You're waking now -

though sighs are shared,

the hemispheres are split

with another sober slice

of fission - once more

a planet cloven.

Perhaps you wear it heavily,

drag the first thought of it upon

your wanting flesh like a hairshirt -

This Idea Of Us,

this beast that pants and lolls,

ankle tall, old, lagging,

straggling to keep pace

with the lovely that you're wasting,

the beauty you've withheld

for this ungodly age - this wild

that howls alone.

One

blazing

flame of flesh;

one

torch of blood;

one

luminous harvest

with which to light the world -

heart -

benevolent fire,

you spread your warmth

as bread for the feast

of humankind.

An hour is eternity. If

paper is scratched with the wrong meaning

blood is drawn.

Why must it be so delicate?

The nib makes uncertain gestures over

winsome, or dusky, or sultry -

yet can't commit.

This is the horrid nature of specifics.

Still, one can't desecrate.

Those are not your smiles.

Your smile is the language

of forbidden consolations.

Because you exist, I cannot see the world.

You leap from lilacs, and tambourines,

and bubble in the eddying waters. You plucked

me from the stalk of a limp night, and because you exist

I am suffocated by your name.

You who turn from love in pain,

turn kindly: seek the tender cycles of the world.

The winter greets with joy-flung arms

the first fog's slow return, and so the moon

shall know its lover's face, the sun sinks

without quarrel. Spring dances without clothes

as Autumn looks on, waiting, and neither

will depart the grand design.

I was a bump in the day.

I walked fifty miles of aimless, looking

in each pavement crack for the faces of angels,

turned blind corners with eyes wide open,

sat quietly at out-of-service bus stops,

for an event I didn't wish to attend,

nor could remember the invitation for.

Noon spun on a dry axis,

each second needing the grease of

a troubled thought and an injured sigh,

and the leaves dived without noise, just as expected,

from the maples along the street

and the eucalypts upon the mountain.

It sticks to your insides, this endless tramp

of the daily, damp commute. This war against the clock

and how each monstrous hour falls and falls

and chimes a bleak reminder.

The calendar, it hurtles slickly by - you swallow

knowledge like you fight a rising gorge -

those displaced days that made up all your youth

lie littered in your wake:

the carrion for history's avid vultures.

And yet, you grow accustomed to the loss -

and grinding down the journey of each day

into a powdered debt - resolve to pay yourself

at Destination.

You are The One:

let me tell you about the reason for being made.

These eyes given to me, these things I look upon

in the focus that remains

within the textures of imperfect light -

there is only your action:

all else peels from view.

How you glow, even though the night falls in my soul.

Even as I grow immersed in the dark, you glow. Your soft

smile breaks even as my clouds gather.

One cloud. Two. A storm. A rainy fortnight -

a flood of Noah.

You await my return: shining; gleaming.

I depart, to climates that you never know

exist in me: fields of precipice; oceans full of caves;

infinite tunnels of bones and decay; wasteland

upon wasteland upon wasteland...

I long to whisper faintly,

so faintly that only you should hear me -

not gods, nor angels, nor nearby pines

with their needling ears -

so faintly that I should not hear myself.

Perhaps I would say, my love,

that our love is a flower

with grim petals - that they are closed forever -

dying without blossom on the stalk.