MONDSCHEIN/MOONLIGHT - For L

It’s easy — watching

languid candle flame

warm the milk-wan

body,

midnight hair cascading,

framing

the face that’s haunted

your dreams —

to tell yourself

God has led you here,

His metaphors and signs

garlanding a poppy chain of

            destiny — that

the

dark eyes searching

your own, so close they

            merge,

will always regard you thus —

that morning will never come,

its cares, its quotidian glare —

and lovers

carved

one from the other

never have to

            part.

BLINK

Lethe laps Ophelia’s body

      washed up at its edge;

hubristic combustion illuminates

      then consumes

the stage. Act after act

projected across the glow

fragmentary nightmare reels:

grainy black and white infused

      vivid scarlet.

Tragic:                                                 Absurd:

everybody’s flawed and dies.        Dialogue from different plays

                                                            collides real-time unnoticed.

                                      Farce:

                                      manners, sex, and bursting bubbles

                                      of meaning.

Alone in this omnicameral theatre

Narcissus ponders Hamlet’s question.

BRONTEAN MECHANICS

—    Pour Ma Jolie Copine.

It’s said a collision

between membranes in a multiverse

          gave birth

amid orgasmic destruction

to all that we can know.

How often did those

universes pass unseen —

a vague unknown

feeling in the nothing before

contact?

Can love be a matter

merely of timing?

Had Heathcliff and Cathy

met in their thirties

could they have saved

everybody the bother?

Could Cathy have lived?

Heathcliff would always have been

lost.

Had his love been

stronger than pride

might he have given her more

than a mansion of memory and

          dust?

Universes loom

from dark matter between realms.

Outside time a flash

could be a moment or eternity;

a new world

beautiful, complete,

known only to its inhabitants

exists for an instant

          forever

blinked out of being

by the sad, cruel logic of reality.

Love exists without time.

Time engenders destruction.

Perfect love destroys perfectly.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON AT WHITELEY'S

Rainy back-street anywhere.

Doorbell rings in a house

            where nothing lives

mute pigment screams

froze in reverent silence.

Sharks hunt naked couples

upstairs where

the artist breathed a funnel-web

            preserved in glass. At this

velvet rope funeral march

the heroin clock drips

minutes like wax;

we soak in impressions of Bondi.

Outside the rain has stopped. Smoking

            we preserve time;

a backward glance

an artist’s life

a paperweight

the spider.

OF BABYLON WHERE WE SAT

—     ...How can we sing the LORD’s song

in a strange land?

Deckchair on penthouse patio

drink on terracotta, cigarette

        butts rain fire on

the wasteland below;

perched on this obelisk

stars our jewelled ceiling

it’s easy believing we can

turn our backs on Gomorrah. But

in the evenings others —

dealers — hookers — junkies — bums

follow us home

ransack our sleep

loiter in doorways and back-alleys

        in our minds:

ash our tower is built on;

face of our salt-pillar shadow.

(G)LISTEN

I

saw hurt

hate — love — loss

cruelty — pleasure — fear

quiver in the corner of your

      eye,

run

down

you

LETHEAN BAPTISM

Let go.

Swept down sadness

                      madness

washes all away.

Cold running panic all

is deadwood

drifting

out of reach.

Roll with it

rushing over

beds and bones.

Alone.

Accept.

The river

                    leads

                                 you

                                           home.