Dreamlessness

I would like to write you a poem

Yet they tell me it is not the season for such things

My lips hesitate and withhold a thousand promises

“Come back to our country”

But who knows now of what country I speak?

Dreamlessness, planning not to be hungry

and never being satisfied.

I am restless and yet can only be paralysed

Whilst I lean against your soft unspoken skin

and look for the address that I have somehow lost

The house where we used to evade the thought of

time.

Anonymous Elegy

Who is Carl Blakey?

I sit alone on a wooden bench
outdoors and let the sun seep
under the skin of my question

Who was he and who am I?

Perhaps he only an inscription,
and I nothing at all
alive only in the receding memories
of our friends.

Dead and faceless.
Like any scream

'Hold my hand'

Hold my hand

For while I run

There’s nothing

Steady

As your hand

Never to meet the sea

All the people I have held

All the lips that I have met

Stare at me and do not deliver

Any of the hopes I searched

them with

Wayward hands somehow untired

Flow down rivers of desire

never to meet the sea

The Geology of Songbirds

Why does the glacier
Kneel before me?
Does it believe that our total knowledge
Can save it?

And is it right?

I approach in twilight.
The snow compacts beneath my shoes,
Its sound redolent of my horse chewing apples.
He did love the snow.

In times like these,
Mementos mori abound.
The weedy bird at my feet,
Growing smaller each day I pass,

Fading in among the gravel,
Shrinking.
That songbirds turn into gravel was
The first thing I ever learned about geology.
 
These things are so circular.

I climb higher to
Improve my view.
Searching as I climb
For the perfect rock to bring to you.

Unable to find it.
Yet we do such things—
We search for perfection in objects,
In love, as if such essences exist.

Filling our pockets with pyrites.
This poem,
Itself a pyrite—
Words I write to be loved. 

And yet the glacier kneels.

Its skin cracked like an ancient painting.
I bid it to stand, and wonder,
When all of its light has vanished from the earth,
What of our total knowledge will be lost with it?

by Robert Sassor