There’s nothing quite like
the pale golden texture
of the reeds on
a sunny, windy day
a day of cold spring
in January,
nothing quite like
the sun and the wind on the water,
the sky deepest blue
behind the skeleton trees
the rain returning at night
the storm bringing old tales
smelling it in your bones
The storm singing stories
and the trees telling tales
of winter winds woven
into fleeing flocks of frozen breath
a murmur gone
with the moon in the morning
when the geese return
Volatile thoughts sublimating
into night-coloured vapours,
filling up the jar between your hands
until their neon blaze ignites
into a universe,
gamma rays shooting back at you,
up through your nerves and fingertips,
flashing behind fluttering eyelids
as you squeeze your ears shut
and stuff the universe into your mouth,
hoping to extinguish the fire born
in neurons touching asterocyte skies
Stories from the other side of the line
have been encoded
in cyphers locked
in a time capsule
sleeping at the back of a bookshelf.
Here’s the line
and on the other side are more stories
where the sand turns white
and the moon opens portals
to seashell realities,
stories written in books of glass
to be told on another day.
Shards of stars, stuck
under raw skin:
broken songs of a drifting universe
behind closed doors, a winter’s tale
in fragmented places
cold pain and
snowflakes in bloodstreams
coursing through time, connected
by little pulses
warm in mutual silent dreams
Words, unwanted
falling as frozen sparrows
back into the sea of thoughts:
a wall of glass,
rising up from snow cushion
to sky-shard blaze:
a barrier, to keep the greenhouse in
and the lost dreams without
In the high towers
candles still burn
while the ground has been cleared
of skeleton thorns on ghostly brambles
winding around ageless ankles
and the coils of time in dried-out wells
and in the high windows
eyeless ghosts still sigh:
oh winters, oh wonders,
oh world going silent
around walls disappearing
in the whispering mist rising like spells,
like prayers muttered unter breath
for the candles to keep burning
until the darkness thaws away
starfishskies 