I came to a courtyard of my own making,
To a cottage by the sea at the worlds edge.
I furnished it with my left over life, complete,
Barren and colourless and I wrote the newest
Book of psalms out of tinder and flame, a tome
Of grey and useless poems, unheard of songs
And reams of flesh.  There in the lightest dark,
By the Druid stone that was placed just for me,
I planted a creeping yew tree.  And the moon
Sang in celebration and silence like a fallen
Priest.  
                    Under the covering hazel trees,
That sprung to life after the longest winter,
Which taught me to forget my name, I now
Struggle with light and my body, warring, torn
Is fading slow, like the always arriving, down
Turning solstice, the climates of the mind,
Where it is digging the never ending shallow
Hole only the spreading eternal yew, that I
Planted, will ever know and only the Lazarus
Moon shall ever rise above.

I came to a courtyard of my own making,
Was it dream that led me there or my eyes?

Rising guano smokes the white birds.
The North winds homing, ave, a long
Besieging sea and ferries the prince
Of waves pass pacific and the fair isles.
With javelin eyes, aloft, blue streaks

The seething air, headlands draft
Grave embattlements, red rivulets
Paint on the raining wing, black art
Ticks the tern, marked minions and more
Dread.  Once you were a foundling

Dropped from sovereign doons, scree
Of sky, air of wizard, your image late
Spikes from the lake, taut talons train,
Your breast a speckled main, rapier
Of dreams, arisen, sheathed in stone.

In the frosts of autumn, leaves do tell
In storied colours, yellow and red,
Round the shores your kingdoms table,
Battle cries break, a silence of wails,
Though they fall they shall burn again.

Let's friend on Facebook,
Digital narcissism  .  .  .
Quick deaths of touching.

Her fine hands are gentle
With lithe and spiny fingers
Of bone and fin.

Her eyes are opal,
Essence of emerald and topaz,
A hoard of treasure.

Her hair is sea gathering
And dances in the blue currents
Deadly as the sea snake.

Her skin is coral,
Made of mineral and sorcery,
A fatal beacon.

Her lips are urchin,
Set in a whirlpool of face,
A spiral of doom.

Her voice is dream,
Rocking the lost wrecked ships,
Ground into sand.

Her long tail is fable
Of paradise, beyond faraway seas,
Cyclones and waves.

The moon, beams over the planted fields,
Growing blades shimmer, slicing the night
As fiery comets first seeded the earth,
Beads light, to life-giving grains of rice.

She took the flower that she loved,
Planted him in the burning sun,
A desert formed around and the morning dew,
Were tears the flower cried,
It nearly died.

She took the flower that she loved,
Brought him near, into her house,
Her house was cold and dry, with no light to see,
The flower could not leave,
It nearly died.

She took the flower that she loved,
Found the place where he belonged,
Without walls, in shade of sunshine, where flowers bloom,
In peace they bear no pain,
And rarely die.

Her fine hands are gentle
With lithe and spiny fingers
Of bone and fin.

Her eyes are opal,
Essence of emerald and topaz,
A hoard of treasure.

Her hair is sea gathering
And dances in the blue currents
Deadly as the sea snake.

Her skin is coral,
Made of mineral and sorcery,
A fatal beacon.

Her lips are urchin,
Set in a whirlpool of face,
A spiral of doom.

Her voice is dream,
Rocking the lost wrecked ships,
Ground into sand.

Her long tail is fable
Of paradise, beyond faraway seas,
Cyclones and waves.

Making love at dawn,
Mist, caress, mellow sadness,
Mourning doves cooing.

From out of the smoke,
And impromptu silences,
A lone piper plays at reels,
Beyond the borders, his knees
In a trinity of keys, breaching
Low dun black ****** hearts,
The public house is enclosed
Out in the open, under a plow
Of mossy stars, peat and bog,
Wrapped, within chanters throat.

Gone are my friends,
The red panda, is now sleeping,
The snow monkeys have moved
Lower, down on white mountain
And the trees have disrobed for bed,
I walk through the snow and hear
The icicles growing in the wind,
Around the bend I meet a new friend,
A shining, secret waterfall.

