loss

I HOPE WE MAKE IT

I have no tolerance for hope. Hope survives
on leftovers and unwilling loss: a soiled casket of
emptiness for every six feet of paragraph
it wades behind. Hope stuffs itself between the words
and the meaning, loudly camouflaged by
gambling and cigarettes, declining to altercate but
lathered by a demand to be seen. It shuns you,
but needs you desirable, a voyeurist: a
lap dancing ghost to keep it current.
Hope is a pimp
and you whore yourself to keep it primed,
shedding your skin like a puree of missing passports,
onion tears soaking sensibility after raw
sensibility, riding hope faster than your hips can keep up,
because, and after all,
there has to be a better place than this.
Time is just an expanse to harness,
a mount for crossing –
and you must wager everything,
from soul to sex
to grind it hard to a halt.

TREASURERS, WE

There we were
for a moment
awash with candy’d rainbows that shed
spun-sugar silk
to dress this call for change

It’s a pity
this entree tasted like a sundae of fever and fable

Treasurers, we, to nought, now
but wingless poetry;
of letters, silent
and honest
we’d declined to share

RELINQUISH

By and by,
the past, it passes –
date–raping purpose
through peering glasses:
pregnant pauses never lasting

Every vanished thrill
restarting futures
on a windowed sill,
shadows casting mimes
in stills
as long will live the passion
– hungry –
fuelling moments full to brim

Just as quick, another morning
dawning – time to pass
and kill; murder
just another constant,
one more loss on
sudden whim as
whereupon man solders on
to play the night another song
for day by day we carry on
to pass another past
along.

AFTER LOSS

There comes a time when
moving forward is a monumental act
of self-preservation;
walking away,
a feat of rediscovery;
and letting go,
the key to finding true purpose.

PILLAGE (HAIKU)

Take anything, but
– kill every emotion, twice –
just leave me my heart

SHATTERED (HAIKU)

Heart made for loving:
broken pieces raining down.
Here comes a new storm.

PURPLE HEART

My posthumous heart
declares no life without you
yet
the holding of my breath
to mark your absence beats it louder

and as I listen to every bloody word
it whispers in my ears
I wrap the sound around me
like your missing arms
and
count
each
pulse
until my vitals fade

wondering
if you will ever rush
like this intimate moment
to tend to my starving needs again

VACANCY

i am being crushed
by the weight
of your absence
and if it does not lift
i may never
stand again

AND THEN WE WEREN’T

we were pointless once;
that is to say
we were always in growth
and there was never a time
when what we had would
stop
to be what we
‘had’

our map didn’t come with those flags to pin that say
– this is us –
or
– we are here –
we were the whole map
we were every map
and then we weren’t

now
we are no longer pointless;
that is to say
we are ‘that point’
the marked X
(without the treasure)
the one that simply says
– here –
and my heart is this map
and it is pierced and leaking
and all that it contains
will run like ink across the world
our red flag standing on end
and flying alone
to remind me

SEIZED

I
am at
II
a complete loss
III
to understand the
IV
inner workings of your mind;
V
the cogs that turn to
VI
wind your clock
VII
have seized, and
VIII
the only hands
IX
that pass time now
X
are mine
XI
alone
XII

SECOND PRIORITY

Second Priority

Love is not being second priority on a list.

JEZABEL

My cat just died in my lap.

She was lots of fun when she was young, but then she started to get fat, and then got fatter than that… she got bumpy and her spine curled up and then her bumps got lumpy, and she started to appear weighted down and went less and less on our beds and kept more to the ground when she got too chunky.

She limped and she wobbled and her head bobbled and in her later days her breathing got faster and I didn’t think she’d last much longer, but, nevertheless, she didn’t weaken – it appeared she got stronger.

But clearly I was seeing it wrong. Her breaths became shorter and she stopped eating and kept her eyes open, and all the while she was staring and looking and shaking and no longer interested in the noise we were making as we called her name.

I picked her up many times and she roused from her waking dream but she didn’t seem to want to ‘be’. I desperately wished I could help her, release her, slow her breathing and give her peace and ease her.

And then she got colder, and when I held her it was like I was holding a boulder.

It hurt her to breathe. I could see her pain through her fear and I gently told her over and over that she can pass… I was here… and before long, her breathing slowed and then she spasm’d, and as I held her I knew she was close to the chasm, shaking and numb in my hands.

She tried once more to stand but she spasm’d again and her jaw grew wider and I could almost see right down inside her as she laboured to breathe while her heart gave out.

I cried when I looked through her eyes as she looked back knowing it was her time to die, allowing me to watch her once bright spark in that final moment subside.

I counted to 5 and I told her it’s okay to not be alive.

I’m sure she knew what I’d said as she rested her tired body on my skirt and lay there bravely, blissfully dead; a part of me journeying with her as I stroked her lifeless – but beautiful – feline head.

