Do you wonder what I do
now I’m gone away from you?
Do you imagine how I live
with the freedom that you give?
Do you stand alone and gaze
at the brightly whorled haze
from my spackled palette knife
that paints a lustrous life?
Or do you look with clearer eye
past the colour-dappled lie
to the worn concrete greys
of my empty days?
Or do you call me back to you
in a soft and pastel hue
arguing the virtue of
what passed for love?
Though I wish to lie with you
it is the lie I must undo.
Only when I am untrue
will I show good faith to you.

The thing about a pike
that makes it doubly cruel
is the way its shaft can sway
when it’s blown by ridicule.
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columbines betray last year’s scattering of seed
by straying from the well-kept bed and
springing unruly from the lawn
i want to tear them out and
bring order to my jealous yard

maybe I should collect crystals and
arrange them neatly on a shelf but
the suggestion prompts your laughter
bursting through the spring air

the columbines are beautiful with
downcast gaze and slender neck
they have their infidelities but
i will tend them still

sometimes we desire what we cannot have
but unable to extinguish the desire
we fan ourselves into a roaring flame

and so we rage
and we flare
but consume nothing

from this
god utters forth
the usual useless shit

then
obedience comes
not from love
but from its failure

we draw on god’s teat
like sucklings on an ashen nub

how great the fall
crashing down around my head
how great the dread i feel
when winter breathes her first chill
across the land
the great hoar undresses gnarled limbs
then laughs her limpid taunts
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