the world is the feather of an unknown bird
whose call we no longer recognise,
and so hearing unguarded, in a lull, on inhaling
speak of simply as birdsong
or sometimes a poem
*
Conch-mouthed, throat
empty but for nacre’s luster
speak the echo of that hollow
like it bore the voice of oceans
*
A short, tight
verse in compact
hand a life is.
*
A Curt Mechanic of Word after Word which Expresses No Thought
taken as the crow
the distance between
the here and now,
dry, cracked and hollow,
picked at, like all that’s
left of an already
picked clean skull,
has a value, notching,
one notch, over nothing
*
To Brook No Sense For As Long As The Word You Follows That Of Love
When I have forgotten your name,
and you mine, and lump
the precious syllables within
a breathless murmur,
notwithstanding that
we will have been anonymised
by time, we will carry on absurdly
loving one another.
*
A hand holding another
hand, holding a pen
one hand guiding
the movement of the other
guiding it in the tracing of letters
it is not practiced in producing
And so too with a voice, a voice
held within a second voice
tuning and coaxing the first
to speak, speaking, repeating,
sounding out, in tongues it has
no way of reproducing
*
I Will Disappear, Disappear
in a period of silence,
having spoken at some length,
to a person neither listening
nor there, to myself,
who wasn’t present either,
to an empty chair, to a mirror
in which no figure was showing,
to the reflection of nothing
on a lacquered table top,
to the pool of a piece of paper
wet through with ink, then,
in that period, and only ever then,
was the poem
*
At some dead end within
the inhospitable self,
against which songless birds
dash desiccated shells,
there, amongst the splinters
and accumulated dust,
lay the syllables from which
these words are formed.