SINKING

this moment will
without you
slip away from me

drowning
as I feared, alone
in a raft made for two

oars afloat
beyond my cramping fingers

and nothing but my shadow-self
will be revived

WRITE ME BACK TO LIFE

Piece by formless piece of me
compose of new desires –
write me back to life before my hope
deterred
retires

Inflate my heart until it finds itself
in soothing flight –
sprout for me the wings I need
to beat its rhythm right

Expand my lungs to fill with life
and bleed this void no more –
to breathe ambition in until
it seeps from every pore

Expression-fill my written words
in storms to self-empower –
for in this silent wash of time
perspective leaves me sour

Find within my shadows
proof of flawless, lustrous light –
elucidate my purpose
forming day from cloudy night

Write of peace, a balm
to heal my bleakly fractured power –
a vision
rich
to seed and plant
and soon – I hope – to flower

Inspire my eroding soul
with passion to ignite –
a reason to awaken
fresh
with fervour to incite

Harmonise expression
to unlock what I admire –
write me back to life before I
sadly
might expire

UNTITLED (HAIKU)

I have lost myself:
too many words left to write.
My void grows timeless.

POSTERIOR SUFFERANCE

This night carries me,
blinded,
in the back pocket
of dirty minds and
shabby dreams where I,
flat, and molded,
press against this folded denim,
warm and splayed with
arms outstretched,
longing,
for another day, but

what if I turn my head
to over-peek the top
of these fraying jeans instead,
grasping threads
to keep me still within its seams
– will the exhilaration
of watching where I’ve
just this moment been
allow me inspiration
– asleep –
– awake –
to boldly look,
clinging to the back end of
these thoughts that write me,
penned in ink:
a pre-determined book?

Perhaps I should just
– winded –
forward face,
ignoring the sour stench
of this unmoving,
walking,
waking race,
stalking through the darkness
in a covered veil
at quiet pace,
destabilising future steps,
accepting this acquired taste,
processing my obsessive needs
and bathing clean my crumpled face
in chafing tears that fear progression,
awash, alone,
in one more nightly session.

Devoid of light,
hear, ye, the theme:
this narrow, stunted, damned depression,
the fabric of a self made bed –
this
bottomless pit without expression
unstitching dreams of fortune
as I swelter, melting hope
again,
apathetic,
white of noise,
inside my broken head.

SOLDIER

The Man who never brought hell home
was wise beyond his years.
He suffered long
but lived it loud
imprisoned by his fears –
and those were thus:
that those before him
came and went
with nothing left but
pain and name
and more of same
who went and came
from seed in soil
to root and stem,
to fallen branches, time again:
a family tree to fuel the flames
on cold and lonely nights.

Embodied by the coat of arms he wore,
this Last to hold his name,
he swore,
– in vain, perhaps –
to stand at ease no more.

The Man who never brought hell home
encased himself in spite and spirits:
ghosts of generations gone,
encroaching deep within.
He sought for answers,
fought for reasons,
questioned why his bloodline grew
to fall and rise
and curse and kill
with secret lies
and stolen rights
and ties he could not sight.

The Man who never brought hell home
had died
the moment he arrived
– or so he thought –
he always said,
with eyes in search of something else . . .
perhaps that love that once he’d felt,
despite the years of crime he lead.
And what is left, again, but holes
to fill with buried woes and
broken war-like games and
shattered dreams
and darker still yet, nothing.
Nothing, as it always seems.

Not a sliver shall him by, it pass,
of hope,
of love,
of peace –
not until the very last,
this Man who never brought hell home.

And so, this Man, with blind belief
declared his story would be brief,
atoning for the sins he cast
in other’s lives
in years that passed,
and spent his days in self destruction,
free from want, control, and need,
biding time with bated breath
like men, before, who longed for death,
entrained in mind and soul,
until one day,
the hell that never came,
came whole.

For every man,
and son of man that once there was,
who sharpened knives
and counted tools
and cleaned his guns,
and polished pride, his moral compass
by his side,
who now lives to wake and wakes to die,
repelling faith, repelling truth, and
cussing lies –
this Man has died.

MUCH TO MY DESPAIR

this ice cream love
– sweet –
and filled with cold desire

drips

through the hole
in my sugared cone

the very thing that
once had held my love within
is now partaking
in the letting go
of its own contents

ABSTRUSITY

(meaning: wisdom that is incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge)

Alone, let me dissolve into the stale persistence of repeated memory, where,
to sink, into that moment, long at last, I will;
to time that stained my white and holy life like thick excreted waste,
as lost among the black apostles, self detest infection festered.
My soul did roast my psyche.

Let me watch through wiser eyes as I was suckled dry by rogues and devilled men who
fed me lies and praised degraded hopes in tight knit bondage ropes and
prayed their symbiotic futures whole;
their shackled lives, encased by squalid dwellings, raped to empty, burnt to coals. Then,

let me fear again the death I cheated, let me shy away again from light and love,
as once I did,
and let the drugs inspire hunger, let my ribs admonish friendships;
show me seated on the sharpened iron throne that clawed its way into my life.

Let me remember courage, this, when biting clean the straps
that bent my arms behind my back,
that tied my feet without allowing slack, that stole my mind, that seared my life,
that scarred my flesh and sent me running, set me free at last
from final unforgiving seas that tempted me with futile guarantee
to nurture, care and carry me.

Let me, lastly, naked, stand in stark surrender, found by precious realisation.
Finally human once again! Majestic once again! While
chains of brutal, rusty, rotted steel detach,
and I begin to heal; to patch at last, my puzzled life that, muzzled,
once,
I hanged among
such sordid ruin.
Now a sequined future wheel rotates as I transition
from a past so art surreal,
so damn unreal,
and yet, a history, sad, but passed, that’s mine, alone to boldly feel.