The poor people sleep for hours in the rain.
Why? Because they are homeless, and it is raining.
To the senators in the gold towers, it seems plain
That, since the poor’s sleeping takes less energy than complaining,
they can say that the poor are lazy, to explain
why they, the senators, are right remaining
high, and dry, and feted all the more
while the sleeping people slide towards Death’s cold door.
The skunks fill jungle glade. ‘This is so wrong,’
says the hawk that moved here when Alabama burned.
‘This should be a coniferous forest, not a jungle.
There should not be more skunks than one an acre.’
The owl in the next tree over gives a hoot.
‘Watch the pythons,’ she says. Both the raptors do.
How the book ends
are arranged
attracts me more
than what might be between them.
I don’t look.
How the book ends
is a mystery
that I cherish:
the mystery of not knowing
how things end.
We pay for, with experience and whiskey,
the values of the stories we are told.
We rehearse until our hearses makes us wise to
the lies, but by then we are old.
We drink up at Fountain Forgetful
till our names appear strange on the wall
that we erected with promise and vigour
as we witlessly played through the Fall.
I walk across the ocean towards Honfleur
on ice that was not here a week ago.
How have we irked the deities to incur
such weather extremes? First jungle heat, now snow.
My chance of seeing Dover again is so low
that I won’t know personally if England is still there
like it used to be. I’d hare off somewhere
secure in the knowledge that I could come back
to the green and pleasant land. Starving seabirds stare
at the frozen surface and the sun turns black.
She tries to count to seventeen by multiples of Pi:
03.14, 06.28, 09.42, 12.56, 15.70, 18.84.
When she overshoots she starts all over again
till night retreats. The lightening of the sky
illuminates her insomniac chagrin.
The next night, after enjoying a nap of almost an hour,
her synapses snap to attention, flee the land of Nod.
She makes again obeisance to the god
she calls Morpheus and, mortifying maths,
she redefines Pi as a function of
seventeen. This lets her summing shove
its multiples into a tidy nest
that add up evenly and bring her rest …
… until she notes she’s doing couplets missing lines
and sleep slips away. Again! Ah, sleep divine … …
From the distance from Earth where it feels safe, the harvest moon
illuminates the orchard where we lie
under separate blankets near the dying fire.
White ashes float and fall in the small breeze.
We are still. We hear the knitting-needle click
of claws upon the flat rocks by the creek.
We hope they’re of racoons and not a bear.
‘It’s not all that dark,’ says my muse, ‘if you open your eyes.’
She’s right. On this rainy predawn Friday morning
we stand on wet grass watching grey mists rise.
I ask her, ‘Are these daemons in disguise?’
‘If you like,’ she says. ‘You can master your perspective.
You can learn your waking nightmares are elective.’
Your thoughts aren’t you. They’re just your thoughts because
you think them. They merely an effect of.’
I say, ‘Sun, rise up!’ And gloriously it does.
Earth Tourist 