Did you think that we would go the distance?
Uncoil this barbed wire from around our hearts and carve
initials into each other's palms like a timely love-brand?
Are you surprised, that all has ricocheted across this
frozen landscape? your eyes widen in disbelief
but it doesn't change, the throb of cathartic disappointment
echoing woefully, rattling around inside your head like
loose change. You measure out your years in
mounting regrets, but they're too often confused with
Learning Experiences, differ only in the acrid curl of
lasting impression, a bile-hate for all humanity, a wild
thrashing of the soul in oxygenless air, socket-eyed
careering like a slow-motion car-chase, only the crash
is not inevitable & you feel guilty when you choose it
Over the broad beds of flowers and roll-out lawn
The marriage of your discontent, its children
all in garlands gripping inconsolate, somewhere
beyond the fingerpainted skies a clap of thunder shakes your
inner eye & you quiver but no-one else hears it
& you've possibly gone mad at this stage anyway
So it's unikely you'll be listened to, heard, or even
noticed. Later you sprawl spent on Whitman's own leaves
tracing the arcs of a tortured regret around & around
behind your eyes, but whichever way up it stands
you are alone & that is relief like water over your head.

'I am a different person now', you say
but the mirror screams back the same face & you suspect -
if not know - that this day will be full of mirrors
you will cross them & run like a maniac, forget your
usual expression and let the craziness out by mistake
The days will start to crumble like so many other
emblems of fortitude; you will notice, but with the
casual impotence of a true stranger & so your life
slips further beyond the brink.

You linger at the water's edge, you are poised
but the reflections rattle you & before you know it
you've cast those ripples as the prophylactic of your own
frozen scream and run reified into another dimension
Where there is no water, nothing beautiful to
accuse you of not noticing.

Each day the war paint goes on & I coast
slip-stream enhanced, ambivalent, rocket-fuel fired.
God's universe would not enhance me thus;
So I have made good on an old promise.
It is a one-eyed enthusiasm & my clang-trap mind
vaults shut. You forget that I have Control Issues
& now they flare like some skin-trapped zero-whore
without a dollar or a dulcimer.

Providing this day will eventually end I can offer some
semblance of repose for a tainted heart-journey in excess
Brilliantly rendered there is not much left now that will
impress, an original frontage on an old despair relaunched
into a swerving space of possibility held back by monolithic
efforts and a vain sense of urgency. The search goes on for
months and still there is no sign of your missing aptitude
you are all balled-up like a crumpled piece of paper
shaped by an unremorseful grip, you will not cede
despondency unto others despite their insistence. Maybe
it's a trick of the light, the way your headache fades, cast
indelibly in this floating space between extremes of being
manic, sunken, unhinged or lurking undetected there is just
a hint of the mundane but not as much as you would like
 
You are hiding again, your skin like a veil your forehead
stretched tight across your face, you write poetry instead of
working and look where it's getting you, look where its
crooked arrow leads, you'd rather not think you'd rather
not know you'd rather imagine Him, as he said he was
not as you know he is, after the possibilities have been
all burst like bubbles and there is only the sagging regret
of a foolish encounter with a fraud and your own raggedness.

Your unacknowledged heart crawls out of its own wreckage
In crowded supermarket aisles things slip from your grasp
& you flee, terrified of how your synapses are sabotaging you.
It dwindles neatly to nothing, this version of a day
& millions out there drink to a colossal victory but you
wrapped in your own splayed fingers, want only a cure
the necrophilic doom starting yet another dirge in your head
hammering at your temples its grief-stricken rhythm gone crazy
stuttering its static-zap messages to neutered bases
Lips, hair, fingers, limbs that cannot be coordinated into You.
But then you've cracked up; we knew that. All the while
a jet-engine roared beneath you the pinhole of your mind
gaped like a wound as everything rushed towards its end
& you emerged out-of-focus with sunlight in your hair
that version of yourself that would see in the coming weeks
fatuous and fading, invisible as a watermark

Beamed bullet-like into some people's lives
I prove too much; their wobbling worlds
cannot take the tilt & off they spin

deflating like balloons as they go; who knows
what state they end up in, or if they consider
my wide-awake bewilderment at all

or whether the loophole in their consciousness
that let me in ever closes, or remains forever
like a trapdoor, one more beautiful scar

to exploit for the sympathy of strangers.
Sure your intentions did not match mine
but we were poised anyway

two cracked-up creatures dead-set
on each other's flesh to sink teeth into
a sheer primal delight the crushing of bone

the annihiliation. Instead one hesitant goodbye
and all the world collapses
How can this immaculate let-down be absorbed?

The hell-fury of days left languid, a stunning apoplexy
sand-bag intent would capsize this lilt in a moment
unspun revenge clicking like a geiger-counter

clocking up my moments & time time time
laughing sardonically from a
far off place hooting in heretic delight

setting clear-eyed damning evidence
on my tail to hunt me home
& at last holding me tight in an endless embrace.

Better the devil in a cheap grey suit than someone you could
fall in love with, make pure with your longing embrace
& whose arms would encase your slipping world &
hold it there, like a mood. This was always your idea,
despite long nights infused with warnings that told you otherwise
a clear blue sky appears & you suddenly believe - not just think
- that Everything Will Be OK; what dead-eye glare casts
across this speckled truth to make it so believable? As if
everything were as simple as sunlight & your aching back just a
figment of your bristling imagination, snapping at junctures of the
day when at last you have the strength to be alone. Wretched &
unholy strings of days line both sides of the calendar
& with them your apprehended nothingness articulates its
meaning perfectly, eludes annotation, but keeps you singularly
occupied for weeks; You've done your bit after all
And what if you were the only real person they ever met
& it all came crashing down like an angry intruder one day
to seek its revenge? I huddle, ever at the ready for
loafing matters of the heart to catch up, become old.

I have given up my fear of words, I have filed my talons
for the real tussle but otherwise I am mute & the old
songs come to me in burnt out phrases, barely of this
world anymore. How can irrelevance have crept up on me?
I feel as though all guiding lights have been extinguished
And I creep along striking matches like a fool, no idea
where the course is anymore.

Laughter turned inside out until its guts spills forth
My eye immune to it all in my deliberate blindness
Once it saved me from seeing what would crucify, my whole
life shattering by design, but no I did not see. Certain
attempts at retribution fall flat. I want to stay up
half the night thinking of ways around them, but the
fortress has been built, we have allowed it to be
built taller and stronger, missing the point that
We would be locked out; a dozen or so minds
incarcerated, kept at edges, colliding &
reaching for the sky with palms like satellite dishes
laughing it off when they fail. We are stranded.
We have been forgotten. And tonight
it all goes choppy, tonight the glasses clink &
misery becomes liberating. How can I go forward
with all this bitterness, hate like bile, hell
is a small place compared with my heart at its end -
at its most enlightened. I once swore I would
leave, I packed bags and left for home in my head
& this thought alone brought me to morning & it all
collapsed within the glass case of a new day,
I was on a joyride back to the old mess, slightly braver.

Sleep now, an ocean of disquiet awaits you & your
paralysing fears will take their place as one more
soldier in the army of empty promises, marching on into
dreamscapes of revision; they will not touch you there
you will grow empty empty empty & in the shuffling-on of
time's serenade all these things buzz & hum & are gone
into the bleeping blanketed night, neon-clad. A whisper
corrects these aberrations but you are oblivious to it all
If you would only lean in and pass under that bridge
between here & tomorrow are a million miles of maybe.