Bouquet

There was love in the room,
full, opening to the bending rafters.
She was a bouquet that
spilled across the bed,
while a basket of fruit
exploded in my face.
There was laughter in the room,
it echoed like a cathedral
of white love spasms,
when the sky knelt in prayer,
and the world obeyed the moss.
Laughter in the blood,
swinging from body to body,
two bodies scooped into
the sun’s morning paws.
There was love in the room.
There were bouquets
of exploded hearts.

Black Currant

I wouldn’t say I am at a loss,
for speech, for words, for flowers.

It’s just that, in the mouth
there is something,
dark, growing, blooming,
death.

I call it death,
but really it is the birth
of an exquisite black currant.

Where am I going?
I’m going to the middle,
the middle,
to the heart of the black currant.
At each bite, through the skin,

itself a galaxy, a life, a cold and deserted song,
I’m wading into the flesh,
blue, female.

It is a breast, a fullness between my teeth.
I know what I will find there
at the centre.

It is not a final nipple, not
completion, lust, perfection, fleeing guitar.
At each bite, the currant diminishes,

at each bite, the lungs full,
so gorged with the juice of fear and sleep.

Animals sleep in huddles of sand.
My palm is a vast plain in the night.

A single tree shelters the
black currant,
the current of my death in the desert.

A wind like a woman strips the dripping canyons.
What is it I find at the centre of my currant?

All fruit falls in the mouth of death,
my voice blooms in the mouth of death,

an ejaculation of stars,
smeared over the parallel skin of her waist.

What We Give

From head to toe, I ache.
All day, I stood between the trees,
the rain running down my neck,
my back, till my skin was sodden.

This work, deftly, swiftly pulling
away the unripened fruit,
the smooth sensuality of sustenance,
is not just a passing of time,

while pockets fill with quick hopes.
No, the trees demand from me
nothing less than precious life hours.

Hungrily, they slake themselves on
my fast decreasing song,
while each day, I give a little of myself over to
the grass.
Before long, what will be left to me?

Like beads of dew licked by the morning sun,
I am becoming a sky of blue wind.
I lose myself here in rhythms
dictated by the branches.
And yet there is no loss.

What I burn in myself to hot exhaustion,
and what leaves me alone like a husk
at the end of the sun,
takes the shape of a thousand fresh years,

and is like a pip of incandescent seasons
that travels along the infinite tendrils of the
lithe, red earth,
to reach far into the mouths of others.