40

(Silvia, Hanging Bank, 15th of May, 2020)

For now, you are denied 

the world

The sun rises, indifferent

Useless gold

poured

Over biblical pestilence.

In nature’s lab experiment

Freedom has a negative valence

You negotiate the cage

Gage

How long you can stand still

Unused 20-pound bills

In your pocket

You lust for freedom

Boil over

Like milk forgotten on a hot stove

Read out loud from the Book of Sleep

Fingertips trace a secret architecture

under-skin tensegrity

This spring is a gilded lady

Bone-sick

The streets are empty

It feels like you fell into a dream

A child again

Whacking at hawthorn with sticks

Scouring the black forest underbelly

Where pine-needle snow

settles in soft dunes

and firs with ghost limbs

are allowed nothing but verticality.

Crowded church spires

aspire

to new life, but only at the edges,

where light bleaches the dirt road. 

You tear up the spine of a pine-bud 

And crush it in your mouth

Inside you too is a living forest
The shape of your mind just never made sense

on its own.

Truth

(Silvia, Hanging Bank, Sunday the 17th of May, 2020) 

When we smashed the inkwell of truth

We mapped-out the vast realms of 

The Kingdom of Things That Will Never Be

Here Be Dragons  
Retreat
Save some dignity.

We hid the map in Plato’s cave

Eros granted you parrhesia,

Pinned my tongue firm to the wall.

His hungry dogs stalked

the shallows

Grew weary of their own bark

Too tame

To go

for the kill

Gentle beast – cried Psyche

If I caught up with you at the end of time

On a dustbowl red Earth – when we have long forgotten

How to breathe

If caught you 

and shone candlelight into your pale eyes

Would you lie still?

In the aftermath of truth,

I hang loose, inert

A strip of silver nitrate

Full-up on light

Sobriety seems as irreversible as

Blots of dark ink on the old pine

Of a child’s bedroom chest

Time’s cycles

launder on repeat

Weaken the dye.

Every poem

Not written

Is another

lie.