The sea has swallowed so many

I’m going to swallow the sea.
Impossible! one said.
Another: Silly.
But I’ve been sweating for thirty years
and I’m thirsty and need salt.

I may not swallow the sea.
But the training will make me able.

Love (after Frank Herbert)

Love bids me closer still, yet as I turn away,
Revealing my redemption from a wasted day,
Love holds me tighter, yet as I lose my grip,
A rock upon which sits my sinking ship.

I say to Love, let go and let me drift away,
Deserve I not redemption on this wasteful day,
I say to Love, no sin if you should lose your grip,
It was a different rock that sank my listing ship.

Love answers, I could let you drift away,
Preserving the redemption for a different day,
Love answers, yes my hands will lose their grip,
To pluck your listless body from your sinking ship.

Acorn (a song after Jonny Cash)

I saw an acorn on the ground
I picked it up, turned it around
I put it in my pocket and I took it home with me.
I made a hole I made a mound
And laid it there all snug and sound
And then I covered it and watered it, you see.

I went to bed that night and wondered
What if I wake up from my slumber
To find an oak tree like no one has ever seen.
Then I would climb up it and wander
Amid the lightning bolts and thunder
And find a treasure that’s been waiting there for me.

But when I woke up in the morning
The sky was grey, the rain was pouring
And my oak was just a muddy patch upon the grass.
And my dream was just a child’s story
Which on the chilly wooden flooring
Lay scattered like so many beads of glass.

And then my parents moved around
To other streets, in other towns,
And I grew up and I left home to find my way.
And though my feet were on the ground
My head was always in those thunderclouds
And I knew I’d find my treasure there one day.

Well, you know that life is long
With twists and turns of rights and wrongs
And many happenings that wait around the bend.
But all these things only prolong
The culmination of each song
And every song must come home in the end.

And so one pretty summers day
I passed that town along the way
And went to look at where the old house stood.
The owners, seemed like they were out all day
So I went round back through the alleyway
And climbed over the fence into the yard.

And there, where the lawn had been
Grew an oak as big as I had ever seen
And I swear that it was where I’d made my mound.
So I climbed up and ripped my jeans
And I emerged out of that of green
To see the world beneath me spinning ’round.

So I just sat there for a while
Just looking out for miles and miles
Until the cool blue dusk began to settle in.
And on my face I wore a smile
For all that time of searching and denial
When this was where my treasure’s always been.

The road home

There is no home like place
Where every smile has a face
Distant grows the fondest heart
Soon it yearns to be apart

When every fake is just a smile
We’ve all been on the make a while
Fighting for a place back home
Where we can eat and drink alone

Provided nothing is completed
Can I retire undefeated?
Softer grows the strongest heart
My angel, I don’t know my part.

We build mountains

We build mountains
from increments of time and motion:
timetables and places, placements,
placemats, play dates, the peripheries
and spaces where we keep the instruments
of living, sleeping, weaning, cleaning,
cluttered cadences and frequencies;
the sinusoidal blip of the commute, drip
drip of that annoying tap that’s never fixed,
forever fixed as a nostalgic milestone;
the friends we keep on promising to meet
and decades later still keep promising;
the turning moons and spinning constellations,
quantum clocks of choruses and choirs,
catechisms, cradles, graves, procrastinations,
precious rituals of likes and leftovers
all generously layered upon layer.

We build a mountain,
living in its shadow, even as the
other side is redolent with sunset.
Once, we hike up to the crest to see
the horizon before it eats the evening sky.

Insomnia on a midsummer’s night

On a soft and silent summer’s night
the air is too still for anything.
There is a living garden
growing out of control out my head,
aromatic buds and tempting tendrils
tangled up in hydroponic fractals,
bastard molecules busying about
with their insatiable flitting and scratching
fleeing and returning to prod and probe
the tender buds and tendrils
irritating bone and tendon
fucking molecules.

Now and then they gather up to form
an avatar of black obsidian
to mark my anniversaries.
But the little bastards
fail to coalesce, and scatter
before I can be reborn.

Saved

Buried

Buried far far beneath the evening sky.
Where the trees have lost their shadows,
where lonely lights hunt through the depths
and the last of the supermarket shoppers
shoot cigarette smoke with the guards
before they hang their heads home.

Want to be up there, upon that mountain,
among crystal air and pink gold clouds.

Stone

I have a stone in the centre of my chest
Where the heart once was
It feels heavy.

Just words

He would write down the lines
If his fingers were not already buried
In the hardened bitter earth.

He would write the lines down
But you go see how much you write
With honest bloodied stumps.

The soil is bitter hard, the bones too brittle.
I’d not pull too earnestly but keep the fingers
And wait ’til summer comes.