still smell like the incense of those rooms.
Come back and I will sing for you and show you I am not surprised by death.
A ghost is made when someone dies and feels restless.
She is living in the park with a guitar.
She is one of the critics who most believes.
The city is full of verbs and selfish people.
A quiet class of city dwellers siphoning all the money.
Hovering above their habitual clinics, I saw the sickness and paranoia,
the waves of fatherly protectiveness,
the cold intelligence animating it all.
And I fell.
Under the Midnight Tree
The unthinkable happens.
And then what? then what do you think?
If the monks meant it
at our hospice
we will meditate.
Consciousness has become big business –
and our expectations were unreasonably high.
A small moment on starbird road:
You kissed my forehead
and I saw things differently.
What should I say to her now?
She is just a stranger.
The music is painful, intentional.
We get angry and try to reject the photographer.
She killed a morning with her shattered glass,
her essay smelling of cigarettes.
We didn’t know how impatient
it all could be.
Sleeping in the cold, making fiction with our eyes.
Everything in place
as we are moved.
Weird Shrine
We don’t know the names of the streets.
We bike down.
We bike down.
Zero family members are travelling with me.
I bike down.
Sleep-deprived-like, ferry wind & ice cream
if you ask.
We took it all seriously & personally.
We took a lot of pills.
We killed a lot of mothers
in our dreams
& we hid a lot of little boys in baskets.
We are not like my heaven.
& we are biking down.
A horned deer-child, bird-like, gnawing the dictionary binding.
Your myriad forms.
Your breath smells like bananas,
but you are not a baby.
Here we are again, in the presence of a living saint.
What, no questions to ask?
No dances, then?
No heaven?
The Mist Magicians
Dear, I am a young man.
Dear, absent-mindedly I …
Take my lives, take these lines.
Dear, residents will know how inconvenient …
Dear, remember the night bus, how we fell in & out of caffeine?
Jingling with the music you purchased from the clouds.
An astronaut you called your father.
How nonsense always made sense.
That scholar of fairy tales.
We were nodding-reading. swimming-fucking. & lying-believing.
How simple it was until we had to finally forget ourselves.
Right down to what we were drinking & wearing.
My lips peeling. I had no feelings.
Disentangling, dear, & so many more people to befriend …
Will You Write Another Poem Called Meow
Where will I put this list?
I can love another face once I learn how.
These are my remedies; these are my addictions.
Barely doing my job.
You are breezing through, grabbing bread,
hemming a dress & sucking a lemon:
‘I need your chequebook & your clothes.’
Words to utter as I compose heaven: ‘damn you, thank you.’
One January I walked in the woods at night.
In a clearing, I saw an owl.
After that, I became honest.
Haven’t had a cold or a headache since.
When your eyes meet mine
don’t forget the vulnerability of that open space.
Friendships (Unlikely)
I wrote this dream to address the problem.
The problem was my dreams.
I am responsible for the fantasy –
just
