If Only

Time were a malleable element
like iron and if only time could
be crafted into those signposts
to which travel introduces us —

monuments, alien languages,
cars speeding the wrong way,
wrong way people and shops,
xenophobia in a smile at
the wrong moment, coffee
and wine when all food fails —

if only the creeping past
could be intercepted, advised
that the correct path was just
ten meters away from where
all hell was unfolding — if

only time was an approachable
friend or stranger on the morning
bus leaving soon — just a few
words, a few hints — nothing much,

just a moment to apologize
with a sword sentence.

No Absolution

“Nothing the writer can do

is ever enough.”
                — Joy Williams

No forgiveness, nor clarity
and in the storm, no umbrella,
just rain falling on September grass,
homeless worms and
the dregs of hot summer rooms
that accept cool evenings as
lovers whose shadows squirm
and sigh, wind new arrived from
the west.  No relationships
ever enough, no stout oak growing
from seeds sown so sympathetically,
so close to the heart, the sinews of
every word spoken in the cafe
by the river, in the evening, shortly
after Chardonnay  and protestations
of eternal love.  No way forward,
no escape from the page, its
permanence, its odour and texture
against the tongue of words
which embraces the moment just
five steps from that terrible reality,   
the invasion of an alien mind.

Words

Extracted from the cacophony
very early in life then
reinserted — those sharp needles
of assertion and assumption
of the topography of
being  human.

A chatter like traffic on I75
dissecting the country of
human relationships
and reinventing their
interactions — slow traffic
at Love — a rolled-over affair
strangled in a tangle of
verbs and pronouns
and stories stretching beyond
the reality of reason.

Though — if you can say it —
it must be real.

How The Immigrant

How language is
this ship cruising through
waves and how even
a fire hydrant means

something and how

the disembarkation point
becomes a confusion of
symbols that are not
processed into words

and how the streets run
counter clockwise  to
meaning and how
the air strokes clouds
differently

as though the particles
which anchor what we
are and how we are
become nothing more
than a light mist

fog and how we cling
to the life raft of past

blind.