part two:

explanations,

endings

nut

Nut brown

as a light brown nut......

(down as a bright long burn

in my book -

she's my book that's burning

with her burning look)

Her eyes, now, might be Hazel,

speckled brown,

perhaps green in the edges,

you could look for colours all day long

and still be finding them

if you could look;

her skin is lightly freckled,

and her hair

(of course) is somewhere on the edge of honey,

fringed across black brows.

But she inhabits her, this is the point,

so totally that all of her are one,

embodied;

such a mystery cannot be plumbed,

there is no way except immersion in it.

(And there's 'the point'

the point of separation where

description strips the subject and objectifies -

this is the sequence of a shopping list

and not an explanation of realities.)

It's not just that.....

she holds me in her hand because she has

a poise born of restraint, a playful glint,

and holds

within those bounds a whirl of fire,

a boiling soul,

a passion past believing,

seething grief,

- she's scared me sometimes, with the things she knows,

she takes me places that I dare not go,

I know I love her (and I tell her so).

And she is beautiful.

Her hair's the colour of Sauternes,

or if you beat the sunlight into rods

on some late August afternoon,

or purified a syrup into gas

and packed it in a bottle and looked through,

or just imagined barley in a ripened field

when you were feeling happy on a sunny day

then that might be the colour that love is,

which is to say

the colour of her hair.

ink

My love gave me the pen with which I write,

the book with purple edges and the thoughts I save

to tell her something honest,

something straight,

and so the ink returns itself to her,

coiling on the pages that she gave.

Love's a circle, follows such a course,

our patterns circles, radiating on,

and we perform our circles in accordance

with the wilful urging of oblivion.

Freedom comes in choosing what there is

between compulsion, luck and circumstance

we cannot read the book until we write

though we might know the ending in advance.....

I'm stretched out in the cold room, long and thin;

rain roars on the roof, and my escape,

the long road that I stretch to reach to you

is no more than a dark line on white paper.

border

The intervening contours swept by rain,

a green procession

under flags of separation,

I check my passion at the customs house

that I may gain admission to the south again.

want

Perhaps I want too much and love too helplessly

in theory I might rather have autonomy

but when it comes to being with you, honestly

I do my best to melt me into youandme.

Relationships exist in this dichotomy

I have a need that fills a need in you

the most sustaining might be co-dependency

perhaps I want too much because you want it too.

run

Don't run away now,

you will never be free if you run away now,

you will always be trapped by the running

and my life is all I have,

and I would do anything

- I would even be happy -

do seven impossible things decided by committee,

invent new sins,

recreate the past,

say something true......

I am your future, which you can deny

only by dying;

I knew you when I saw you,

and I know you now,

I know that you could turn and walk away

though it would cost you every hope

I know

you are impaled upon that spike,

I know you, and I know you capable,

equipped with madness and with senseless pain,

I know that you could do all this again.

There is no help.

We're trapped in history.

There's just one thing I want, and that is love

and I was building my life to your shore

and if you leave then I am left no life,

my bridge sticks out to ocean like a pier

the island that it sought has moved or sunk,

and I am almost,

I am lost,

all lost,

I am most lost,

the dark,

the least,

the last;

it isn't worth the price if that's the cost,

but I will pay it twice because you ask.

bell

You've never gone so far before

and I am frightened

hollow,

I ring with unease

I know love is a force will burn and break

I'm full of empty

stuffed with nothing so hard I will burst

a lump forms in my heart,

don't lock me out.

Let tides subside,

the moon has phases too,

the Spring tide hurts the most,

here at its ebb

my face hurts with the tears I do not shed,

if we could share these feelings they would be less bad.

spike

Somewhere far back I can hear the laughter,

I am left spread-eagled on this rock

and pecked by happy buzzards one day after.

You know how I feel,

I feel the spike

that I enacted enter through my skin.

I feel the black sick of despair,

and I feel nothing.

I suffer for their sins and for your sin :

if there is nothing left but suffering

then that is mine;

you'll have to smile,

pretending nothing's happened,

though the wheels have stopped;

the song's expired,

the woods are still,

the angels fled,

their wings in tatters and their minds exploded.

You will come to know this in a while.

sight

I ring you up

your voice is like a vice

so cold and strained I don't need telling twice

it has me in a grip as hard as ice,

I know I am to be the sacrifice.

You tell me not to see you

but my eyes

are clenched in pain

and I see otherwise

your image comes unbidden

though I try.

in

It's June, now,

in the January sales,

the seasons prove inadequate,

there aren't enough

since she has balanced my world on her finger.

Cast the ragged net a little wider,

(half the things we catch we do not see)

lingering, consider where you linger

you will find the reasons are inside her,

there was something calling from the start.

down

if i went down for you

how would i know when we were back ?

i miss you but i must not turn and look.

my palm still stings

and if there are no footings I will fall

or only bubbles rise up to the surface

(of course, I might sprout wings,

and just my luck

to sprout wings underwater, in a swamp)

Still,

it's not the play of surfaces that holds us but the strange potential of the essence which persists beyond the real;

we don't believe in Spirits, but are moved by them.....

and this enquiry beckons us within,

to hidden places and dark moments, where transgression holds.

So there's the pull,

the pulse, the puzzle, the terrain,

the dark heart of a territory held around by shadows;

Hell is chill.

The heat is dark, synthetic,

though it burns your fingers yet it leaves you cold

I do not want to go down there again

my palm still stings,

I pray you follow me

that pain not follow pain that follows pain.

down 2

My palm still stings

an impact made by surfaces

to reach

the essence writhing underneath

to generate a black heat in a broken heart

and bring the pain outside.

It's far too close,

this process,

to the exploitations of a vicious lust.

I fear I broke you,

or I broke your trust.

flame

Though I have smoked and guttered, I have burned.

I thought it must disclose, but was it heat

that burned without a flame, a smouldering

of fumes and choking gasses, you suppose ?

A slow, consuming fire that sheds no light ?

If so, there are no lessons to be learned,

no shouldering the burden, if that's right.

half

I split ourself in half

and grind up here

(dead centre)

in my fracture box

across the concrete miles,

the flattened earth.

There's no sense to my movements,

it's a paradox;

I drive fast to die faster.

My life is dream,

this waking is like death,

a cold, impossible disaster.

My life is in your life,

is in us,

this is no place for me, the place I live;

(the place I live is with you, I should say)

but we are always called upon to suffer the impossible,

and all this we accomplish by existing every day.

other half

This half of us

has,

by some oversight,

been left without a heart,

parts of a brain

(in which are burned bright fragments of a dream or vision seems more vivid than this drab of real)

a nervous system reaching out to feel

the missing whole

and registering pain.

portrait

The blackest ink

loaded on the perfect brush

could not depict

the subtle tapering straightness of her brow

and no description show

the clustering of brown flecks in her eyes

that flock around the pupil in the dark.

She is beyond containment,

irreducible,

a being is a motion,

not a print,

and so we slide in process,

never fixed,

reaching towards somewhere that is not....

I can't say what I mean,

when words are both too clumsy and too thin,

I splash them with my meaning,

none goes in.

We are emotionally made

and driven,

told in stories,

woven out of dreams,

how could we understand

the vastness of an instant

or explain

a single kiss ?

I start at a description which obscures,

and sink into a gallery of words;

I only know my lover who I miss.