Poetry

Give me memories as 

slow to leave as snails. 

In foreign    and perhaps 

fragile years    I’ll still be able 

               I wanted to make a gothic of it all:
the trees on the slope where the island dipped
               into the sea, their weird kinks & angles;

She has drawn them disembarking a sky-blue bus,
fresh from the bombing of Al Hajar. Some stumble
in the red-blobbed orchard, their hair shedding dust.

I’m thinking of how mushrooms will haunt a wet log like bulbous ghosts; 
of how a mushroom may be considered a travesty of a flower

It wasn’t so much that we burnt tires, releasing a toxic stew of nasties,
or that each Eleventh Night, as a spat crescendoed, some fella got battered 

Our love it lives at 6.3 degrees.
I stooped to measure it inside a dream.
A meager distance. Not the moon in apogee. 

The old Hitachi dual cassette was pain
and elegant with age, and the branches were, 
and the sash window was open with pain, 
and the afternoon was adequate, and pain.

The Earth spun on the Universal fanfare and the three of us were settled on 
the settee when the doorbell sung Big Ben’s [sic] dong, dang, ding, dung.

With no internal shell you keep 
yourself together in a sac
& the matter of attachment.

It couldn’t have been easy getting it to lie flat on paper.
That’s obvious from the asterisks.