After Love

Searching for solid ground
  among the ruins and the rubble
splintering yourself
  on sharpened adjectives
that promulgate the confusion
  can’t all be illusion
was it just caricature
  plastic grandeur
idolatry of the unremarkable
  out there among the broken walls
you slip, fall, find inside you
  too late
the heart and bone debris
  the bloody thorns
picked out of the tired body
  tell nobody, hide the blood
after love
  not even memory mourns.

 

 

Soldiers

I stumbled into the dregs of his life
Entered for a while
And flowered there.

Got drunk on the litter of his past
Asked him to open his doors
And then condemned him.

Later I stumbled across the realities of more
Found gentle things for a while
Then war.

Beside the bones of soldiers
Photos of ones once loved
In drawers, albums, plastic folders.

And when the flowers die
As they always do
Was their beauty a lie?

And when the day for loving is past
And the leftovers are left unsaid
Can we then say, smiling, love is dead?

 

 

The Past

He gathers his losses around him stem by stem
on the bank of a broken brook
picks the wild flowers of regret
says: ‘I am the past’
strokes the velvet lily
yet to the past he does not look.

Does he like living there?
forever on the wrong edge of now
inhabiting empty shadows
a vacant vestibule devoid of space
a girl
an empty face
choice – a place he doesn’t know how.

Here time is counterfeit
the memories, the river, no longer fit
love’s small pleasures, tomorrow’s debts
cast by a covetous universe
watching him, watching
the hour
glass
split.

For it matters, matters deep
the accolades you cannot keep
in every wrong turn reverse direction
each un-flower, left to perish, un-picked
the petals, rose-wet, blink at sky
watching him watching them
down down where the waters weep.

It is not, never is, the fault of others
let yourself, the word, the ending bleed
the stains upon the mirror
you once mistook for oceans, stars
here sever circumstance, sever chance
purge the chrysalis, stamen, seed
watch the star and lily cross-pollinate
inter-breed.

He gave himself too lightly
too ripe, too over-free
to those who never cared
and the berries that once
were bright to bursting
then broke, dripping
screaming, spilling
scared.

Beside the river flowing
time’s a living poem
he tastes the air in desperate
aphorism
a hollow tongue licking
the gaps in clouds
in-between syllables
and hanging sky
where verbs go to die
what is the price of a word, I ask
a tome, a tombstone?
his lips fall quiet upon the lost, last years
articulating despair
and I dare, dare not ask him why
beneath the hanging sky.