A long way to go.
Growing tired, eyes closing
Bright shadows flash by with a steady pulse
Of gravity
And memory.

Things float just behind the sun,
starry exceptions echoing
across the luminous space.
Silence and chill
Take over and combust,
filling the vacuum
Where once there were voices.

He breaks some burnt wood and with the charcoal paints his face and starts to dance. As he weaves around the flames the music changes from the tinny sound of the tape recorder and becomes infused into the movement and the night.

“There’s a town near here”
She waves behind her
“Follow the riverbank if that’s the one you mean”
He nods and sets off. After a moment
She gathers her wet clothes and follows
Walking along the river he jumps from stone
to stone like a child.
She picks up his rags as they fall.
“Can’t you see the bandits in the canopy?”

At dusk they enter the town, a desert valley with ghost bars and, outside, animals tied up for slaughter.

I wish I were of cattle
whose skull drying in the desert
feeling from afar into
the place where feeling
was held.

And all around
seeing the back of my head
white, smooth
rounded, connected
seeing my proud horns
scarring the shadows over my empty eyes.

Nothing need then to speak.
Just to spend my time watching
the inside of my drying skull.

For I am watching the inside of my skull
and the rumbling of my unknowing herd
passes outside.
Outside my skull.
The skull is there and I am there
and that is all it is.

Midnight eyes close, formidable
and sultry the eclipse.
The dovetail heart cut off

in moments loosed and crowding
over and again brought out
to devour life in sleep.

Quickly, quickly and come now…
I come, but slowly and
drafted, drunk, renegade.

Peach villas behind balconies
Witness landscape, face its morning
Between grass tops bending away in disguise.
They only battle thin dreams
Or outline forests.

Glass great-grandmother
gravestones, satisfied, disappeared
Where worms open crescents
For secret greenery.
Paper stars cry rocks, stars blue
leave distances
Steal outlines, break light
But husband grasses lonely
Left on Friday, Monday, Tuesday,
Their birthday, reign in colour torn.

Over dark offices, everything dreams.

Where do you go now?
Now you are partitioned, happy, washed away
Now you are given to rescue
Now you feed back into shocked mountains
Of retirement, settled elastic embrace
Of nights behind yesterday.

Where do you go now?
Now later lights pull you back to them
And earth has flown below you, sleep void
Churning out now and now and now
And revolving quietly to reverse
To you.

Where do you go now?
The last desert is beneath you
And sandstorm walls crumble backward
Now to strike on evening’s breath,
Now linger over ruined tides.
Now you are gone.

The morning swept over the hills,

Running like oil over the fields,

Turning the slowly burning lakes

Into platinum.

Later, she drifted over the ocean

Like a song left alone in the wind.

Sinking slowly in cool sunset
She races graceful barren landscape
Rough and quiet inside
Wait! The last rays
Are too precious to hold
I cannot count the sighs cast into her silk waters

Let me live to believe in strange things
I cannot move my hands, slow
With something strange and treacherous
Lying across the fawning boredom
Of midnight movement,
Shadows of window sniper
Behind the curtains.
New eyes open
Look out over grave country.
The wasteland of loves.
Cold storage.

Poor head above red
Roof midnight, cross and
Clam shut. The
Sad and metal beasts
Left outside
Faces chewed in mournful rhythm.
The children call home.
The fires desire their wives,
Black hair and soft
Pearl skin
Beneath the ardent spoiling love
Of the lake
They sit, free of crosswinds.

Gather in the house,
House of grey soul-burning.

The moor flower,
Birth of dark passages,
These of the child
In his mother’s arms and
Web spewed eyes.
Hallway gratitude
In the grave country.

We too is fell
On our ‘beat and evil days’

In the grave country
Children on the hills
Laugh at the far off city walls
Where their mothers cry
Where their satin bedclothes lie
Where night comes at last.

Yielding to a soft

Improvised rhythm

Over and over,

Ducking behind the cold stone boughs

Of the dead tree

And its shadows falling beneath my feet.

The scene is mine.

I can watch the slow gaze into the distance

The weighing of responsibilities

Behind its porcelain face.

It fell into my hands

I gaze on it when moments

Seem to stop