Of all the useless appendages,
your earlobe is the loveliest.
I’ve never nibbled on your tonsils
and know nothing of appendices.
I whisper and it stirs
the white down that grows there.
Like the soft sand of Normandy,
it’s the beachhead of my advance.
I order my words, and off
they go, over the top,
to take the cochlea,
the stirrup and anvil!  With precision
and discipline, too, they charge.
But when you lob a glance at me and my nibbling lips,
everything scatters:  my words, my thoughts; they wade, they drown, or get mowed down in the blood-drenched sand, and flap a useless arm in the wet muck, and wait for the tide to roll in and scour it all clean.
Later, alone and analytical,
I’ll ask what went wrong
and hear again the answer of the ages:
you were unprepared.

we the implicated
we the intricated
we the strand and
bolt of fabric
woven tight like
mother’s love and
screaming child

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The ceiling fan above doesn’t turn.
It waits on a switch that never trips.
The snow outside sits cold and white.
It waits on a sun that never shines.
The world is a head with empty sockets
spinning itself into nothing and nothing
stirs me as I lie on my bed and see how
the ceiling fan above doesn’t turn.
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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.

When I was a teen
it was inconceivable
that I might find radical
tucked in the folds
of an old man’s face.
Now in my forties
(though with a boy’s libido)
I see in the mirror
how the first lines crack
my youthful veneer.
From mid-day the dawn light
looks the same as the dusk.
Which explains why old fogies
spend so much time counting change
at the check out:
they’re protesting something.