To An Unknown Lover

When your hand bleeds
I lap glass from your veins
Crunched desires & loneliness
Squealing into the night's void
Tremours from a broken eye
Your darkness a silent reproach
Your beastie rings
As they break in flames
From within, beg but don't stoop
Rags everywhere, threads
A midnight crossroads without lights
Tweak my heart, chop it
As I knock, knock & knock
on a ramshackled shed
With featherless hens inside
Half furious, half compassionate
See the waste, the damage
One, second, third, another
Their wounds gaping out round
As they gather here
Souls not burnt out yet
On a string hanging from a secret purpose
As they stare and pretend
They don't, the horror, the horror!
Of dumped lives
Masked in candy wrappings
In a park promenade
Behind their invisible tears
Lurking, praying, sighing
Endless hours, patiently wilting away

I have seen you, heard you, smelt you
Made for the nearest shop
To get some Christmas dynamite
To blow myself up
To erase the panoptical boom of hope
From my memory
Ambition of logs laid off
At a ghost town station
Pointers pointing nowhere
But at each other
Emptiness salted by good intentions
For you wanted a saviour
But harnessed a devil in a space shuttle
A slow taster of blood
Languid enchanter of glasses ringing in ears

Ocean Whispers Between Us

I
I may need a biometric passport
Fly on the wind instead of blown seeds
For this bait is too strong for a sperm whale
My little burning star, a palm of simmering rain

But when reality replaces ideality
And Zeus melts lamely in the afternoon sky
A tearful woman sits waiting for a horoscope
Days fall from a rope strung between her planets

I am a word arriving from nowhere
When your desire has pitched up a tent
My ears love, my eyes eat my fingers
Their limbs flow in the shadow of birds' wings

Are we a sentence in timeless duration
Squeezed out of transient bubbles at night?
Water looking for its boiling point in armpits
Dry land hosting elk games in the freezing morning?

I cannot get enough of your words
And wish all your poems were endless
Bolting of thunder, lashing of the wind
Touching of softened fields of sweet lava

The soul has had its way into a cellar
We are roasting a rat, drinking humidity
Dark sensors, blind tongues, tied thoughts
plot in a holiday resort after the fall-out

Here is your coal to burn, old, black and hard
Here love squirms under the whips of pride
Fear with scissors lock pants in a tub
I wash you, you wash me in the ocean between us

II
We are the blue blazing in northern steel
Architects munching apple flesh at gates
A thin glass line purchasing a ticket
The developing history of nuts in levitation

I killed a rabbit for you, tore off a piece of field
Sharpened knives for my whirlpools told me
There was a splitting leaf releasing insects
Lunch after lunch building a housing estate

A feast on top of a TV tower, unlimited views
Occluded systems rasp painted breath
Taken hostage among swallows at conference
Moving south with bushels of snowflakes

Premature derision, the north pole between us
Torn planes on the wings of torn calendars
Forty years after, bread of ashes, beds of ruins
Sharpening of teeth in the fenced off moonlight

I have cooked you, spiced and spattered with thyme
You have drilled a nest in me, stuffed with void
Round after round smudges bloodstains on a tie
A tear lurks in the grace of an electric chair

Vast arctic reserves, tatters of light
Me a melon nailed to the straits of a post box
You a herd of moose conjuring up grass
Clouds, islands of blue, orders of red, stiles

We are not desperate sadists in graves
I'm letting you bite off my minerals on a ship
You touch me with rakes plugged in essence
Let's be more cruel, my grey, it brings us closer!

III
You are an apple at a winter fair
Lucky men licking stories off birch bark
Tied in a boulder
Lined by smoke from a ship's funnel
Jaws spread from Dawn to Dusk

A furnace closed to balance off
A 24 hour off licence
Attempts to abduct a flower garden
Pass the ball to spectators
Knitting dust

Waiting for a mayor's head
Spitting, chewing, playing ice-hockey
The land of high motors
Ringing of infinity
Achieving of circling cakes

Your little whisper in the moonlight's grace
Don't leave me alone at home!
For I will lock you out
Or hang myself on your golden hair
As you sing buckets of loving passion