It is time to tell of Telos. What’s to say?
That it doesn’t rhyme well with Laïcité?
I’m out of depth, another dearth of mine.
The sword of Damn Old Clete has cut the vine
of happiness. It blew birds shot aside
and targets Telos but its aim is wide.

My mind runs ragged victory laps, not races.
The applauding crowds are strange. They don’t have faces.
‘We’ve won,’ my mind tells mirroring copies of itself
arranged by dates of deception on a shelf
that is labelled Life, erroneously. The lies
of the land allay no fears although one tries
to ease my mind by saying it will be
happier on the shelf Eternity.

There was a total dearth of reason and an equal lack of rhyme.
Were it progress could we move to half a dearth?
To a double dearth? Could n-dimensions plot the slant of trailing rhyme?
I thought not. Nought thoughts have a way of stapling
up and stitching down until all that’s nought is lost
among cacophonies of never beens.

(Experiment Number 6)

The bones of many mortals are not hollow
but these, this perished swallow’s, surely are
(or were; the tense attention’s metaphysics
shan’t deter us). Inter it in this jar,
with one side showing, so that we can follow
the beetles’ weekly progress with their trocar-and-cannula aspiration.

Will the swallow watch? Not likely.
Travelling to the places essence seeks,
when freed, will take its interest and its time.
Its body, once its joy, decomposing,
won’t cause the soaring spirit any grief.

The swallow starts its tour in further space
where all the stars, place-holder points of light,
avail the bird as nulls in the vast number,
that he, a leading one, installs in flight.

Week 2. We watch the beetles cart away
most of what empowered swallow wings.
The bone remains; some skin, and all the feathers.

Week 10. No beetles. The larvae freeze.
One night we hear bird song.

Winter solstice. I find the broken jar.

I can write no more, nor less. I should confess
but no one reads this so we are all write
in the sense of staying somnolent. The lank tress
of our lady saved from the dragon that wild night
lies on the trellis where the laity
can worship it. That’s what they like to do.
Beyond their sense and my ability
the Fates weave strands from her fair hair and strew
them on the waters that continue rising.
Canute had better luck rebuffing waves
than you and I have, sat here fantasising
against the ills set free in óur times. Nothing saves
our faces or our children. The penny drops.
The lady is forgotten. Our story stops.

The moon mops up shadows the sun had baked onto the beach.
We watch and we wonder which of us will leave.
A breeze seizes our choices and scatters them out of our reach.
We walk on damp sand to the rock where large moulting birds grieve.
A dragon-eyed cormorant regards us. It raises one wing.
We look where it points. The horizon’s half-hidden in haze
where the world edge drops off. We strain and we see a small thing.
It’s a boat. It’s a yacht. We’ve not seen other people for days.

I pretend I’m speaking Spanish. I use the words.
I combine the words in ways that are my own.
If you get my drift we imagine we’re communicating.
This is similar, but more obvious, to how we speak
the language we grew up with. We use words
in ways we’ve shared so long we think they’re laws,
but when talk gets important we invent
our own interpretation of the sounds
we make and we suppress. What we call languages
are but the shadows of the things we feel.