the quest, essentially.

If I find a stream
that tastes like mud and the restless feet
of naked people - if I find trees
old and wild, brooding over a shade no cunning eye has seen
and torn - if I find an unknown place,
would I find a space in me
unfilled, a bit of
mind still free?

sleeping duty

she slept and as she
slept life crept
a briarbush unchecked neglected
circling about her wrists up her thighs
tight round her neck
unwary she became the whore
of thorns that prodded pierced and tore and
not a soul there was that knew
the roses were too sweet that grew
did you not stop to screw one too
boohoo boohoo
boohoo boohoo

textual frustration

Some men will strip themselves like
dead fish and lay their spines in 
my hands: They want me to stroke their bones, 
I think. I'd prefer if they were octopi
with fat purple tentacles I couldn't fight shoved into 
me against my whimpering objections. 
But no. These men are 
pens: I suck their ends and 
crack them between my fingers when the words won't 
come. 
Is there no load to degrade my hate? 
Is there no man that can break my hands 
so they'll never write again?

after a dream where i couldn't say no

I was an
I-negated self:
my body the medium of
artists who
drove instruments into my legs,
fondled me like clay
then burnt me through to hold my shape
my voice driven to my gut, throat packed
with tracks - quiet laughs and
empty conversations with girls
I might have loved. and when my mouth
was visited by a fleshy worm
i kept it shut and closed my eyes
and lay me back
a statue of a lovely sleeping naked lady
or a lonely man's doll.

i had a dream where a woman demanded
"did he tell you the lie? did he tell you the worst lie?"

My growing up was no-less,
stripped to silence,
but it rattled in my belly and
rose like a gulping scream against a pillow
pressed to my face and now
I bellow! now
I wail! now I
guffaw!

some days the pebbles lying in the sun like dead fish, smoothened
down by the beating waves
will scorch the feet of those who walk on them

and one day we won't be pebbles but mountains, strong and firm and full of
echoes of words we could never say before.

fantasies of a poet

There is a beautiful poet that I love
distantly, more for his manness than
his music: for his big, sleepy eyes (the colour of
acorns or puppy fluff) and
his soft curls (how soft? I wonder).
I imagine finding him one pinkgray morning
chewing a thumbnail over a
notebook. I imagine draping myself
across his shoulders, kissing out his furrowed brow,
his little frown, us forgetting
the words together. Then
I imagine, as I must,
what he will write, as he must,
about it all later.

an august morning

The air is cold -
isn't it delicious? This
morning with the
savage city groping my
eyeballs, I blink and in that blindness shiver
the trees just under my
skin. Is it fear or anticipation of
the end that sets them trembling?
Men drive their stone stakes deep
but the earth beneath my frozen feet keeps
the beat of a defiant tune like an uroboros tape reel that
repeats:
The cold is delicious - isn't it air?
These are the moments I am me.