1 New Poem

Dispatches

I could parrot the same
hunt-peck type clatterings
until wandered time lets go
its flaring radiance through the 
blank space between stars.

I could spend the half-life
of cold former suns starring
into you as a moonlit shape
shorn of gauntless fault
and dancing on river edge.

I could hold you in robe
of memorial, the back corners
of mind where dark words
crept across swampy moorland
I look back on in ages.

I could write of it in block
shape, breaking waves of
illuminated shore you swam
back to, against a battered
old ship stock I keep

Ready for the telegraph tether
I wander in the space of your embrace.

1 New Poem

Opposite Charges

One day, you’ll be the rain,
electric in form,
no longer so entrapped, enraptured
by passing of skin from itself,
and lighter now for being left.

But I would chase you,
still remembering,
the weary way I looked at
old postcards of Italy,
how women bathed in seaside waters.

Letting go: one day,
you’ll be the wind and we’ll rush
through each other as we
stop from now, still
selfish in our present shapes.

Mesh and interlock, go forth
for closure sought as less shame
and more the possible past
we had as name etchings in

Winter ponds from breeze branches.

1 New Poem

White Tulips

Muck-gray and silence outside,
sleet sheets washing down concrete
places we stood in time to street corner
symphonies now quiet.

You took the water, filled plastic
cups and spun to catch light
in tangles of hair (falling frames
around half-moon smile).

I took your hand and
pressed to cheek, feeling
a world’s wonder warmth beneath
old, battered visage.

The day beyond, stretched out
as lazing animals in separation
again, we were dreaming
of bleached flowers

And the spring dawn.

1 New Poem

A Cottage in Nova Scotia

I picture us one day,
distant in time
(just past in feeling),
at a cottage in Nova Scotia.

When we’ve both gone graying,
dulled in spectrums seen, heard,
but still reach for each other
as instinct in morning light.

And you smile still like it was
clutching nervous hands on bachelor apartment
couches, like it was
the first pulses of mine

You felt quicken through skin;
amazed at how you transform me,
make it all go rushing,
so unlike gentle dock waves.

I picture us dancing
in sock feet on kitchen linoleum
to beats that took us a flutter
between frying pan handles, one old night.

I picture myself,
face lined from a lifetime’s
laughing at the
goodness we took chances

On one day (far gone,
held close for feeling);
compelled enough to drop
wary glances for loving looks.

I picture us reading over
news of the day as sun
streams off wood grain panel
and we look back on

All years spent in tangles
of arms, swelling of
breath as we bridged the
few inches left between us.

I picture us in a cottage
in Nova Scotia, saying same
soft spoken phrases we do now,
but knowing them to have held

Steadfast, true.

1 New Poem

Taken/Free

A sense of feeling is floating,
airships between us in pale shifts
of light across midday skin.

In the lacking language of physics,
we became crossed and tangled,
splaying fractals across the room’s width.

That time and this we make have
meaning beyond domestic interior scenes,
with our breaths on scant edge of hearing.

If I didn’t die in absence, without
some movement of things beyond a
dollar-cent piece, they were so

richly felt for being fleet-footed,
as they run, stallion-liberated, in
plain of proof in mind,

that once, at least and if only,
we were so taken with the
always of tomorrow, we set out

free of today.

1 New Poem

Windows, Walls

I look over the wall;
how reflected was the noise,
light beams that slipped through
those grey spaces between
dorm-room tacked posters, dresser
drawers and lamp shade shadows.

How it seemed no longer a trapping space,
but something found safe on
Sunday mornings where time
faded from foggy view,
squeezing of clock sweat ceased
being so gold.

A trail of breath was painted
now, a stain of brilliant colour
seen only in glimpse, only in
impressed dragging, that cower,
yellow in shade, at corners
of darkened conscious, waiting to
be struck alight.

I look out the window;
the fickle New Scottish branches
encased in dripping crystal.

Your skin was bare, satin soft
against snow-moon’s hanging
glow, bright ember against dark
of abandoned ghosts, wrecking
invisible memories that vanish
against sun.

It had views to outside,
where things stormed, rages, were not soft
as bedsheets, turned cheeks,
first kisses, traced hands,
muted whispers.

A leaving mark was hardest to make
in this, torn-away curtain
from ourselves in birth-same state
drew closer, more rationed
with occurrence, more drying as
broken minutes pass.

But there were:
walls to shelter,
windows to look.

1 New Poem

Light-Coloured Dresses

Pale blue: swiftly you sway
around the salt cave crystal
that sticks in mind, sending
stomach knots unwinding, released
with tender touch, with whispered
word.

Blushing pink: old lines started
wearing out in everyone’s voice,
living that didn’t come easy
as shuffling coil springs
here and there without much
thought.

Hemming gray: delicately we push
feet together, seeing what shapes
we make together when all else
falls in, shuddering of skin aside,
too-quick sparking of nerve
aside.

Morning green: next minutes
paused, rehearsing the cold sails
taken home, but made light by hands
on clock face that no longer stared
deeply against my figured formed
solitary.

But was aglow in our shade.