Each day I fill baths  .  .  .
So short my time with songbirds,
  .  .  .  Morning states of grace.

Making love in first light,
Softly, she flowers and quakes—
Ripples on still pond.

Too beautiful for words,
My noble friends as they pass,
Songbirds in morning.

A hundred crows from all corners,
Flew into view, and whirled about,
As if the cracked earth set quaking,
As if the sky was tiding, sloe black,
What ominous undulations accrued,
What murderous tribulations due?
The very sound they made was tear,
Was tirade and all those black flecks;
Dark sparkles of sun, shadows of fear.

North winds, clouds gathering,
My mind paddles in sky river,
Like snow geese or swans.

.
Blooms of hair, shimmers and starlight,
Face of dream, gathers in lighted loom,
Wakes of morn, spotty forest fawn, child
To magi moon, maid of golden orchards,
Of faraway seas, world opened vastness,
Temptress of foreign fruits and the giving
Sun, where blue, blood oranges old, ripen,
The dark vines grape of ancient olive, red
Lamb and wine.

What enchanted lands are you made of?
Where the diving seas of dolphin, sponge
And whirlpool weave, wherein Gods must
Have loved and making you, left this earth
In beauty and peace, burnished with dream.

If I should die with a shunted echo hear me,
Lost fabled one, my paltry heart the snows,
The warmth rides of the chiding winter sun,
The melody and rustling in cantata leaves,

Whose strings of one, plaintive guitar, strung
By breaths birthing breaks, your tracing lips,
White birds, water wings miraculous, not so
Stunning as your steps float above the water,

I am nothing, less, you shine pure, most of all
More than any heart could tender, how could
An empty house, abridgment only, unhinging
Doors coursing reason hold the new day sun?

As flame was my doom, love hear my thesis—
Should I die, look for me in the loom chrysalis.

And speaking to the western wind,
In the sped and turning time of the revolving sky
As a top unwinding like a dropped fable;
He dreams of taking leave, unraveling the coil
Upending his foil
Of listless sights as daylight creeps one more tread
And sweet belief breaks down once again:
Days that are ******* like a sad hunt
When the tracker is bent
On tragic orchestrations that only lead to a duel . . .
Undoing, Oh must it be, "Must we fit?"
Let us know and get on with it.

In his bed the women are only dreams
Phantoms, iridescent sirens.

  .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .   ­ .

Yes! I am not King Lir, nor could ever be;
Am a child cast out, transfigured, remote
Innocent, prey to the white flaming truth
The growing down, that clothes my name
Inconsequential, sheathed with shame,
Polite, capricious, calamitous;
Empty of all, it is unanimous
Nor even the memory of ripeness
Invisible, a drop in the pool.

I am weary . . .  I am weary . . .
I shall whisper to the newborns when I am old.

Shall I build upon the strand?  Have swordplay with the sea?
I shall tear my hair, mutter to the moon, bury my wounded knees
I have heard the Selkies singing, sailing with the breeze.

I do not think they will give their skin to me.

I have known them gliding beyond the seventh wave.
I still hear them sing so sweetly, weaving sorrows, on my back
Carving the blue waters as the waves are turning black.

We come and go in cycles with the moon, as tidal waves
Seep and seethe, foam and heave, lone captains setting sail,
In folly with a capsize brimming, before our boat has been bailed.

              

                                        ­                     ­­                                               — after Elliot

.
I wanted to know the sighs
Of mercy.  On the bed she lied,
Laid bare in the shocking light
That twitches, as she rolls
I hover and cage her in question,
With moist eyes, abandoned
By loves interrogations,
I stab at the untruths and confusions.
I wanted to hear the supplicant
Murmur of indolence and shame.
With windy caresses I break
Her arms, she ropes me red
In tangled hair and I struggle
To let go.  I wanted to taste
The twin defeats of victory
And indifference, when in the light
Of darkest night there are cries of yes
And no and false accusations,
There is consuming pain and excruciating
Pleasure and as we squirm
And seethe, she teases,
Goading me and then,
I loose it.
.

