There was a day when light

as bloodless as a pearl
ground to dust 

blew about as freely

as a spring swallow

on winds propelled
with the vigour of by colts' feet,

when a sandstorm of thunder

could light the nooks

and shine through the chinks

held in even the most

sealed of hearts,
confounding the nitre of catacombs
with pelting granules of solidified sun.

There was a season

that seemed like an epoque

where music bloomed

in symphonies of notes,
cobbled together like shards
of ancient stained glass
from gardens of shattered

calm

so silent,

as cutting as a crystalline knife

through the slow burn of glassy flames

a pyre of white buds

framing a hidden spectrum

forged from forgotten lyrics

to love an inspiration;

you must love the skeletons in its closet,

the cracks in the walls of a glass house,

and the darnkess that lies beneath its trapdoor

without knowing when you will fall in

To love the power of a dream

you must hold its space open, 

flung wide with the heels of your hands

out from the heart where your ribcage expands

giving form to a whisper

and risk its collapse

stop thinking about the rubble of your future.

about the charred thunderheads

whose rain never fell

whose lightening only cauterised

the wounds of the clouds

about clipped wingtips

cut too close to the bone

bleeding out and drowning in winds
 whose sails they once had flown

like an doomed egg
stumbling pathetic, ejected
from a nest onto a bed
of rotting pine needles.

or,
you could stare at it;
at the dying embers of a chapter written in soot
(or a name writ in water)

until the imprint of an inevitable pyre has burnt itself to your retina

leaving you as blind as a zen monk's white wall.

tracing

reaching into static
to pull out floating bones
the holographic remnants
of naggingly present ghosts
whirring in my ear
- banshees somewhat off-tune -
humming notes as sharp as glass
to fleet away like fumes

and join the other countless
parallel, puddling tracks
(mais toujours en avant)
and never doubling back

these vagrant, dusty
meanderings
like foot prints in the sand
merely lapped-up,
wrapped-up
wanderings
along the shoreline that depends
on shifting waves
and drifting haze
and eroded
by a fogged-up lens lens

anachronism

If the tunes of unplayed music

grow yet stronger in the mind

as blossoms left to ripen 

sweeten gently with time;

and if touch indeed has memory

then I've loved you

under a thousand suns -

and awaiting your whisper

inflames my very blood.  

this whisper like a shadow

between the lines of words

hangs palpably in the air

suspiciously unheard

as the silence before a tempest 

of impatient sound:

the silken ribbon of a sigh

before it is unwound.

fragment

a broken heart

is not a shard

lodged ticking in the chest

like the shrapnel of a timebomb
or a lie confessed

to be righted
or explained
or summed up

it is mute and
gapingly limbless
and cannot  chase
the hours backward
for the story has been told

ignited
inflamed
and burnt up

and the fading, empty echos
brand a senseless moral
into a numbstruck brain
so ice the pain
and sit suspended in shock

a broken heart
cannot explode 

or disintegrate

or drift into precipitate

of rust or dust or scars

it is the silent corrosion

buried in an ocean as

vast as a blank  watchface

beyond this empty, windswept place

that beats in the pulsastion-

the faded reverberation-

of an extinct and ashen star.