loved
would be the ones you would miss.
So i steeled myself
to the darkened abyss
and settled my soul
in your warm, twisted kiss.

Cropped Photos Only Show Smiles

On and on
night after night, it continues
Like a toothless saw
against hard wood,
just getting more
jagged and broken.

Twenty two years of
bottled aggression,
monogamy and
indecision.
Testing the faith
of every fresh young face,
every heart not yet
crippled from
the weight of the world
and the length of
the road ahead.

And if this all
does indeed lie
ahead of us,
the way it does
in bad films
and tv specials,
why is it so difficult
to forget your face?

Eyes like little holes in the world

Can’t you see all this love?
-Regina Spektor

Life is made up
of moments.
Specks of your life and mine
and his and hers
flying about like
dandelion seeds.

So take this one,
softly in the palm of your hand
and set it aside
saved up.

Take this one moment
and sit with me
aside the lit wick
of a new candle
and we’ll wait till it passes.

Christmas

I strode out
in the night
to cut down a young spruce
and steal its moonlit heart.

The snow glinted
and my axe-edge keen.
Tearing away at bark skin
like a ravenous dog.
I do not know how
to use an axe.

In long folds it came away.
And i lifted the heart of the young man
to the sky
where it hung
and bled.

Each of my careful footsteps back
was stained red with
my betrayal.
Each of my tears frozen
hard and stinging my cheeks.

Experience

Life is a concrete sex embrace
wild with stars.

A blind secret,
dark as holes in the sky.
Stiff. Yesterday’s decayed women.

Free from joy and desire;
Almost always love rots men’s hearts
as only it can.
It is the colour of the young.

Pierce me. Bleed me. Moist with your kiss.
Warm. Cold. Think. Kill. Die.

But dazzle my peace,
WE WERE BORN!