the immature poet(ess)

clawed to know

the moment directly

before – before the world

is skinned, realisation

of a flaying’s cusp

that as yet, she could not

conceive of.


before i curl out a line,

i have already censored

not for good, nor merit

but for presage. is omen

subterfuge or are we

mostly hearing –

i would say ‘deaf’

but those whose speech

is choreographic

are probably more attuned

to seeing a prophecy

fractally bloom. in hindsight

i feel the omens so round

about me, more real than a town

of mourners, transitory

– more pert

and fresh than fermenting.

years on.


in an alpine hotel lounge at new year’s,

of dated interior yet prices

adapted to so far above

sea level, we requested cups

of hot water from a barman

who disdained our tea ruse.

i wrote her a december

gift, birthday and christmas

(she understood the artistic

was not always instantaneous,

more like our earl grey suffusing)

a central motif beginning – 


“i.

                                                                           (rem)embers,

your defiant trails

even in the dusk

of coats unincarnate

and over the quilt that lays

still, without our heads

brought close

above (the source –

yours’)
               in the flat expanse of hours

i find their number in tender

embers
though we must,

                                             i suppose

work –     crave, crave

your element be.”


this became her euology, less than

24 months later. at dias,

i wondered how i had wrote

such words and not seen

farewell. 


i confess, though it is not literary

though maybe it does truly

make me a poet

or an off-kilter one

(i’ve really drank the kool-aid):
i confess

an intricate adhesion

of meaning, of signs and

suture ties where you’d

never guess collusion.

does obsessive-compulsive disorder

ever give up its narrative, go home?

does the herringbone

mind, underlaid for poetry,

really have primacy? i worry less that i am creative

of tragedy, but my failing indicative –

supernova omen

descend, an unheeded

presage. i confess

to brewing and imbibing

the poet kool-aid

neurally,

the uneclipsed optics

of seeing all

underjoined in

poetic cohesion.