1 New Poem

Paths That Cross

We started so deliberate, along
the followed page scraps crossed
up with ink, compass-exact
strokes against dying candles,
closing walls, to chart a way
through.

Swiping about,
smearing fingers through
facades and oil print; when
it comes across as knife
edge to throat, it is a
darkening of presence.

We were not burning, blazing
testaments to higher-lived
purpose, not speeding toward
some sitting in light-streaked
field at the quadrangle piece;
only a touch of spark.

Shutting off, zig-zag coiling
electric lamps in antique clutter
that drives us away from
finishing what was started;

Talking into one another’s
straightened lines.

1 New Poem

Forever Summer

The washing in of late afternoon
comes tidal in still glass of
warm shades, soothed calm with
bright-breaking whispers in
windowsills over and against the
dawn fires, a wafting trash burn
that flicks unnoticed against
pale blue spaces, like sullen
damp through air bricks.

When all is calm, relieved, bound
again in immortal palm green,
it gives feeling to impossible time
drifting past on electric rumour.

In a second of gutter-running rain,
there are no masters, no reasons
for disbelief in magic’s presence,
save the unpaved tumble it was
to the sickly slick of carved-off
roadsides, the tossed metal clang
being thrown to-fro in bleached
sheet breeze sweep.

It looks like much more, or less,
than this, frozen in eye-dropper
place by the worst of memory,

But, most of all, it never went
on as long as the sun,
setting even against tricky haze.