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A Dream

In dreams silent secret and unafraid I steal away to find you I’ve divined Your wish to see me I steal away to find You in a forest digging with a spade I touch your shoulder feeling my heart race To think how glad you’ll be but slowly quite Slowly you turn blindly to me…

Lily

Dragonflower. Ice-flame fontanelle plume Of the Virgin — The spine coarsening on upwards The leaves centipede and sinister For swarming up the body For stiffening out the gorged soul Ribs Fish and perfunctory To lift the flared cheekbones, the mouthings Of the hydra-face. Core-abstract Shameless and craving Of cunt-flesh — The splitting grin and the…

Sally

Sally, I was happy with you. Yet a dirty cafeteria in a railway station — In the hour before dawn over a formica table Confetti’ed with cigarette ash and coffee stains — Was all we ever knew of a home together. “Give me a child and let me go”: “Give me a child and let…

Holding A Raccon’s Jaw

Snow melting when I left you, and I took This fragile jaw we’d found in melting snow Two springs before I left, beside a brook Where raccoons washed their hands. And this, I know, Is that raccoon we’d watched for every day. Though at the time her wild human hand Had gestured inexplicably, I say…

A Dove

Snaps its twig-tether — mounts — Free Dream-yanked up into vacuum Wings snickering. Another, in a shatter, hurls dodging away up. They career through tree-mazes Nearly uncontrollable love-weights. And now Temple-dancers, possessed, and steered By solemn powers Through insane stately convulsions. Porpoises Of dove-lust and blood-splendour With arcs And plungings, and spray-slow explosions. Now violently…

Granny Tree in the Sky

Grandmother is all bleak and bare While the alien whom I do not know Fattens golden on the cliffedge. Yet although our bones rot more rotten than we know Or than we care to know; Although we find God’s throne but not God; And although we are all in our blueblack way Bleaker and barer…

Mostly Departures

for L. I can almost see the prairie where you are— the flowering grasses and the cones of white blossoms on the horse chestnut trees. The horizon calms you after months of cities. I imagine your eyes seek that line as if you had cast it out over water. A few nights ago, I saw…

The Dudley Murders

Strangled women rot in cellars near Dudley Station, ghost after ghost complaining. Guilt of flesh sours me, there are no clues. Terror drools in rags from jagged mouths of busted windows as I stroll past to visit a friend, the last white dude on the block. I ought to scream for the dead who can’t…