His headstone verses were writ in wine
To draw the eyes unto the fact of death.
Lichen lines love-and-only-love remembers.
All, all, we knew was eyes of deepest blue
This good man’s eyes writ in blood
Mortal love will always end like this. Time
Weathers the stonemason’s art to a flat palimpsest
Of hieroglyphics which resemble…
Poetry
On these heatwave days
of a future summer,
on a future planet,
A place of much deprivation;
~of a molested nature,
that screams in iron traps
where the final wild tiger
bleeds to death in agony.
Will nature continue to be abused
in a museum devoted to the shadows
of a past, that did not last?
To a life of sand…
There’s an end to everything:
Birds in the trees, music,
Plangent and deep,
Tempests flaring in the mind of man
Foreshadowing that terrible realisation
That you too have followed this same cliff path
On nights of luminosity and in the darkness
Of the day. When mother, father, lover, friend
Have swooned towards the moon in triumph
Or despair. Or…
We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the thick silences of trees.
Soon the dark lights of Christmastide will afflict us
Twilight memories drift, flux and flicker
In this breeze of Time,
Penumbra-beginning, hologram-end,
Such pungent affirmations, slip into a past that does not last:
Generations of…
