(Seventeen Syllables About) MOVING ON

My darling, unless

          you’re on my mind, I barely

                   think of you at all.

RATIONAL EYES

We can’t

keep doing

I don’t really want to

stop

it’s my own fault

it’s yours

I like

          and we keep on

need

I hate

you

          make me

feel

IN/OUT

Either

always

          in the corner of

your mind

                   or

completely

out

of mine.

OPEN AND SHUT

The art of playing the game

and never giving it away

of baring all

and nothing

                   at all

of hiding under a neon sign

the art of being

completely

open and shut.

COGITO, ERGO SUM

Some have the gift

of choice –

which universe to inhabit –

moulding from their mantras

          worlds.

Some find it easier

to shatter a mirror

than look at a truth

          reflected.

Gathering the shards

they scrabble

a fractured picture –

a stained-glass filter.

This side, the altar

the other

          the seducer.

Delusion seeks an accomplice

in imaginary crimes

 – a scapegoat for desire –

admits to a vague complicity

          but

never responsibility –

rarely touched by

                             reality

of which

it nearly always

complains.

(Seventeen Syllables About) SEEING

Life in red and black –

          light and darkness dimly glimpsed

                   through eyelids screwed tight.

THIRTY-EIGHT (Certainty)

If thou regret’st thy youth, why live?

– Lord Byron

At seventeen a poet

fancies himself

                   Rimbaud

stomping on tables

and pissing in complacent coffee cups.

At twenty-one he’s Byron

trying out for size

                             his muse

on every caprice –

a madman shooting flaming arrows

never staying for the blaze.

By thirty Yeats and Eliot call

mystical, cynical, bewildered;

enamoured still of conceits

but

faithless in effect;

squinting through swirling sands

at a shadow that may be

a slouching beast –

or just

a marching line of afternoons

          and coffee spoons.

No sane illusion

survives to middle-age.

A poet ages faster

and more slow

digging

with the pen

for unsellable gems;

labouring

          not for an audience or

himself, but

the work –

certain as dying Keats

that his name is writ in water.