Hoofprints

Everything you see of me
Rooted more resolutely

In those muddy hoofprints
Of my morning loneliness.

Pyrena

All the processed meals
And all the steady cravings;
All those times I’d mostly feel
My esurient sense of failing;
All these glands within me
Like silkworms masquerading,
Blind their burrow-mouths must be,
These ever-unworldly sensations;
Saliva in my pancreas
And bilious in my breathing;
Memories bladder-manacled
To strangely knotted bleachers
From where I sat once witnessing
Impassively, all my days receding;
With those who would abuse me
Only then, to obliterate
And smash these blistered benches –
Refuting my existence,
My purpose; those perpetrators,
Those missing old soul-eaters.

Incomprehensibly then,
Such totalities
And inexplicable mythologies,
I step out from shadows
Framing my toxic profligacy
With rhododendron, rose
And briar-choking ivy
Bordering my inadequacies
Made tangible from the tacit,
Born out from yellowed ivory.

How odd, I reflected
In afternoon relapses,
That our connections,
These mysteries,
Regardless neither of
Cooling distances
Nor cold absences which only show
Just how much we know
Each other’s oldest ossified routines
As we trespass through boundaries
Only then, again and kneaded again,
Transposed into our folded selves,
Our living sea.

Haiku #786

786.

Memory’s a knot,
Tightly I tied it myself;
Concrete slowing feet.

Graffito

All art
Is vandalism
Graffitied on
A brutally pure wall
Of conscious
Mindfulness
As self-awareness
Bubbles and forms
Before a thought.

And all artists
Crave our attention,
Transactions of time
And influence,
Only to abandon us
Like driftwood on pebbles,
Like unpolished beach-glass,
Once their needs,
Fulfilled, have passed.

Out Of A Lotus

Time will slip by
Unhurried, unnoticed,
So I propose one kind action
For someone out of a lotus.

Sometimes kindness requires
Doing what you would usually not;
Sometimes self should write aside
Someone else’s suffering plot.

Tempus Fugit Usquam,
So in moments see kindness renewed,
For some future day, ego expunged,
What will become of me and of you?

Valhöll

I did not say good morning
To a magpie, solitary fellow,
Conspiring with a rooftop
To clag my hindered eyelids.

Nothing changed.
The day stayed the same.
Grey, motionless torpor.

A leaf appeasing gravity
Spiralled to the floor;
Breathing-in is a luxury
I cannot afford.

Under a lantern-clad ladder
Leaning up into Valhalla
I mindlessly walked;
I stamped on cracks,
Send me back,
And smashed a mirror
With my orb.

Nothing changed.
The night stayed the same.
Sirens, waves of woe
And obsolete laws.

That magpie loosened its claws
And disappeared into
All-consuming hours
Which do devour in tides
Both the man and the boy.

Exigencies

There is no such object in my way
That I have not placed there myself.

Move society aside and
There is no insurmountable elevation
I did not raise myself.

In abluting these inexcusable
Exigencies of my conflated self
I can finally see
And in seeing
Then configurate
The right way out.

You And The Whole

You and the whole
Of history
Is only as much
Or as little
As I can hold
In my thoughts,
Atomised and
Compressed
At any one time.

Anything left
Is profligacy.

My Body A Prison

All that I’ve been through,
All that I lost,
All that I valued,
All that I cost,

All my inactions,
Fully embossed,
Old malefactions
Buried in moss;

My body a prison
With cells unaccounted,
My past in a frame
Unglazed and unmounted.

I’m who you shake
For seeking your answers,
My heart in the arms
Of thorn-fingered dancers;

I hear in my mind
A ceaseless alarm,
For I lost every key
Cut to disarm.

All that you’ve been through
All that you lost,
All that you valued
All that you cost.

Pallbearer’s Song

There is a light transcending,
I broached its dappled fall,
And though I neared the ending
Such light left me in thrall.

I carried him on my shoulders,
Flowers spelt my name,
Relatives somewhat older
Gave all hell to blame.

I lowered myself by an altar,
Hymnals in a hand,
And though they sang with gusto,
Silent was the land.

However low I travelled,
Misguided wrongs recalled,
Sunbeams on a glady gravel
Seek to be my pall.