each and every seventh day.

The dirt from the road is riled 

by the afternoon breeze, and

I know you’re not far off.

The drought drifts in and wraps it’s

arms around everything within reach; burning

through roots as if soil was transparent.

I pray for water, a necessary commodity

from here to the Sahara-where the 

sky is a maternal blue, knowingly scorched 

by the sinking sun.

A drought is on it’s way 

each and every seventh day.

Doors click or slam shut behind,
seats aligned – knees bind.

The lines hiss under your feet,
heart beat – dampened palm.

Disembark at twenty two,
stranger’s shoe – clipped and clopped.

From the entrance to the wet side
bodies and towels collide; you slide into a
pool full of wide expectant eyes.

Sixty winters in the forefront of my mind,
limited beats in a half heart-
i’ve opened it up to the halcyon notes of your
bird song.

Sixty winters in the forefront of my mind,
in the white of my eye-
the rebirth of aborted ideas that
you’d closed in an airlock.

One winter in the forefront of my mind,
seventy nine spent alone.
Nothing had changed,
the fault was all my own.

A man with answers atop an iron chest,
whose thoughts are locked away like precious art
or valuable antiquities. Hidden from view.

I need to ask him why i hold those i love to ransoms
they’ll never meet, and why my angles are adrift when
i walk past clean cut glass.

A man with the world walking past him,
not acknowledging his hidden brilliance; his
ability to hold figures.

I need to ask him why i ache when awake,
why i pedal for miles in any direction,
why i can’t centre myself with the universe,
and add the reasons to a growing collection.

Effervescing between the clean green grass and the
ocean sky, my eyes crossed your lengths and your
breadths with no effort at all.

No need for the obvious or the ordinary,
the words required have been said by the work
done with our hands.

Finally my mind is resting.
Gently ticking to a timetable set by no-one else;
fear nowhere to be seen.

We’re going against the grain again.

We all stand on the shoreline from time to time;
ships sailing along the horizon, boats heading inland
and home.

We all listen to the waves folding inward;
with no time to spare, heads hide from the glare
of the arching sun.

We are all bound by unstoppable time;
as day folds into night, you’ll find the sky
still burns brightly.

thoughts are dancing again, through my mind; i know
you are somewhere amongst the lights and the
bending branches of wind stricken trees.

loose limbed in a half slumber, exhausted from life long compression;
waiting for the decompression of deep sleep and your pale, soft skin against
my middle.

Hardened faces march towards the effervescent, unenlightened
lights; the pits and mines resolutely holt. The foundations of power
buckle under the weight of a hundred bruised and blacken faced
sons.

The sound of crystal shards prance into the ears of the upstanding,
the arrestingly corrupted. The dead toes have bled out and supple leather has
ripped; a resolution for a century founded on feet.

Womb now abandoned upon a bed
in a back room. Peril is lost in the lucidity of
life, and the sound of sweat seeping into the soul.

Loose and lost, and the act that besmirched her good name replaying
as if it were some endless record;
constant and steady, scorched and starched
into the skin of the next ten tender generations.

It has become the ordinary.
The end of the pleasure principle.