Selected Poems (2020)

A list of publications, including downloadable PDF copies, is available here.

Prospect

You tore me open
with only your eyes
shooting a glance like fire
through that dim, warm beer light,
pupils tracing bare chest,
            taken downstairs
like a hand down a thigh
slipping away and coming
into humid night;

    and we’re

            always downstairs
for some deep grey tension,
or out amongst the cigarette smoke
silver and sodium light
and mosquito cameras with
their knowing scarlet wink
turning the tired ones stiff,
while upstairs is
out of order or
out of bounds or we’re stumbling
out of some Whitman dream
into a wine-soaked boulevard,
walking crooked back
to a knotted sleep
alone or with you or without you
or with myself, at the very least.
I’ll look for you,
and your lead-hot eyes,
in a dream we won’t remember –
fingers probing at my ribs,
a cloth between our teeth
you seemed like black velvet
at dusk, heavy
with breath-warmth and softness
that curls around my lips
and slips crimson behind
my ear;

     and we’re

            always yearning
for some blue-light back-hand gesture,
or a snow white-flagged sailor, seeing
the hairs of my arms
rising and falling
with the curtain of your breath
as I move to match it,
while the moment
turns golden under
cheap bulbs flickering like
eyelashes from some Cocteau close-up,
silver-horse-boy-Greek-god portrait
moving from white wash
to tangled dream
of me or of you or without any
idea of love to sleep with softly.

Spirit
            to C.W.

You pressed your palms
against the small of my back –
eyes aligned with mine
in the red lack of light,

a spirit from
nowhere, drunk ghost for new year
too close to my sweat
in the blue flood of light.

Then gone like mist,
slipped silver from my fingers,
you left me to walk
from the rising pink light,

to stumble to
clear spirits and darker rooms,
too far from myself
under buzzing black light.

What Remains
          to A. 

I look over what remains -
That heather-brown t-shirt,
a small felted owl,
and a prolonged sense of absence.
I have felt your vibrations through time,
unreal confessions
that hold my hands to account, just
as you once held me.

Yet now you hold yourself in dreams -
dreams of weeping into a tomato plant,
Of bleaching your hair in the sun
With that familiar knot in your gut,
or wondering
how the line of your hands
arced its way through a tender night sky
with such subtle beauty.