despair

V.107

In the nightmare world, all love fails
not spectacular and justly
but just by being out of sync
and slightly too slow. Blinding love

takes hold of you a few days late
and this is the eternal law
– declarations unmutual
and your world is a roaring wind

where reeds wave under a grey sky.
In the nightmare world, your polis
ostracises the honoured ones
and your politics fail, not quick

but slow and janky, as love fails.
Your worldview is cracked and you sit
comfortable and quiet indoors
playing videogames. Easy,

the world begins and begins and
in the nightmare world, chronic pain
undercuts any coolness, and
people you don’t know are complex

as puzzles unsolved since Ur fell.
In the nightmare world, horrified,
people slowly forget their lives
and we stub our toes on the curb

V.63

The future doesn’t exist
only the moment exists, and the moment
is the moment of despair that the future does not exist.

There are no hopes.
There are only desires and deepest of those
the desire to have hopes.

I ride the bus back from town
having achieved a slight melancholy

and bought things I did not need
when I ‘should have been saving’
for the future I do not have.

Love once tore my head open
and everything inside fell on the ground.

Now, I feel no love.
And my head remains empty.
such is time’s slow dripping
and the cloud moves toward the horizon.

Should I be angry? No.
Should I want?
Should… faint red lines iterate upon the past and build to a revolution where hope is reborn as weak as it ever has been that we could one day find a place among things

Bath

Bath

“If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches” – Rilke

I

There’s nothing really wrong now, per say.
The day was good – disjunct as often
with the day I thought that it might be.
As I wait for the bath to fill up
the room fills with warmer, wetter air.
Not to begin on the day hoped for.
There is just a lightness missing – mist
takes the windows. Kingdoms have been razed
and lost because of this wistfulness

II

My body floats ever so slightly.
The deep element we were borne from
laps my chin as if to say nothing –
is enough, and indeed it is, better, yes.
The sweat beads run out to meet it here
they orbit my body, salts dancing.
Is that enough? To attempt to think
in the calmest way. The figure: still
sea glitters in the sun’s soft twilight.

III

Now – a new series of figures pass;
the wind blowing of trees in dusk dark –
the grey boiling of a deep sea vent –
small blank fish in Mariana black –
a blinding light as torn blinds open –
an ache in the neck which fades slowly –
a small smile quickly dances outward –
A last hope was that bath – just know it.

V.14

How your voice comes to me through doors
that shut too soon and leave me spent
ammunition on the pavement.
I hear each consonant as fire

crackles on a summer beach
beyond the waves a jellyfish
moans and those are vowels of your throat
singing, of your hair which hangs like

for like, eye for an eye, my eye
which is hooked like the subtle fish
wife in barbaric times. I want
to talk to you about Rosa

Luxembourg, about just how right
we are about the large, inapt
empty spaces between the clouds
where no thought interrupts the flat

tones and gradients of the air
in its wider form. Free of life.
Barbarism it seems is willed
by the people, and so we cut

onions to pretend we aren’t despair’s
pawns and playthings in an open
gambit. I want to hear your crisp cough
as we laugh too much while drinking

The Cathect

We, all of us, have it –
fear in the night, trembling
at the horizon of our life – waiting
to unfold from the world, unknown
until the crystal moment
when we die with surprise.

We, all of us, battle
to sleep with the knowledge:
our hearts, our stomachs, holding
this sadness, our terror – alternating
which rise and fall with tides of living:
a bird flashing in the sun, then gone.

We, all of us, have the solution: embrace it.
This one pain is certain; learn to love it.
Smile in the blackness
at this strange elevation – it won’t be long.
Join in the chorus and chant of life
for it cannot destroy us, this fact that we die.