Refined, I'm sweating gasoline
Set myself ablaze
Just to light the cigarette of my dreams
My natural state has changed
But hasn't stopped getting in my way
Takes a drink to strike an ember
Stagnant black glowing amber
Cooking my assumptions with timidity  
Chaotic pieces tempered into
Wavering unpredictability
Directionless enmity
Enemies at wind
Cooled to harden
Forced to torch again

fiery crimson slash
on mountain canvas
false beauty above
truth hidden below
how low will they go
to tap the root
sip stolen nectar
to feed their bracted petal lies
protect the precious flower
from pestilence and weather
hummingbirds and hovering bees
take pollen honey-sweet
from the fertile center
spread the stealthy seed

I was honing my voice
he was building his muscles
to impress our common interest.

Whenever she was at the roof
he was seen doing squats and push-ups
I was heard singing love songs
taking the notes to that high scale
where my voice invariably cracked
and his bones creaked with exercises.

The three roofs became one battlefield
where two warriors would rather die fighting
than give up the princess to the other.

One day she would smile at me
when I would extend the limit of my voice
the repertory of my vocal talent
but for reasons best known to her
the very next day she would feign
I wasn't existing on the roof
and it was all muscles her eyes got stuck into.

Then she stopped coming to the roof.

The two warriors had only each other as company
the days were never the same
for she was married off to have new interest
and having lost the race for common interest
he started singing mournful songs
and I decided it was time
to give voice to my muscles.

I have heard of people
tasting stars

and I wonder how their mouths
never filled with ash

I have cradled dying stars and
rocked them

as if they came from
my body

dipping my toe into the
waters of the universe

I am a child of flames
no cooler than the

sun

but I cannot taste myself
without surrending to

becoming that ash

There are no right answers.
The sky rejects the birds, turns them
over to gravity,
embedding them in the concrete and dirt.
The grit refuses to become a pearl,
just as the wound refuses to heal
and the flesh eats itself.
The market sees a sudden spike in
sales of Champagne and cyanide.
Coordinated efforts seek and fail
to curtail the rising tide of violence
in the nation's dreaming.
You realise that this crude, barbaric language
that you can't understand
is your own.
Beauty glitches and pixelates.
Frightened, furtive confessions of love
are unheard over proud, visceral
proclamations of hate.
Tongues divorce mouths.
Every now and then, a voice
inside your head says,
'Thud.'
The measures of sanity become
more quantifiable and
totally arbitrary.
The horizon
tightens
like
a noose.

It doesn't matter if this is wrong.
There are no right answers.

They're killing off the working man
and
if that's their plan it's working
unlike the working man
who sits beside the telephone
waiting for the agency
to get
a bit of work that pays
more than a
pittance.

The distance grows between those
who have and those who never will,
it's a bridge too far but already crossed
and
the working man has lost
again.

SWEET MEMORIES

Dazzling rainbows in mind’s cerulean sky
The elusive spectrum of varying wavelengths
Often appearing after a sunny drizzle of happy episodes


SOUR MEMORIES

Fossilized cadavers
Unable to be cremated or buried
Refusing to disintegrate into oblivion

Somebody bundled
it into a clock
and slung it up high on a wall,

with numbers
like bars between us,
where there had been nothing before;

before,
my days had come open,
open and endless like sky,

but boxed on the wall
there looked no room for all
of the rest of my lifetime and I.