Gray gathering  
Signs fell on the musty register.  Two pallid  
Faces infatuate, braiding the ley lines,
Were married in a dimly lit registry.
Outside, the sky in Dublin was a dark pool,  
The clouds were omen, birds, startled in  
Your eyes, a flashing flue of doves, all wings  
A warring coo, escaping into the dusk.

We walked a ways to that room of dreams
And dined in the Shelbourne’s Aisling room.
I was Ormond, I was Yeats and you  
Were gone. Your happy tears were notes singing
Our sorrows that day.  Our love was castaway  
Our love was time bomb.  Crossing stars, we trembled  
As we talked. Two birds setting sights on some  
Lost ocean’s horizon.  
  
                          When first we met,  
At the meeting hall, cradled in a tempest  
Eye, you gave me your name and it burned on  
The paper as it now burns in my mind  
Like Brigid’s fire.  At once, once, we were one.
Conjoined yet neither one of us a joiner.  
Anointed under the votive stars violently  
Innocent your heart, a spike, my heart  

A rail.  Our love was charmed, our love was time,  
Balm.  To what end this new beginning?

You were my gift,
Soft, sweetness, little one,
Eyes of moon and ocean
Hills of creation, of shadow
And bread.  In your nakedness
I fled the earth and bathed
In starlight and dust at the end
Of the forever of the sky.  
In that silence,
Of exploding cosmos and vapour,
I fell, feeling in your smiles the suns
Decay, I felt light beyond
Its barrier, and was decimated
In the gravity of the neutron
Blue of floating eyes in separation.
Your faraway orbs were lost
To me in the frozen dark energy
Of shunted light and the cold 
Vacuum of space.
It was my birthday
And you were set on leaving.
It was my birthday
When I nearly died.

You were my gift,
Soft, sweetness, little one,
Eyes of moon and ocean
Hills of creation, of shadow
And bread.  In your nakedness
I fled the earth and bathed
In starlight and dust at the end
Of the forever of the sky.  
In that silence,
Of exploding cosmos and vapour,
I fell, feeling in your smiles the suns
Decay, I felt light beyond
Its barrier, and was decimated
In the gravity of the neutron
Blue of floating eyes in separation.
Your faraway orbs were lost
To me in the frozen dark energy
Of shunted light and the cold
Vacuum of space.
It was my birthday
And you were set on leaving.
It was my birthday
When I nearly died.

Swallows pirouette,
Wings sparkle wedding with skies,
 .  .  . Wild rice in air.

Blueberry picking was no chore.
When I was too young to do many things
Well and fishing with my father's
Father, I discovered all kinds of stuff
I wasn't good at, like how to read
Ripples, or tackle slippery eels, or even how to clean
Spiny perches.  'Where are the hungry fish?'
Grandfather would spout at me, all the green pools
Were liars and cheats and patience,
Was another one of my shortcomings,
Not only this, my father hoped his trades
On me, but like a conflicted carpenter
I was in love with trees.

This all left me wondering just what
I might do, that is until I plumbed my first
Blueberry.  In the hoary-head of blue things,
Stuff was easy, and ripe for the picking,
Bunching blue-baubles in baskets over-ripened
Of berries.   On special mornings, due southwest
In lazy hills, round my home, — bells  
Were breaking, in quiet sections of the Canton,
Massachusetts woods, and playing by them,
We rounded blue notes, some friends and I,  
Plucked-out tunes to the breeze, on leafy-
Instruments, and pulled our weight, into moil-moisted  
Bushels, (one batch of blue was more than a ton  
Of any other fruit!)  
Toiling, till the sky would peek  
And spill its hue.  Foragers were we, as teaming
Minnows round a polk-a-dot reef, feasting on some great  
Blue-Fin’s roe, brave savages, painted in the glow of ember-
Light, of burnished yellows, and bushy-blanched browns
Drenched by dew and dappled in the stipple
Of sun-brushed fire, all the colours making patterns, even  
Box Turtles knew.   How merry it was we made our labors,
Why it was wicked!  And muggy from the heat of cool  
Indigo stars, we squenched our thirst, in glugs  
Of kisses, each following the greatest by far,  
And one soft day, we did notice the crown
Of a Princess, set on top of each full  
Noble-blooded faery-pearl dropped
As if to commemorate all  
The things that were worth  
Knowing, stuff that was ripe,  
Easy, and rapt
In blue.

