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After the Elements

You and I, we are too far

from fire now: the chimney-pots

have driven out their smoke,

and stood alert for its return,

but flames are rare, or else

they are disaster; our rooms in brick and board

have insulated from [...]

View From the Air

Syllabled elegance makes a goose of itself

on purpose, so it appears at table

crowned in still-bright but obsolete

circuit boards:

              an ill-fitting

              vocal swirls

              out of punctuated

belches & compressed farts:

must implementation lie subordinate so

Options UK

or move somewhere with a high unemployment rate say 10% and buy to let cash with a mortgage on your own house or sell up move on to a small market town with no market or sell up start a business a café or shop or sell up trade [...]

The Bridge

That there are things that can never be the same about my face, the houses, or the sand, that I was born under the sign of the sheep, that like Abraham Lincoln I am serious but also lacking in courage,

That from this yard I have been composing [...]

Mosquito

An eyelash fragility inside the iris of our room the stringed hum —              this unwavering solo, close enough to hear the lust               working, a ruthless desire like all desire willing and oblivious in a loom, weaving that indiscretion in flaws, the hairlines or hems of all that bends to a pleasing [...]

Buffer Zones

Walkers walk by eyeing my cold coffee as if to ask what do you think of the lyric inventions of the seventeenth century but I don’t think about the seventeenth century, I am distracted by the train whistle and the road construction in the distance which seems further away [...]

Otherness

“I am in exile. Like everybody else, I live in a world that is given to me . . . it is not my native home.” —Paul Goodman, “Speaking and Language,” Defence of Poetry, 1971 A woman I know well has stolen my face. She answers for me when someone asks my [...]

Death by Lightning

I left you in the house, your eyes on me, suffering from a relative of grief, took myself from here to the neighbouring village. I don’t usually walk, preferring donkey or moped, but neither could fare in the weather: rain slopped from eaves turning the streets to streams. [...]

Threshold Clouds

Up a curving road             on a dry gold hill,             you follow at thirty paces.

Sometimes I look back and you’re there,             sometimes not.

I came back to northwest California,             dry grass wind gold ultra blue,             back to late childhóod, when I lóved yóu.

Shadows of spheroid [...]

Life In broad midmorning, a wild streak of handsome ginger, Reynard of the suburban bins, in a lull in the traffic,

Ventured the gap ahead and leapt a high stone wall To the den-paradise of Riddel Woods. Why’s the natural

So consoling? It should surely be otherwise: what can One life mean [...]