Your fingers urgently
trace haiku into my skin;
soft scars that disappear.
Untranslatable,

but meaning everything.
Your poetry is the same;
the words peel from the page,
filling the constant deep of iris.

Each sentence expanding space;
We hold that darkness in our throats.
As far as I can tell; stars, birds, strangers, trains
are to-- secretive, insecure.

You might recall, that
in your happiest moments
you felt feather-like, a fatherless breeze.
Your mind-- word-free

Wordless as anything that can soar through air.


More fitting perhaps;
the ink were splashed onto the page
Spattered; a black star venting its anger.
A black clenched fist imploding in on itself.

A supernova light years wide but utterly hidden;
spilled glitter on a classroom table.
A black widow crushed between a book slammed shut,
and a butterfly left to colour the air.

The whole of your experience
expressed with this solitary un-haiku;
this single blow to the page, A stained symbol;
as much as a star pinned carelessly to night.
The page closing in on the poem that wants to explode.


A touch sensitive piano under a hole in the ceiling;
rain battering the keys, a disconcerting concerto
without strings. The rain blossoms into fingers;
A mothers fingers testing a child's bathwater.

They fall upon the keys
like pearls from
a snapped
necklace....

She sits like a cloud in its right place,
Like a marionette, voiceless
as though it took a puppeteer for each finger.
Like children stepping on dead land-mines.

For those moments she is
the voice that commands rain across fields;
A haunt of soldiers charging into translucent shells
Her heart like a machine gun silently rattling.


A puppeteer after-all; of those slender bones
and silver tendons inside.
Keys like ivory soldiers unpainted in a tin box.
The gloss black half wing lifted, in semi flight.

A hundred faces watching her
under that solitary spotlight in the ceiling;
They fell away, becoming, if anything-
a storm-cloud of apprehensive music-

fine dust motes of silence illuminated
by the light of an explosion
like carnival ticker tape; until she stood;
as though suddenly tugged from above;

closed the lid with care.
A taxi door slamming softly in the rain.
She walked away, like a song unfinished
to all but its composer.

The audience began to chatter, and cough,
rustle their coats and stretch, but really;
they were feeling their way back into the world,
having experienced a slice of death.

Each note hung
like a woman too young
to position a piano stool
under a rope.

At night, she taps her fingers
on my wrists as she sleeps.
The two of us, naked as piano keys
(slender as the black ones)

I lie awake in the dark listening to her songs
with my mind free of words, of its cages;
Except for the ones I trace on her skin-
beach, hourglass, oblivion.

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