Suffering on Saturday

Dear Jane,

do you think anyone cares?
August unravels,
implodes and bursts
in an explosion of time seeds -

potential.  And  I appreciate
where light lives, when the sonic
pirates board my ears, sail
straight into that song
I haven't heard since I was six -
a familiar of outliers
at the extreme limits of harmonics.

Because my body sings the jazz
of windows and doors.  Of pieces
cut like rogue bands from a festival
dedicated to corporeal ditties -
frailty, vision, memory, pain.

Cancer.

I have my bucket list,
my must do list, my make plans list,
my never give up list,
my I will list of impossible
feats.  I have what I wake up with
each morning - my will
to live dream list.

And everything is entangled
into the next hospital visit,
the doctor,
the chemo appointment,
the sleepless night,
the unending pain,
the reality my body
will fail my mind's vision.

So What


(written while listening to
Miles Davis' 'So What')

the window trills
at midnight the window
a breeze
rubber-stamped
October the window
where piers
are lit
and the river is
onyx fur
and below each light
trumpets
a tint the window
yells hard
bass sidewalks
and posts piano-rolled
into a staggered
one o'clock
walk the window opens
a mouth for
fretless cigarette smoke
clouds the window
unfettered dissolves into one unsustainable chord

A View From Horizon and Highway


He dreamed through
the winter wheat harvest
and christened himself
'Wild Fire'; dressed
in the red ochres of
a wounded and fleeing sun.

They tagged him as
'Victim six of the brawl
behind harbour warehouse
twenty'; and firmly
negotiated his three day
ash journey home.

Addiction

This miracle — water into wine,

then wine into blood —

this metamorphosis.

Or has the imagination

merely been well-fertilized

with Sunday dinners

and Sunday school. A want

of answers to questions

we only ask when

it is dark and the sparrows,

all fallen from the eaves,

are as silent as absence.

And the hole gnawed through

the chain-link fence

enclosing all that we dread

suddenly gains a voice.

We are asked to change,

we are asked to alter —

we who are less than

mortal flesh — we who

are undisciplined scree

tumbled somewhere in

the mountains by Eden —

we who have been

abandoned in a rain

which falls like wine

and smells like blood.