my heart is untidy

Damn winter. Snow: curds of my dysphoria. 
Always home, despair, 
alighting from a poultice sky
like a migrating bird with its entourage of woe.

You say I do not love you; that my heart is too untidy;
that the life in my kiss is like inhaling a knife; that I am 
cold as vanity. You say 

I have fear: my touch a thud of enemy.

Yes, I have fear like a colossus,
yet my world is too small
like a drawstring bag,
its neck strangle-tight
that it cannot breathe.

I have sadness for all this. Sadness
such that even the trees look away
and the cats scatter
opening up to the flume of spring while 

I remain hunched in the resolve of an interminable winter.


DISCONNECTED #28

Tearing at the mirror, my hands unrequited
raw as a dismal death jutted into an empty room. 

Heart, a violent strawberry light always present 
in the background of history's lamentable photographs

like a bloody sunburst,
like a recurring autopsy.

In the foreground father declines
the offer of a supporting role.

Mother smiles above the bank-bound fish of her heart.

They are now a fascinating silence -
the way a corpse pulls the eyes

even in the horror of its deliquescence.


DISCONNECTED #31

The daylight is unspeakable, asphyxiated 
by the low cloud. Gulls hang 
like white flags wooing the blue armistice of sky. 

Down below we are managing our suicides, 
holding our dead like small warm stones.

The living love as if promise were a ligature,
a patch of loud unable to grieve.

Old photographs lie face to face in the thin dust; 
their fucking less than poetic.

Spring verges: a hollow optimism of furled petals.


DISCONNECTED #33

Despair, my tattered dogma.
What prescription elected you?
as the rooting of tortuous decibels
in the grotesque opera of my belly;
its aria the ghost of a stillborn.

It is a slum in there anyway:
a dry room
of pitted walls that collect the noise
and blood that refuses to behave.
It all has a passion for collapse.

No wonder I have affection for the bone.


DISCONNECTED #34

I have spent sunrises like gold coins, yet
pushed dreams like pennies in an arcade machine
on afternoons all ghosts and foolish poetry.

I have lain on the dreadful bed of yesterday,
my eyes soggy with wakefulness
wishing memory all warm and lullaby-stuffed.

I trace the lament of the neglected womb;
an insect crawling free from fluid amber
into the terrible headlines of living.

The world all wars and mistakes and fine art;
all greed and sunshine; all painted wings
and twisted men with blood on their lips.


DISCONNECTED #35

I like my skin - its mild caramel in winter;
a summer tint that resists a cold mistake.
It speaks with the tongue of the wilderness
and does not hide from the ruins. The alarm
is that there will be too much to hate: a time
when my eyes might collapse like new mourners
at the first realisation of the graveside.