Cut Down

I carve your name
under the shelter
of trees
we used
to climb

your grip always
stronger than mine
until the day you
could not stop
staring at sunlight

so brilliant I feel it still
under misty breath
of winter

will anyone else
climb these trees
see your name

or will you be
cut down
for new homes
and new lives

Shift

I plant
pumpkin seeds

not far from
where we once
lounged

tracing wishes
in the outlines
of shifting clouds

I look over
at the chair
you refused
to get rid of

splintered wood
peeling paint

about to ask
how we know
anything will come

of what
we planted

Dragonfly Gives a Masterclass on Positive Thinking

Dragonfly says 
i was fat larvae pondlife
greedy turdbelly bug-eye. 
But you never know 
what life is in store
onetime dreamlift me 
out of wet into
skyfly beam 
gleammm
       rrrrrrr
ainbow
I wingshh  ape  flut t
       t ter…
Dragonfly says
every fat 
pondlife bitch
has a dragon 
in her just 
wing  
it

Location.Location.Location.
using /// what3words

On the sofa, I dream.sensible.swans.
In the kitchen, Brian.unloads.shopping.
My side of the bed is a hazy.traffic.salon.  
Brian’s side is a lunging,humid.swordfish.

On the loo, I redouble.cracking.depravity.
Next door purifies.their songbirds.park.
Glastonbury folk have past-life flashbacks.
profess.knowledge. The Westminster crew
fence.garage are.unable. while the nation.
vibrates. feeling.

Écore

I brought my daughter to the coast
to set our feet as close to water
as we could without losing
shoes to soft shore. I had her
smell the air, listen for tide’s lap.
I told her these things haven’t changed
since I was a child, only our distance
from the shrimp boats
trawling the horizon has.

Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes;
they went directly to my hands

—Francesca Woodman, 1976

Palms flat against the old house’s wall,
it does not matter what you are, hidden
under tears of curled wallpaper—all hair

and skin and bone and fears of
a life you might not have time to live.
This house, its cracked plaster and bare

plank floor, has its own story to tell through
you, through what only your eyes
notice, the light your lens traps.

Light, dark, straight lines, open angles,
curves we all know are there, just
out of view: these build the chord

you strike. Resolved or not, it all
means, more than you might intend,
even more than the house’s ghosts deserve.

Body Rota

I am seeking the sleeper cells carried

in our very bodies, revelation

of matrilineal inheritance

a perception  /  not  /  separated from

the integration of being           :            it is

alleviate being           :            to clarify

to amputate conclusion           :            intervene

intervention can           :            pose security

a question: Can a poem escape           :            being? 

after all, a reduction can suggest 

intimacy           :            Does the revision do 

the same? the polemic is not always

: synonymous with distance : should or does

(imagine)                       (imagine)             (being) (being)

When the nurse
removed the drain
from my thorax,
the half-inch-thick
rubber tube
slid out the way
a dagger would
sink in, quietly,
starved of drama
or even pain.
But the second one
the surgeon himself
removed after a
month or two,
after the chemo,
and the sleepless
nights and opioid-
induced nightmares
as I slept sitting up
on a chair, the living-
room a cozy ER
managed by my wife,
pale with fear,
thin with energy,
lost but for this job,
expecting me not to
wake one morning.
That drain unraveled
in me inch-by-inch
like a garter snake,
slowly uncoiling
like the DNA
that failed me and
brought this plague
upon me and my
nurses, doctors, wife,
and child. Then the tube
was out, its length thin
and gleaming. The
surgeon patted me
on the shoulder,
told me it’s ok.

Here’s something.
Go back
to your worst day
and bathe in it.

The water
rises,
lifting all boats.
Call it just swell.

Sit in it.
The boat
or the water?
Possibly both.

Or neither.
The thought,
the memory,
boat and water

all. I try
not to
be overwhelmed
by metaphors,

or bath toys.
Even
red, splintered decks.
But here they come.

And I’m left
sitting
among words and
water and wood,

on advice.
Believe that?!
Feeling something
of what I felt

back then, back
when I
was just a kid
who hadn’t drowned.

At night as
I reach for the shade,
my ghostly reflection
glares at me
from the window.

With skin drawn taut
over protruding cheekbones
and sunken eyes
framed in black,
it frightens me.

I pull down the shade.