Nocturnes

And again the habit of old showers
Draws one here to the grave,
Also the touch of sprinkling leaves.
A faint tune resounds down the walk of memory,
As the river gurgles
Of a circular dream, still wet from last night.

Away they float towards a common cause,
On a sheet of icy water laden with the promise of time,
With a mirror of musing clouds for company,
Sharing their first kiss and their last dance.
In murky yellows and rushing reds they spin on,
Carrying with them a trembling word from me.

Elated skies open up in further joy.
Waxing gibbous, that ancient nocturnal lover,
Raises her face, ever betrothed to her beloved earth.
If only I could witness their capricious journey,
Or fade, away, into the drowning ocean,
And sleep, sleep, my weary head upon your thirsty shores.

The grand orchestra of Nature plays on,
And I wonder how one can speak of love.
One oft finds the word too vast, too feeble,
Like a beaded thread under a mountain.
To even have lived amidst this music,
Is to have loved and died in one eternal moment.

Back home,
Chopin's nocturnes are played as if in final farewell.
And the abiding thunder in my mind
Pursues as if in a trance, its tender melody.
If one could choose a perfect moment to walk out of life,
This night would be the flower I'd pick.

Promises

Dignity is uncertain. Belief, even more so.
Hope lies floating on the sidewalk,
Whilst you ink another confession
Across the restless walls of your mind.

You are trapped inside and out,
Complicit in a habit you wish would die.
The threat of dawn is a distant knock,
This deep night is hardly diminished by streetlamps.

Faint voices from fading mirrors
Alludes to a new clarity through tears.
The hush that follows a passing car,
Has come a long way from home.

Stare, stare for too long at any word you wrote,
And it doesn't feel yours anymore.
Only a vague incomprehension remains,
And the anguish of a ticking clock.

Ember

The air is pungent, like the bite of a berry,
Frosted, thick with the dark of shuffling murmurs.
A hollow shadow follows from memory's cove,
Betraying the nebulous doors of time.

I ask for a surveying kindness,
To yield and lay upon the riverbed.
Forbearance is a mighty forest in spite of the moon,
Even the night must lose her way sometimes.

Oh to forget and be forgotten,
If only for a moment, to sit and to perish.
To dance and fall off the edge like an ashen fruit,
Or to pick up an arrow and shoot.

Oil and fumes and tide and wine,
All rise above the lidded skies in proof
Of violent sorrows and hours upon the earth.
Hence this too shall be a passing eclipse.

So an eager leash of prayer flags as tether,
Into this ocean of despite I plunge.
Kicking against the swell of darkness and death,
With a single name to the embers of my heart.

Because water is too small to tame my fire,
Because silence runs deep and my love, deeper still,
Because a poem of love needs no approval,
Because my song for you knows no ending.

Library

Sitting by the framed music of her window,
The church bells knell the evening lights.
Just as flocking wings gather in a litany,
We ferry our drooping shoulders home.

The throat is parched with the dust of time,
And the gaze returns from the inward mockery.
Far ahead glazed the sempiternal dance of the wine-drunk tide,
Mimicking the pale fires of our battering hearts.

Scratch the bottom of language,
And the flood runs out of water.
The walls breathe and shift in silence,
Blindly clock the noise, softly hold the voice.

They who dwell beyond the hour of sleep,
Of whose feather, a lightness sought,
Of whose youth, a sweetness fraught,
Buries a longing in your homeless soul.

An intruder upon this ancient covenant,
I lower my eyes to the prevailing sanity.
The insouciance involved is a pretence,
Must I continue or sigh?