9, of a girl

An ugly streak of leaves is here, here marked.

Shame of an unkept body,

Break of day for need and errand,

Then back to secret dark when the sun’s up. 

.

Flesh fallen from discards and changes,

Carved like a soft wood, a willow

The want is marked on skin but not the change.

She said ‘as the wind blows i’ll be fixed’

But it brushes both ways. 

She flexes to and fro both up and low

And knows her range, from tree to tree

You see a life-like swaying there

But the weakness of the root remains the same.

.

Felled she finds her peace, a fallen branch.

Moss-covered through days, the ugly bark, rotted,

Though in those who sheltered there the hearth remains.

8

Cold undulations under my palms,

Hands can’t move at the beat of your mind,

Slip of the blood, the eyelids calm and find

A wash of cold air for God.

.

A country stopped, bay the sands to seep

Back and keep on burning old glass,

Asking for a passover, hiding you from him.

A prayer is just a noise.

7

Give me a piggyback,

and you’re made of wicker.

Flat on my back near fire and

Now you’re alight. 

Took another ride to get height,

Your smoking limbs barely reach

My skin to feel. 

5

Institution boys, 58 brown-shoed young men,

Three good cliques one good band of all of us,

8 over at the wash basins preening and jesting.

Harry taps the paint with his feet, timeless radio on his night stand,

We are what Don Henley was talking about, summer boys

and heart-breakers on a free stint (so we think).

Thirty minutes and we’ll set up to arrive, till then cards and drinks,

Joe will drive, more in a convoy like we’re invading a continent for God’s sake.

I’m brave, first proposition that we go places, (Elijah has lost his frames, tortoiseshell, under the bed, he’s a scape goat and a standing joke, our hero though)

So that’s what we’ll do. 

All of us here in the warm evening, a dorm of lion cubs, one window wide open

To the girls below on fifth (one less wolf-whistle than usual, find those glasses bud).

2

Still-born images from daydreams,

the fading waking body, a half light.

You appear before me, day through a stained glass window

On to a mirror onto a wall (So not too defined).

A brief smiling apparition and then i’m not alone,

Been known to lie in half my bed so the imagined

Can be in the other. My admission is that I do not dream

Of you, I devote my capacities to the image of you,

forgot breathing once because my brain was working on you.

It’s a guilt like ruining something delicate

If something breaks the illusion.