in the dark and desperate hour

Decide this is the end of the beginning:
rise from your bed and walk the walk:
beneath the ice of lily lake the lotus
shelters, fallow in cold muck, abiding
summons. Cracked half of planet,
fixed with bodies remanded to
the carbon root as energy for flower, seed,
machine: nothing wasted in a
mechanistic universe but soul arisen
to rejoin the human archetype.

most grievous fault

Thin hands around a cup of misapplied
expletives, frowning jags of critical
analysis: they hate you for it, know
this and be quiet thoughts ; make pretty
scenes and suffer not the lack of child
presence in a hail of dirty weather.
Tides of fortune turn to flood the
crumbled sea wall , so ungrateful...

The Judgement of Vision

The warrened den of foxes,
passage louvred with branches
sweetly interlaced,
admitting just the pointed faced..

Before the church a Christ of bronze,
extending palms with an ironic smile;
The congregation paid with alms
for pediment and full surround of tile.

Abandon hope ye squirrels and rats
who come too near the canine bower
at dusk; a warning to all feral cats
who prowl the phosphorescent flower

The die was cast in Italy that made him
and thousands more for foreign places.
Do not fault Christ for poses that are dim
or trace of bitterness upon his faces.

The works of workshops mass produced
inform a vision deeply jaded;
the artisans of fields and forest used
to feast after the light had faded.

girl from a book

triste or tryst,
either way
lose your
place unless
exile serves
cloudberries
on Signal Hill;
flirting with Bloom
a thankless chore;
pattern book details
lost on his like:
let us meet
in asterisk...

epicentre

panepicentraldemic
miserere
shantishantishanti
toussaintl'ouverture
tontonpetitmichel
perpetua

Subaqua

Long distance, particles
assassinate expensive
privacies, travelling
cadmium cables two
miles below sea-level,
post-scriptum,
just for fun.

red strings

the region where spirit
and consciousness mingle
twines helix -like
the space between
earthworms mating,
forgetting the eternal
worm pulled ravenously
from a sodden field;
these strings attract
ancestral messages,
something about
the axis and the tilt...

If You Do Not Play, You Will Not Win

Banks of snow, sacks of cash
ready for the reckoning-
salt the tiny twists away,
les tortillons.
Come June ,
all those coins
thrown to the drifts
will be waiting,
glittering and bronzey,
among the buttercups.