stars

V.123

I am the window into space –
The inconceivable clatters
through me, loud like a wood shutter
banging the pebbles from the walls

The window is dark and hangs there
over my bed like a dark bed
for ghosts, who hang invisible
eyes rotating until they see.

Over the forest of my form
flow duvet clouds, and I relax
as the warm envelops my feet
and my thoughts fall into rhythm

in the way that a ball falls in
to the slot on an old roulette
and spins until the crowd can tell
red or black. And then I can sleep.

On another day I see you
on a blue galactic background
pricked by a field of tiny green
stars. You hang there, over my bed

flow over me like clouds and I
relax. Your mouth holds me in place
your voice scatters me about like
smooth pebbles dashed from a bright wall

Ships and Stars I – Galactic

Sometimes I don’t know whether to plot the course of our long and varied galactic run – the stellar cultural forms we shall pass through – or to sit in the garden on softest grass, lie, gazing at daisies.

I would like to say I lack understanding of this – but that massive understatement would leave the gulf between me and this high crown of petals unaccounted for – small chips, dry stalks, and so on.

Or could I plot new courses never before flown – or ask why this ‘never before’ is quite as important to us? Or I could absorb seasons of TV as if I were the wires themselves, dark angels

Or know all this illusion is simply there to shore me with all possible solace. If I can do this, that, why am I drinking thought’s hemlock, surprised at the dull undone?

Zodiac

I

Your week this week will go off
like a rotten egg. Such is life.
This fragment of a year will crack
and spill all over you, achieve

new heights of boredom and disgust.
Why? Do you ask why the fungus
grows at the tree’s base and grows
rotten? Come on. Just accept it

like you accept that your eyes
will look where you decide
and not just swing around like
billiard balls in a washing machine.

Next week brings with it new challenges
as exactly the same thing happens
for the hundred and eleventh time.
But this one, this is the one, I can feel it.

II

The stars are spread out in the orrery
like thick yeast extract on toast.
Things are everywhere finding it difficult
to connect. Take Bellatrix

for example. A salty taste on the tongue
just don’t let it touch an open cut.
Inside this emptiness of pain feeling
there is another expanse of tiny stars –

from each new star, we see new constellations
and the red bloom in Orion
is aching to reach them.
Close one eye for a while and things look flat.

There are an endless array of bears in the sky
clouds, atoms, birds, planes, galaxies –
all of these are bears if you look closely.
This week will bring bears.

Continue reading →

Walk to Bonaguil

Left the cold house and broke hastily through –
passed for a day over poster perfect fields
and the sun charged with us, freeing the air.
My friend snatches a deer from the woods grasp

and chatters for an hour about its litheness.
It fell to us to unlock this path’s puzzle –
spell hieroglyphs upon the land’s patterns –
leave nothing else but time behind us.

Like the moon frosting the evening, brushes the darkness,
a Castle falls out of the forest –
meets us as we crunch around a corner:
It carves its ancient signature into us.

This must have let us forget, as we left there in darkness
and stumbled up the stone-ridden hills, slowly,
eerie at the earth crop’s murmuring whispers –
the little light that fed the surging darkness.

Then, chancing the elder hunting track,
we saw histories of the boar’s foraging,
burned stars into memory as we shivered –
hearing Orion’s shadow, under the frosted roads.