The Blue Book

Yours Sincerely

There’s an old story
about a thrush and a garden
and a small boy who found a bone
beneath volcanic rock in the rose bushes.
I don’t think I’ve told you all of it,
but I whispered the moral once
as you swirled yourself
in the toughness of dreams
and all the things we keep
so that we don’t collapse
into the embarrassing capture
of happiness.

Rather burned than held prisoner,
with an inch of toilet paper
on which we scribble undying love
for anyone who can decipher
the soiled hieroglyphs like wet flowers
stuck to your shoulder
that later you pick at.

I think of wood,
of my bones as wood
beneath the great lakes,
gradually compressed into fragrant energy,
something slow and put here a long time ago
with the deciduous knowledge of water,
wandering in an almost psychotic way,
lost in the constant orgasm of bees
who dance their own directions
to honeycomb land, where flowers
sleep in the sky without dying,
and a Scorpio moon drives us
to mad and painful joy,
to all we’ve been before,
and before before,
before there was an out there out there,
before the stars exploded
and light felt heavy.

The monsters roam
between fear and love
and perfect is a mere myth,
but myth is what I choose to live by:
what is heavy is light,
what is dark weighs nothing
and she plays with it,
that girl I saw once,
skipping through shards
of multi-coloured sun streaming
through an old church window,
giggling at the prayers
of serious men and women,
searching for the great lake
beneath which I lie.

Waiting, breathing,
becoming another dream,
swollen and light and simple,
love.

TRACE

A Mythology of Hope

Frames for knowledge

A personal link