Night sky

decipher the night:

the stars read like braille
find as fingers fail
a pale meaning

Hemmed in

when we with old eyes by a new light
trace the patterns in the palindrome

palms pressed against a wall blind

and stumbling in the broad midday we
traverse the expanse laid before us

measuring its dimensions in arm spans

spiraling like a horizontal free-falling 

the stitches unravelling in staccato steps

each second held stationary at needlepoint
along a striking linearity but this here now
is a point and nothing less

Toeing

toeing the edges of a vast 
silence, so afraid to speak into the 
hollow and see my words 
fall and watch 

my feet 

follow 

Speech

spitting on dirt to form 

words, those shallow graves 

in which we bury meaning

and mourn it in
epitaphs

When

when the mist settles -

a tower of playing cards collapses
in a flutter of painted faces against
the wind/ discourse dives, adjective-
first, down the tunnel at the end of
the truth/ dancing cave shadows die
into the light/ a wedding veil lifts for
the first time/ the last curtain torn
into two/ trumpets sound and finally

we see

illiterate

these words
(once breathed, now borrowed)

become in me
a gargled pulse -

the sputter
of a swollen heart
punctured

by poetry   

To be heard

like a child with tweezers -
  picking, plucking the seams -
clumsily jabbing at the stitches
  with a blunt needle, trying
to create that frayed effect -
  that gap in the fabric,
that lull in the sentence into
  which i could slot my words
like spare change down a well
  where rusty carcasses lie still,
barely polluting the water -
  in hopes of finding a fault,
freshly sprung, within that
  stagnant, unfading fullness
in which the world rests
  untouched

But something

something died in me
             yesterday

                     (and the day before)
and what it was
    before it died
      i cannot be sure

there

i am not
there,
where
my bones
break
and
become
air. no,
not there,
where i lose
my voice to the
wind and unearth the
hollow from beneath my
skin and i live without, i die
within and i would never begin
myself
again.

On the bus

there is a poem on this bus - something about the
collective sway of bodies as it hits the turn
and the studded whir of the motor's churn

there is no drum like the hum of steady breathing
and no beat that could compete with the seething
of passion and pulsing of pain, punctuating the silence

In-Between

Life comes in
  bursts; in gushes, violent
rushes of air, in
 flashes so fierce
they blind - as love does -
 eyes from seeing and jolt
black-cold blood
 into being.

It comes in a flood,
  ancient as birth, in
currents which shock
  and startle the earth,
and when
  the waters die down
into the land,
   the dry still remains
     in the desert sand.

But we, with our
linear lives live in the
   in-between, apart, and
unseen, in the great gaps
 of the great peaks -
and for hours, weeks,
  we wait
(and barely survive)
    for time to arrive
  in the wind.

Quietly

at times 

the awareness of words

is lost to meaning

but let the soul speak

silence into the clamor and
watch the world 

unfold -

into song

- quietly

There is no time for poetry

There is no time for poetry
in the mad rush of daylight through
the skies, weighted with suspense

For the night that has lost its depth is now
tense with the cumulative strain of eyelids
over a billion pairs of eyes

Lying more awake in the dark than anywhere
else, in beds, where the world retreats
into the body to rest from time

Where, just as the mind has begun to
compose it falls into sleep, and its stirrings
into the dusk of dusty dreams