The fact that you seem very important, but you are not.

Dessicated ghost , can you remember
how pliant the days where when you stole across my vision
your stain on retina, I was undone, and still I talk to you
even though you are no longer a viable proposition.
Do you remember me? Or do the winds
blow across the marsh to meet only a wisp of seagrass
drying remotely on the shore?
I want to ask you about unkindness:
specifically the need for it, and whether
love cancels it out ?
I might bring a priest flapping across the dunes
or a bureaucrat's sealed files upon my head
dropped from a supersonic aircraft.


An armillary sphere blocks my vision
and the tick-tock clack of mechanised
institutionalised misuse.
Love, can you change the elected government?
The betrayal and the use of power against the woman
clad in rags with the child against her slackening breast?
Love! It couldn't even bring me to you.

The Shadows of Birds

The shadows of birds


Between red buildings, bright blue flies its kite
the eyeful seeded with flurries of uncertain birds;
Only this is relevant, choppy as a newsreel
unfolding a story which never sticks around or yet quite fades
Extending beyond the brain into some coalescing pool
of nothing mattering/ mattering very much.
As if two children playing on different continents
glance upward at the same faint shimmering movement,
As though this October day, this sun, this broken thought
is all that marks us out us human, this recognition
of the absence of light where light briefly fails to pass.
We mark the choreography and its notation
the trajectory of miraculous and ordinary birds,
Some dim lobe marked out for remembering then forgetting
how some things end, are endless, how long they last.