Following nectar,
Tiny Gods humming southward,
March of the faeries.

Four crows, black on cloud,
Dark, sordid wings parry and ******—
Murdering white skies.

Smoking from heaven  .  .  .
Lonely clouds float on water,
  .  .  .  Two swans on a pond.

Hazel nuts, brown leaves,
They fly in formation, last reign—
Blue drops, summer sky.

The sea gulls— who fly in wanton
To the horizon, are a spirits
calling, are sea songs falling
To my mind they falter— as I
Have known such cozen to the sun
That falls each day nor do I see
It rising.  My world is weighted,
Under, pass the lining of the quick,
By the mounted cloud which hangs silver
Over the plated night. The owl,
Whose eyes of Janus tails, when wanes
The lids, tied to crescent holey
Whelm of malevolent moon,

Praise over me, with wooly wings,
Is silent as shadow.  I may strut or run
But they do come as the shadows will
With cahooting sun, and the blotting
Bald faced moon, chiaroscuro—
The days feign and heaven pales under
The wake of the luna sea.

       In darkest daylight
I shamble toward the flat horizon
Where the seabirds fly, till their ends,
I take two-faced my faulty comfort
As I see them, falter, falling, yet never
Do they touch the gloaming ground.

Ring-necked doves resting
Coo, build below higher nest—
Red hawks in the eggs.

The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.

Left home, ended alone,
Many travails, trials that cut,
The odyssey of his lashed life,
Took a tremulous toll of atonement,
This lamb whose only consolation,
Being left over at the jeweled altar,
The merciless downing days of droll
And loss, the cruel, blanched turnings
Of uneventful fated choice into ruin,
Never actually knowing his target,
Throwing darts at the sun.

.
From their private jets,
The primal privileged
Spot a spark earthwards,
The glint of the rolling
Out of guillotines.

Guillotines so tall, waiting,
Just for them and they know
It was coming, as they know
They have it coming.

The rabble they so despise,
Yet pander for as they pull
Wool and leave all in cold,
The wretched who someday
Read injustice in the leaves,
The Princes of sham, cloven,
Always bearing woven bags,
Carpet dreams of desperate,
Down trodden, never fearing
To be trampled, till the blade
Is shining in the searing light
Of new day.

For retribution is a fable
The reptilian upper classes
Are cold to see as it strikes,
Their forked tongues,
Eventual as slimy winter
Strangles themselves
In a hollow cave,
Unmarked.

Even the dirt is soiled
With their fame, their
Scaled names, even
Sun will not shine
On the bloodied blots
They have wrought.

Such murderous stiffs,
Who enslaved all warmth
And empathizers in a rug
Fit for a tomb.  And all their
Art as false as they!

The earthy shall rise
And salt their mortal
Wounds, songs will not be sung
For the indifferent masters
Who now pour into streets
Made for severed muck.

The only beauty they left:
Opulent, soppy-red coiffured heads
As they roll on the potholed,
Sooty pavements.

There is no awakening.  Outside the cave
Light shadows in the sun, a blinding
Muck veils desolation in the vein-bled,
Good men, stumps of the naked forests,
And bird song drowned by the droning dead,
Ignoble, this is no country for old men.

In the open, all lie freely, lacquered clean
Sunning social graces, shine pornographic,
Know truth is real yet, embalmed by speakers,
Pages, their flame a cross, churning in a mire,
Our glass cities run time mendaciously silent;
The euphony of the untruths, the bent sign.

In Catatonia words are watered but never
Change, sapped of meaning, seasons fall
By the handy green, the spring leaves, tipped
Off balance scaled to autumns teeming news;
The barren shores, breaks, bless the vacuum
Tubes, and pray a curse, fawn the head lamps.

