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TITLE: The Miracle of the Kisses

That night, the cock denied him thrice.
His mother and the whore downloaded him,
nails etched into his palms,
his thorny forehead glistening,
his body speared.
He wanted to revive unto their moisture.
But the nauseating scents of vinegar
and Roman legionnaires,
the dampness of the cave,
and then that final stone...
His brain wide open,
supper digested
that was to have been his last.
He missed so his disciples,
the miracle of their kisses.
He was determined not to decompose.

TITLE: Selfdream

At times, I dream myself beseiged.
I rebel with the cunning of the weak.
I walk the shortcuts.
Tormentors clad
in blood-soaked black,
salute as I manipulate them
into realizing their abyss.
Some weep their sockets hollow,
or waive their thorns.
Much pain negotiated.
A trading of the wounds.
My chains carve metal
and I am branded.

TITLE: In Moist Propinquity

Hemmed in our bed,
in moist propinquity,
'tis night and starry
and the neighbourhood inebriated,
in the vomitary of our street.
A woman,
my stone-faced lover,
a woman and her smells.
The yellow haze of melancholy lampposts.
Your hair consumes you.


TITLE: When you wake the morning

When you wake the morning
red headed children shimmer in your eyes.
The veinous map
of sun drenched eyelids
flutters
throbbing topography.
Your muscles ripple.
Scared animals burrow
under your dewey skin.
Frozen light sculptures
where wrinkles dwell.
Embroidered shades,
in thick-maned tapestry.
Your lips depart in scarlet,
flesh to withering flesh,
and breath in curved tranquility
escapes the flaring nostrils.
Your warmth invades my sweat,
your lips leave skin regards
on my humidity.
Eyelashes clash.

TITLE: A Hundred Children

Tell me about your sunshine
and the sounds of coffee
and of barefeet pounding the earthen floor
the creaking trees
and the skinned memory of hugs
you gave
and you received.

Sit down, yes, here,
the intermittent sobbing
of the shades
slit by your golden face.

Now listen to the hundred children
that are your womb.

I am among them.

TITLE: Snowflake Haiku

Where I begin
your end
snowflake haikus
melt into
crystalline awareness.

I guard
your quivered sleep.
Your skin beats moisture.
The beckoning jugular
that is your mind.

My pointing teeth.

A universe
of frozen sharp relief,
the icy darts your voice
in my inebriated veins
in yours.

TITLE: Fearful Love

Cherubim turn swords,
cast flaming fig leaves
on a cursed ground.
With bruised heels
we labour
among the bitten,
festering fruits of our ignorance,
making thorns and thistles
of our crowns.
In the sweat of our faces,
a pheromonic resonance.
In our dusty hearts,
skinclad, in cleavage,
we hope to live forever,
flesh closed upon itself,
conceiving sorrow.
Our trees are pleasant to the sight
of gold and onyxstone
and every beast and fowl has its name
except for our nakedness.
In a garden of talking serpents,
cool days and lying Gods,
I betray you to the voice
and hide.

TITLE: The Old Gods Wander

Your promised lands
with reticence.
Grey, forced benevolence.
They shrug their crumpled robes,
extend in veinous hand
black cornucopia.
You're fighting back, it's evident,
bony protrusions, a thumping chest,
the clamming up of sweaty pearls.
They aim at your Olympian head.
There, in the meadows of your mind,
grazing on dewy hurt,
they defecate a premonition
of impending doom.


TITLE: Getting Old

The sageing flesh,
a wrinkled vicedom.
The veined reverberation
of a life consumed.
On corneas imprinted
with a thousand dreams,
now stage penumbral plays
directed by a sight receding
and a brain enraged.
To fall, as curtains call,
to bow the last,
rendered a sepia image
in a camera obscured,
a line of credits,
fully exhausted,
fully endured.

TITLE: Narcissism

The Toxic
waste of bottled anger
venomized.
Life belly up.
The reeds.
The wind is hissing
death
downstream,
a river holds
its vapour breath
and leaves black lips
of tar and fish
a bloated shore.

TITLE: Tableaux (on Van Gogh)

Listening to a scarlet sink, detached
an ear, still glistening wax,
in bloody conch.
The gaping flesh.
Wild scattered eyes
fiercing the mirror.
Light ricochets from trembling blade
(it's gaslight evening and the breeze ...)
Behind his stooping shoulders,
a painted room ablaze
the dripping composition of his blood.
The winding crowd
inflates the curtains inwards,
sails of a flying Dutchman.

TITLE: Prowling

The little things we do together
to give up life.
The percolating coffee,
your aromatic breath,
the dream that glues
your eyelids to my cheek.
We both relent relentlessly.
Your hair flows to its end,
a natural cascade,
a velvet avalanche
buries my hands.
In motion paralyzed,
we prowl each other's
hunting grounds.
Day breaks, our backs
turned to the light
in dark refusal.

TITLE: Cutting to Existence

My little brother cuts himself into existence.
With razor tongue I try to shave his pain,
he wouldn't listen.
His ears are woollen screams, the wrath
of heartbeats breaking to the surface.
His own Red Art.
When he cups his bleeding hands
the sea of our childhood
wells in my eyes
wells in his veins
like common salt.

TITLE: Prague at dusk


Prague lays over its inhabitants in shades of grey. Oppressively close
to the surface, some of us duck, others simply walk carefully, our
shoulders stooped, trying to avoid the monochrome rainbow at the end of
the hesitant rain. Prague rains itself on us, impaled on one hundreds
towers, on a thousand immolated golden domes. We pretend not to see it
bleeding to the river. We just cross each other in ornate street
corners, from behind exquisite palaces. We don't shake heads politely
anymore. We are not sure whether they will stay connected if we do.

It is in such times that I remember an especially sad song, Arabic
sounds interlaced with Jewish wailing. Wall after wall, turret after
turret, I re-visit my homeland. It is there, in that city, which is not
Arab, nor Jewish, not entirely modern, nor decidedly antique that I met
her.

And the pain was strong.

TITLE: A Peace Accord

I wrote, Sally Ann, I wrote:


Shot from the cannon of abuse
as unwise missiles do.


Course set.


Explosive clouds that mark
your video destination.


Experts interpret,
pricking with laser markers,
inflated dialects
of doom.


Hitting the target, you
splinter, a spectacle
of fire and of smoke.

The molten ashes,
the cold metallic remnants,
the core...

A peace accord
between you and your self.

TITLE: I Need to Know You

I need to know you
even as I never know my self
that phantom ache
of amputated innocence
You,
the stirrings of a curtain, dust
settling on sepia cukoo clocks
covers obscuring
Perhaps one day you will become
a benign sentence
an agency
through which to be.


TITLE: Our Love Alivid

Our bloated love alivid

at the insolence of time

protests by falling in,

involuntarily committed.

You are the sadness

in my sepia nights.

I am in yours.

We correspond across

our dead togetherness.

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