III

III As It draw breath but would not sing

still for you’d stay. Clouds, hinged in crimson

leaned into the yawning ground. How hope

would fade, as you depart. A saddened turn.

Aubade

This morning, this grand impossible morning

avenues of light passing through the barriers

I wait for you. There is annihilation in this

speaker, though when it comes, who knows

poison, and poison begins somewhere, in

the unconscious mind, a dark door over

the left shoulder or just out of sight, before

you are through it you are through it;

the world closes down and the entire soul

is sabotaged, institutions formed up to pattern

recognition out of sight, out of the head

and shame and unyielding attacks 

on the imaginative faculties are its lifeblood

feeding on the desiccated numbers, at large

mounting the insurgencies: Addiction and calm

this morning arrive here, learn its names,

depart without a kiss, pure blank severance

a light as light will form, forcing back the door.

Aubade (Leaving Paris)

Wide artillery corrupted hillside

she held in her body historic

press occupation buried

layers of prison, distant faction

as dawn would rise and the panoply

fall asking our feet to proceed

for their soulless close, warm 

germinal rain by the shutter mural,

in a distant window, not so far now

we held one another’s faces, 

shared a quieted kiss, close in the nerve

uncoupled as the blue blades became

the rest of the sky, and fixed,

to departed life, so ordering the clouds.

Aubade (Blossoms at the Depot)

Refuse and flowers, haunted

      I move on, through the world

   searching for that which disappears

in the hand

lost to nothing, by remembered

      honeyed leaves

   in its echo, scented, satisfied…

Aubade

We stood in the middle of a field

of corpses. It stretched as far

as the eye can see,

in every conceivable direction,

above and below.

They were new corpses.

We had not killed them, and

we stood there, in the field

was the world. 

He kissed my mouth. I laughed

and stumbled a little. My weight

landed on a belly, lightly covered

in dewy grass, and a sound, a little cry

came from the mouth of the corpse. 

We both remarked on this; 

we had not known

there might be a corpse

and that gas, lost in the belly 

acts on the chords to make a voice. 

His fingers, warm, wrapping my fist

and in the field's dawn 

chorus, elderflowers opened

their faces to the world. 

Aubade

How to sing

    discerning a pinpoint

    or set

along the way. 

The anchor

    was the rain. Elements

    and focus

distance you along. 

I knew that face

    and called as the crowd

    closed, the morning

light away.

II

 II They decided well, to end. My heart my breath my wall. Spoils. Shit. Unbarbed. Thoughts, who merely stammer away. Awash with a principled morning. My tribute to a long grey shore. Far, far beyond reach. Whistle. I will raise a hundred shores. This is a ring, a dynasty. Lost time incidents. Get out. What is it that awakes the shore, it is who does not begin to sing. Stay! Stay! Late in pine that dreams colour knows beyond system repair shore project does not pile up, received info to fraud dips in radio pretends itself a feeling. Comes expands and gets shot and can’t breathe and that will simply never work. All beyond is binary and still inserted to deflating you, my own true corridor, beyond the fortieth floor on possible. A hand reaches from the shore to the sea that inscribes life beyond the use of caning. Then fear flares into a tongued yellow knot of clinging skies. Permanent trap. A thing bites in, resume, to the wreck of routine to track it and its own self down. As though too much closed end. Targeted life would live to be called alive again. Click think make grief suffer you. Make sky pray an index by a ration its brittle path outer out end everything ever about you gone away.

I

I When it came to life in the morning when it fell in the autumn to life where the tides, a tiny glint, it crept into life in feeling this; the autumn mornings, very early its itching skin the beginning of each day swallowed and doubled itself. Began each morning as the very tiny or giant tide moving each day; soft and drowning skin which is not revenged yet continues to be clipped and in the revert tongue of a quiet early morning starts to speak: “One loose ear. Cut, cut from my head for betrayal in the cold daylight. How will this hole in my head heal? And how was I tried? Stay. Please stay. Bring over some orange light. I am lost an ear. It is taken by law. Taken in law. Law has done for my head a little hole. Hello? Any sound? Are you there? Take this my sound. For it goes. For now may I fall. Solid as day. There is dancing. I’m sitting here waiting for the air to clear or for my wounded earhole to close. I heard a flood would come, and I informed. I said ‘I can hear that there is a flood coming’. They took me into a little room - white with blocks of green. And then one produced a tiny pair of scissors whilst four held me down. They slowly cut through the gristle and removed my ear. They asked me to thank them. I affected a bloodened curtsey, as best one can when held to a plate. It would not be my end they cheerily sang as they promised me to my napalm. I can tell by your eyes. Now I must leave you. For a long year a minute or forever. What is it you want, for beauty brings their mane beneath this healthy roof that we have come to stare. Stands our noble fight. But we will not be going to war. That would only be stupid of us. Like the children who go to war we could go into some kind of a war together. Our rules for the war will be these. There are many of us. Let there be only two. Let us both drink our water and cut out this arcane tongue. We shall heat up our blades, go back to our berths, the little houses. How they sing. I like singing to you my tired little war she colours. So what is the problem that we make our dual war for. Fury. It ends and it ends. But rest it is morning. It lights hard. Your heavy heavy slips back to sleep. It is why I have had to keep a constant log of the tides. Their movements and ours. Tell me that these are not our motions my moon and war and worth oh. Hide away in light.