05.05

all my efforts have failed to curb the browning of the peace lily leaves’ tips.

          the tips of your fingers were white

before the thumbs went grey as an elephant on contact

           with the frozen ladder rungs.

the whites of your eyes were not white

next to the crook-armed moon as you forced your body down that frozen slide.

           excessive water goads the leaves

into pantomimes of drowning. thirst turns the flower stems to straw,

           white flowers hidden by browned foliage.

I have tried raising the blinds on fine days, I have tried unrelenting darkness

            but light is neither the question nor

the answer. it is to be another week of misery for me, another week of feeling

            nail butts soldered onto my pupils,

looking at those withered apexes the way one looks at the legs of a burnt spider.

             I return to the soaked back of your dress,

I return to the slivered moon of underwear beaming through the soaked red polyester,

             coat, stilettos strewn across the tanbark.

probably we are too old now to fuck ourselves up and make a clandestine exit

             from the big party to go and play.

I cannot look up at hairy wrists and crosshatched bulging veins on the monkey bars,

              and when I look at your back I see death

and this is how I know I will die a long time from now, alone, repulsed, and hated.

              in all my efforts to curb the decay

I choose not to notice that the leaves, though brown-tipped, grow as never before.

29/04

I run a bath, my first in years.

The cobwebbed exhaust fan is broken.

Behind the locked plaster door

steam settles like dust over mirrors, chrome

draw handles, basin, towel rack

overstuffed with the gaudy blue towels

my mother has always preferred.

I am in the tub

before the water has risen

from puddle to pool, too hot, kneeling, hands

on thighs, legs blooded, shoulders white.

Outside, an electrical storm rages

but there is no rain, only skies

too high up to guess at, imbricated

metals and blue and bone, red

shingles wailing through the air.

I stand up to look out the window

above the vanity, open to the screen,

water reaching barely to the top

of the titanium rod in my fibula –

flood ruler for a man of worry.

While the old oak whose branches I could touch

does not sway, the copse of eucalypts on

the highest hill in the park two streets over

thrashes so madly, I wonder

how the roots stay in the ground.

Then I lie back, sleep away the heat

24/04

Strawberry stem, though poisonous

I pull you from that which you protect –

I cast a grey glass mold of you

to nestle in my sternum, a star

fruit pendant – now you keep me from harm

as the charred debris of

humanness cools and hardens, nomic-

vested, renegade as fire.

Together, we walk to the park

where there are lakelets muscle-bound

by eels, their white-bellied bodies

like the serpents of so many creation myths

thrashing, a million-eyed

monad on the shallow mud bed

I could seize fragments of with my bare hands

to throw into the trees.

Watch the space fill up again

as though flesh were some magic compound

but you are not watching.

In truth, I converse with you just as I do

every single hair upon my head,

every ridged birthmark, every drop of blood –

they are quantum talismans

as you are, but with one difference –

yours is magic believed.

22/04 #2

What is known of it –

almond husks split open and emptied

on the cool loam beneath the almond tree.

Some form of

life has done this. Are these the kernels

feeding the larvae of the Tiger Moths

who proliferate so secretly

then carpet the brightest windows

and choke and burn in the sensors?

In Vodoun

when God comes

to animate the body, it is called white

darkness.

I know of a man’s hands,

knuckles felted with black hair

breaking the wings of a crow

but it is not he who does the breaking

or the drinking of the crow’s blood – rather

what has become him (the sacred

parasitism). His tongue laps every sweet

dew ball from a bluegrass field

like a sick animal, canines excruciating into fangs

faster than bamboo grows,

eyes multiplied by four and gone red.

In the Maze

my brothers

dart to avoid my body, its marked

whiteness.

There the parents of a child

floating in the telic centre – this maze

centre is a perfectly round pool of water –

an unreachable purpose

always with a pair of beautiful, age-lined faces,

one dark, one light – perhaps Finnish –

and the child of the hybrid

colour, disposition, cannot cut through

the tall hedgerow with its soft cuttlebone

teeth. The child has nothing to eat, gaping

holes in both sock heels

to contend with. Imminent night.

22/04

each bite in a leaf
a Canyon of Arun

each ant
an ethno
scientist

each gun a gun

21/04/14

I am going home to see
My Mother and Father.
To reach them
I must cross oceans
Made of more than water.

20/04

Missing for months, the boy’s

red plastic spade is found

by lawn mower blades.

As in all cases, the discovery

demands a terrible noise,

the shriek of the pulverized –

glancing shards see

the father shield his eyes,

returning even to the little he

through an open den window

the cat unscreened.