iridescence

go and ride a thousand days,
my clear-eyed messengers,
scour all points of the compass
and find me a glimpse of iridescence

for shining guidance into the unknown
on the day that I die

azerbaijan noon

erratic echoes
of a swallow's cries
faint and shrill,
lost midget amid
the persian blue vault
of turquoise and gentian tiles,
pool of cool noon,
in iridescent samarkand.

the first shy note strikes the oud

mother

and so I'm finally an orphan.

all your deaths
have scarred my soul:
I've grown numb
to my own death
number 1 of 1

burn

so, eventually there comes a time
when our words mean nothing
when our ink's dried out
and our pain is gone
and nothing is, but
what we do.

ages-old friend
 welcome back
 together again

 let us love

facetime

catch a window

my distant tendrils already
burying into seniority,
with twenty-six percent of the
body and brain
slowly breaking down

what-the-fuck as I look in the mirror.
no gentle business,
and ever-so-irreversible.

true, it's vaguely becoming -
I've got the style now
but no looks or stamina are left

this sad sod here,
waiting for you to
catch up
with me

melancholia

single pidgeon
in the distance
of boundless
grey suburban skies.

sombreness
dememoritised

taking flight

we revelled in the cold autumn rain
that pattered all night through our open
bedroom window:
the lime taste of oxygen

but suddenly the sky
sweeps in from Meknes
spreads blue hot chalk over
god-forsaken Lisbon urburbs
the asphalt crawling with
gross fat black
glistening princess ants

princesses in life-and-death quests
for the promised life
the promised home
they were entitled to
blind to future
com
promises

they make me sick to the
bone
stick to my trousers, to the windshield
as I myself turn gradually into no
thing
boiling away on the
hot autumn asphalt

so in the stone blue distance
let us hide
in grounded old
aeroplanes
in the museum of flight
before I vanish for good

let me hide my hideous
shrinking head
in the warm Bedouin tent
of the gentle cup of your hands
where I know you will love me
as I grow senile
and evaporate

I love you for so much more
than this