If you think of the dark
as a black park
and the moon as a bounced ball,
then there’s nothing to be frightened of
at all.
Love’s hate behind a white veil; a red balloon bursting
in my face. Bang.
My body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
If I was dead,
and my bones adrift
like dropped oars
in the deep, turning earth;
or drowned,
and my skull a listening shell
on the dark ocean bed.
In his dark room he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
Pray for the immortal soul of rock 'n' roll.
Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
A man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
The clocks slid back an hour and stole light from my life.
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself.
And, of course, unmendable rain fell to the bleak streets.