Fading Out

There’s comfort in the sky
fading to grey,
solace in the fantasy of silence
as the clouds glow and your mind dims
colours muted, thoughts stalling

and the day
sinking down
into the water
slowly
dissolving

Book Codes

Find me in the books I read:
Their titles a secret code,
an alphabet of covers and spines
stacked in a matrix of shelves
by hypertext grace —
too many dimensions to arrange
in lines and groups and rooms;
Their clusters a whisper of storms
in a maze of themes crossing volumes,
words bleeding through cheap pages,
seeping into hardback neighbours
and drenching dust in heavy sighs:
Their implications, hidden in plain sight.

Eat the Darkness

When the darkness swallows your fire:
eat the darkness
so you have both the night
and the sun within you.

Rain Riddles

As the rains solves riddles of the sea
and salt asks questions of the sand
the wind opens its textbook pages
chanting water words over the coast

inflecting waves through all the forms
of mirrors, clouds, and rainbows.

King Autumn

Stolen skies
in the deep blue moments, from afar
as ships do pass
beneath the arches
of summer aching for gold
bridges of tumbling clouds

and birds are sowing songs
into the silver-lined acres
of fog weaving silk to banners
steel grey and maple blaze
shouting,
“behold, king autumn has come”

—

[A poem I finished a few weeks ago but didn’t want to publish before autumn.]

Sea Letters

When the inkwells of your eyes
have run dry
from the currents of the world

the winds pick up
all the paper-thin thoughts

to scatter evening letters
into faraway seas

Light Weave

Lightless stories
woven from the heaviest fabric
in rough linen, scratchy
with tags of the past,
still unremoved after several eclipses
of sweaters pulled over heads
and hair mussed up by woolen static
in the eternal winter of space
where threads unravel quietly,
uncovering more silent moons
to orbit dead eyes
in sighing haloes and singing stars
covering the knit lightyears of scarf,
the rough tapestry
alive against cold cheeks.

This Is No Crusade

Words burst from throats
like parasites from rippling flesh,
wriggling through planetary layers:
strata of rock and heart and lungs
and they are ugly, grey, but they want
out of geological imprisonment,
burying caves in shed skins
and they are misshapen, rough,
but they want, for want of light and eyes
up to the light in their lackluster shape
and bask in their ugly, grey glory
for the simple sake of existing.

Library of Skies

I hold within me a library
of skies, of coasts,
of brambles on slopes
and the many different ways
evening light falls
on many different shapes
of foliage and rocks and moss
along many different paths
through many different forests
and along many different harbours
between many different hills
where time passes differently

I map trails across pages
crossing them off
with the beaks of crows
and marking the passages
by trapping days in amber.

By Heart

I know by heart
the unlit passages of time
measured in steps between
bed and window
in the night hours
I know by touch
of the bumps and textures
wrinkling soul-silk universes
stretched out between
cavernous days
I know by name