We are among clouds
All absorbing moisture
As the sky lowers gently down.
Settling softly around us
In nebulous silver twilight
Our souls the only buffer
Between night and daytime
Between hell and higher ground.

We are subdued by it
Made solemn, dumb
A crowd of clacking footsteps
Marching muffled in the lull.
Faces eluded by mist, this
Hushed and skulking quietude
This looming slowness, this
Toneless humming; hidden sound.

We are only water
Only droplets parted by air,
Validated by shadows.
Vapours, creatures of the half-light,
Making structures that are
Watertight, pretending we are not
Permeable. Shrouded in plastic
Raincoats, afraid to be unbound.

Floating without dissolving
Swimming among the drowned.

Labels: poetry

Happiness does not last
But for the moments I am happy
They last long enough
To fill an entire life.
I'm glad I lasted long enough
To know your cheeky smile
To see you approaching from the
Corner of my eye.

No longer wary of pain
I realise it cannot hurt me.
I inhale and make it my own.
I embrace it, carry it, find it a home.
And then there is no pain.
Only the searing brightness
Of a joy undiluted, of an
Easy looseness; fear undermined.

I once carried the darkness
And now I can leave it behind.

Shape shifter, elegant
Drifter, built of air, my shiny
Trickster; glass butterfly.

Labels: poetry, sentimental

How can one person create a sound among
a hundred million voices? Their faces betray
their desperation and their words do not ring
clear. There is no clarity, all is chaos, all is a
clattering din. No spaces, no gaps, no points
of calm to be found among all that is ablaze,
burning terribly, edging away the pathos of the
night. There is no night. There is only a rushing,
a tumble of footsteps clomping upwards, of slush
and muddy impatience, of trampling what is left
of the earth. The un-beautiful simplicity of brute
survival, of breathing the cold air still, of hooded
eyes with pupils narrowed in their sockets. They
see only one thing: what is ahead of them, and
what is ahead of them yet. They march because
they have always been marching. There are so
many stories that they become anonymous -
every plea a useless artifact to discard and forget.

Labels: poetry

oh and I’m away with it now.
picked up and kicked in right
when I didn’t expect it. took
me by the throat. and I’m
racing and writhing and folding
now. it outpaces me, makes
me breathless; I am at the end
of breath. I am a thousand
moving parts. I wanted you to
make me sick and now in a
state not far from delirious I
want more sickness. coming
through my windpipe, reaching
outwards, twisting as it goes.
(and it goes, and it goes)
outwards – turns in my blood.
scratching through skin,
seeking chemicals, feeling
opaque, feeling that light
gets trapped and cannot
escape, feeling that I love the
sickness, love the sickness;
sweats and pulses, moving
towards a pleasure only
secondary to death, heats
my bones up, takes my breath.

Labels: poetry

blood fucking/finger painting
skin sticky; acrid, acrid blood
lover blood covered bloody
mouthfuls blood stuck dark
brother, smeared on chests and
faces – and joined, blood
shared and blood loved. Life-
soaked, joyous joyous, emptied
everywhere, everywhere; and
plunging in for more – blood
hungry, blood humping, washed
off and brought back and
washed off and held together by
viscera made potent by a sinister
et cetera baptised by paint that
binds, our names signed, our
bodies stained, our lives given
over to this leakage, this messy
seepage, this escaping love.

Labels: poetry