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?

So This Is Life

Long black waves
beat at the rocks
With their grey white cusps
Foaming and angry.

Behind the thick glass
Of the train window,
Stung with rain,
And inside my dark hood
I sit safe in the
Eye of the storm.

So
While the wind moans
And trys vehemently to
Blow out all the candles
We lit last night in the
Garden and our inebriated state,
I dream desperately
Of freckles and fingertips.

Go to the movies and cry your eyes out

Life is just
a series of photos
skitting past in front of my eyes.

Some of them are in black and white.
Some of them aren’t very focused.
Some of them are like incomplete drawings,
with the upturned corner of somebody’s mouth
or half of a dark grey eye.
The memories flick past like a cartoon
drawn by some crazy kid
and held together by an old blue rubber band.
They trick
my mind into them,
pulling it along like an unruly pup
on a leash.

The colours are often very real,
too true and they burn
the backs of my retinas
sting.
Some are more sober with
shadings of grays and browns.

I tried some of those
old school 3D glasses,
with the plastic lenses
to see if they could make some
sense in it all but they
just highlighted all the
mistakes in each piece
and all the
lines connecting us all.

My life is just
a series of photos
flying past in front of my eyes.
And your face
seems to keep coming out.

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.

Bemusement

Walking home from the train station
on one of those long summer evenings.
Someone had written in large letters
on the wall outside the bowling alley
the word ‘BONDAGE’,
and I pondered the implications of this.
I had never been much good with aggression

or knots.

Clutching at Straws

On a bench
at
Lansdowne Road Station,
waiting for the train with my
whiter-than-white
shoes on and my
whiter-than-right
view of it all.
I was sitting beside a girl,
as the story generally goes.
She looked a lot like
you.

I hope it wasn’t.
We missed an excellent opportunity
to hold hands
in the cool evening air,
to make faces at
the people speeding by,
to pretend to fall in love.

The Way of the Day.

Shall we dance,
friend of my heart?
Tracing trails of silver moonlight
with the toes of our feet
and the fingers of our beating hearts.

Tempting and heavy
is the gaze
and so full of eagerness
and badly hidden innocence.
Our awkwardness is
earnest at least.

On an island in the pacific
a young girl is laid down
for the first time
and listens to the stories of the old gods
and the stars.
And a dark skinned, blue eyed boy
sets his little paper boat
afloat on the swelling tide
and watches it burn
slowly.

In the light of that
smallest star of the sea
how can we smile indifferently
and throw ourselves at the world
with hats and scarves and envelopes full of truths?

But how can we not?

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.

Timber

I and my
sure-footed,
four-footed friend
strolling along,
doubtful
in the evening twilight.

I counting the petals
of a daisy that I hold
in my wrong hand
as if they were the
years of my life.

He snacking on the long grasses
because the world has made him ill
and he is sick of it all,
the taste of it
sour in his jaw.

The hair on his back rises
and i flip up my collar
as another empty car
rip-roars past us
but at least
we’re headed home.

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?