In the homeless land anxious creatures divide.
The concrete utterance is picked to rubble.
The stones ground into sand and we ringing
In delight, moving mandrake, mobile cadavers,
Orbit to satellite are digging babylon down
In the false hood, ****** by the mortar.

The ruin architects mark, fork millions
Of tongues in tributary, as does a great
River from a stony source.  The sterling
Feed their stock with tainted food, plants
Regenerate the mangled codex twining-tare;
Throws the babe with baptismal waters.

In the soulless land children peak abandoned,
They fall on temple steps by the golden mean.
We pattern the sky in the bold fabric of pity
And mercy but the strands fade out running;
Our cruel and only kind would rend the stars,
Would fallow Elysium, bleed gold to the vein.

How did we end mortal under the divining
Sun?  Down base our provident ways watching?
We wave in fealty to the dominion of spins
And shadow, gussied Gods so proudly made,
Desolate, vain, air escaping to whisper;
We are sailing from Byzantium.

He Said:

Climb aboard,
Lift yourself into dream,
I will only take you,
You must surrender,
If the sky should fade
Or the heavens fall,
Hold on—
Never doubt I may love
You.


She Said:

Hold me,
Look into my eyes
Forever and only say what I,
Already feel, already know,
I will, will happiness,
I shall keep tenderness,
In a box of joinings
And lavender,
The mystic blue
Of earth and sky
Is in my hand,
Overreaching.

Imagine Eden, real,
No heartless ****-heads breathing,
World without right wings.

Birds painting the air,
Early light in the garden,
Waking with new sun.

Love, looked at itself,
Came upon nubile innocents,
Threw down with jaded sun,
Made its own bed in the open,
Earth rained for a thousand days,
Evolution birthing in the flood,
Meteors could not wait to fall,
Comets not wait to strike,
Oceans drowned in salt,
Evaporated whilst the whole wide
Swirl, turned and glazed upon
An arc of celestial remnants.

( Sonnet )*

We walked along the grainy ocean,
Our way, smooth as a path to nowhere
And through a dance of reeds your hair,
Steeped with marshes of wings and air,
Red, mellow as fire from the fallen sun,
Your flowered dress was the first spring
Ever germinating and blue crystal waters
Sprung, of coastal pools, Knockanare wells
And I was flung, as a windy clutch of seeds
Dreaming, your voice, bloomy, song wafted,
Rousing, as remembrance in fragrances —
And the moony, blinking stars soon peopled
Our woe-less eyes, full of sleep and vision
And all the stones held us deep as sarsen.

Bull frog in fish pond—
Loud, one day I heard last croak,
Raccoon washing hands.

I have seen couples,
So far from each—
Other, on a platform,
Waiting for the next train,
Never touching, yet how
They ****** their mobile
Devices, how softly, sweet,
Without guile nor agenda
They swipe the glass—
As it swoons back in return
With blue lights and alerts,
So dearly needed and answers,
In way words for the machines
Of flesh and the ghost within,
With such personal aplomb
In real notifications of text
And instant message.

The lone stark bugle cry—
Horn of the great mountain elk,
Ripples down cold through morning
Dusted wood as the mushrooming dews        
Drop into dearly waded pools under
Fawning toes of forage and cool
Evergreen.

.
It would not stop, the drop dripping
Faulty well and I was cornered in
Your eyes, when your love came down.
The gentle rain was a deceiving
Flood.  The softness in your voice
Was dim light bent, on my banishment.

I began to notice the kind indifference,
The doldrum swale, when your love
Came down, was like you were employed
Only— half trying to get along
With me.  My own dulcet music
Crashed in two, she wails a shamed—

Diaphany and darkness from the corner
Room began to grow, when your love
Came down.  The light that moved so dear,
Became a precious ration, it was
A black starvation and I began
To die from tasteless food, sad music,

Fading sun, no expectations—
And laughter meant for others.  I bled
For years on open wounds and I—
Could hear the wind that rails at ones tomb,
When your love came down.

She left him at night,
Eyes moving away and hearts,
Falling like Perseids.