Absent Cirrus

I rediscovered an old sin-stained notebook

containing your name and old phone number

written in the dark, distracted

curl of your cursive.

I was standing outside a café

watching a cirrus cloud in the cerulean sky

float by like foam on a pint of beer

(meanwhile, the absent-minded cigarette smokers outside

watch their fleeting exhalations

coalesce with the clouds),

and thinking about how 

the memory of our meeting has ebbed,

it too ascending and merging with the sky.

How you

finally broke

like a storm across the sky of everything.

Bed of Roses

Winter brings night by afternoon,

a gloaming sodium vapor lit

ninety-nine metres apart,

but those seemingly obfuscous shadows inbetween

contain the most comfort.

Favourite LP

I've noticed you listening to my favourite LP;

I've often wondered if it conjured thoughts of me.

Honestly, I could not care less if it did or not,

it's just a mild but nagging curiosity.

Do those words hold any meaning to you;

those lyrics which have often defined all that I do,

or are they just some soulless sung sentiments

which I have desperately clinging on to?

I've noticed you listening to my favourite LP;

I've often wondered if it conjured a happy memory.

Do you attach the music to those missing moments

or am I just another meaningless mp3?

I remember the times I used to sing along

and you used to declare that it was our song

but now that we have gone our separate ways

repeating the lyrics just feels wrong.

I've noticed you listening to my favourite LP;

and I wonder how you have the audacity

to ruin something that I used to love so much

and leave its sleeve in our debris.

Beneath the Surface of the Sun's Silence

Phosphenes float in the fleecy clouded sky,

like restive woken walkers, weaving to work.

The withered yellow leaves have all but died;

the worn arms that held them plea for a perk.

The grass-blades shave their early morning frost

as the sun ascends and purifies the night.

The cows complain about the latest milk costs;

the price could not justify the budget's bite.

The wind's peppermint breath conceals its scent

plundered from depths of desperation,

a breakfast of sulfurous sorts, nights spent

ruing the winter's rapid inflation.

And as day swaps shifts with the oscitant moon

the phosphenes know they have arrived too soon.

Gazeless

My words may not mean much to you.

They elicit no response

and they will hang like stars,

which are always there.

You could wait until the night,

maybe then you’d see them

but you would still have to

choose to look up

and I don’t expect that you will.

Vision of a Stream

The fleeting vision of a stream

is stolen by a sunny beam.

I cannot feel the peace that lived

within the context of my dream.

By losing heat I pay the cost 

to walk a world of fog and frost.

There is no cause to stay in bed;

the vision of the stream is lost.

Game Over

My noose has got itself into knots,

nervous about all of its loose ends-

it says it wants me to drop everything

but I can't be beneath when it descends.

My bucket is feeling so empty,

woozy from having its world completely turned-

it says I should kick it into touch

but I can't let go when it is concerned.

The spring in my step is spirited,

bouncy from the thought of a final bound-

and leaping off the pixelated cloud

I fall asleep to the "GAME OVER" sound.

Asylum Skull

Disconnected dissonance drones into my drums,
my lifeless limp body floating above my bed—
the crimson lampshade reaches out to an empty socket
as a seven hour death orbits my hollowed head,
and harrowed though I am, my cerebration can grasp the plug
to spark a glimmering celebration of the dead.

Filth/Fresh

Repulsive layers of hoary skin,

days old on my body

full of sweat and sin,

matched by the lewd grubby stubble on my chin.

Loosely layered filth on my sheets

which grip me like a drug

and fester where the flesh eats

my former self obsolete.

Transcendence,

I ascend.

The dirt from my bristly past descends down the drain,

icy water pours and devours me,

heavenly bites like an angel's unrestrained passion—

a startlingly strong baptism

penetrating my pores.

Resplendent layer of unspoilt skin

I am born;

I am youth.

Smudge

Rust rubbed into the black card-sky.

Bleak streetlights, a child's grubby fingertips

which smudge the silence with sounds soaring by,

joining the dots from thirty second clips.
And so the rhetoric realisation echoes a retrospective cry

but the hand that forms cannot maintain the same grip,

I smudge the anxious smile away from my diminishing dye

and extend the same stroke to my wind-chapped lips.

Escape Route

Something changed that night,

full-beam irradiating gleaming green needles

strewed across the silence and the desolate dust,

cascaded horse-chestnuts crunching on the coarse gravel.

As my droning wheel-bearings startled those intrepid foxes

who had dared to make the white paint their bed,

the black cat's eyes glinted towards the ebonized sky

as if their master was prepared for flight.

Much like the foxes' ill-fortuned sleep,

my small-hour soundtrack was disconnected

by some strange interference suggesting a return to signal;

a tinkering tone I could forgive

for I now find myself back in the civilization I had loved to avoid.

Through all the twists and turns,

and incandescent lunar-lit landscapes

I cannot shake your mind.

Evolution of (a) Man

Minor brushstrokes

on the portrait of my youth,

a springtime collection of sentiments

that no longer hold their truth.

So I sever the cold roots of winter

painting over the love that they had gripped

and find home in my sunny solitude

and the missing pages torn and ripped.

Soon

Surreptitious little ripples spread animus in my mind,

but art ameliorates that sour state.

48:39 to combat those dilapidated disorganised plans,

accompanying acerbic print on off-white

which resembles that resentment to empty words with its flowered obtuseness.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter;

Loveless.

I'm done.

Sleeping Away the Dreaming

Lurid, lucid landscapes in luminous zest and zeal

where majestic magenta melts into the black and gloaming teal,

but materiality could never match this mirage of an ideal

so I bring my body to bed, where everything is real.