The Edit/An Anatomy of Love

Compartmentalised 
Exponentially complexified 
Awarenesses of sensations

Dream within a dream
In between Queens
How many Queens? Thirteen

A certain curtain stone
Sharpnesses of edges 
And smoothnesses of rounds

Sacrifice
Keep my quiet
Father Being

I’ll steal your shoes, strip you of your Cool
Because, Basquiat, 
What have they done to you?

Hugs are surrender embraces
Care scent
Belvedere Village

Arranging objects, like nicotine and THC
And all these self-evidently beautiful, stand alone phrases
What to do with them?

Like the first two lines of every book:
Fetching, catching,
Embracing, anchoring.

Homewards: wine and cat
Three colours in a band:
Panoramic photograph portrait of the earth/sky line

Quiet Fire.
Analogue She
Heirlooms and keepsakes

Difficult may be
With werewolf vibes
Coursing through me

Presenting: The Oh My Goodness Me’s, followed by La Présence
And supported by Soliciting On Saturdays
Opening with a debut performance by RATS!

A knot
A tangle of blood and hair
It is entirely possible to overWOW someone.

Remarkably resilient
Thresholds reached
Limits sensed, seen and respected.

Weaving webs of word spin threads
Nervous, twitchy, insecure, anxious.
All these convenient marriages

Meaning making machines
Arbitrary, assumed,
Yet not necessarily natural

Parallels and paradoxes
Nebulous and unnecessary
Skeptically confident

The quiet, slinking shadows of Death, Laughter,
And Good Graces.
I know sad, and this is not it

Brood of Night:
Love and Death 
Are Brothers

Wood smoke
Rose oil and whiskey
Anointments for the Dead

The private lives of God
Flowers and their meanings
Endless blessings, feathers and synchronicities

After all, 
Some of the kindest people I’ve ever met
Are Germans and Americans

The message 
Of Magic
That comes when one chooses Life

The Love accessed
When one reaches out into it, not knowing 
What it even looks like nor where it can be found

But knows beyond doubt
It’s probably there
In that place that scares the most

The ice cream
One went to buy
When these emotions arrived

My old stories and beliefs 
Are like homeless orphans
Just in need of love

Black cat Blessing.
My Playlists have survived
The lovers who inspired them.

Quest Ions for the Image Nation:
One piece of the puzzle at a time.
And some of the old Poems are irrelevant now.

I have nothing but a Map of Pain
A Recipe for Kindness
And an Anatomy of Love.

The perfect Thank You speech
Big bright, brave Moon
Words to describe things that are super massive, giant, gargantuan

I expect I will arrive 
At the end of my life
Not having figured out all of the mysteries

Love is in the water.
And don’t offer a hug
If you don’t have one to give

Can you hear the Silence

Unbearable 
To breathe deepest deep
And allow love to flow free between the connections
Without trapping or keeping it,
Once woken to world where
People seem to mostly act and think
As though they’re the only beings
That matter,
Little meat medallions.

It’s no wonder:
All this amplified loneliness.
It’s just a song of how I’ve longed for 
A love that is outside of me

Teacher quietly teaches

One does need to wade through
All one’s hurt and pain,
Torrents and extremes

Oh how I’ve dampened myself
Just to take care of everyone else’s needs.

How to hold emotions 
While they seethe swirl swim and dance and speak
Without naming them,
Convulse with love
Without getting lost in stories

To be alive
Existent
Present
In this giant world
To do nothing but close eyes
Listen
Love 
And let go

The Wind

Little Obsidian Poppers
Marks She made on Paper
Notes She wrote in the Kitchen
As I cooked

Horns when heaving
Turn into neat Sheaves of Wheat
And then Leaves,
Veins, Arteries, Rivers

Look at these Hands
How blessed I am to see Them
In Photographs of Ancestors,
You, who I never knew

Hello Hands
Hello Lips
Hello Eyes 
and Hips

Thank you, 
All Beings,
You are my Teachers.
Bless these Knees and Wrists

Oh His Story of ghostly Existence 
And Grievous Bodily Harm!
I love and leave you
For I go now with my Teacher and Friend, the Wind.

Doubt

Slow
Sweet
Gentle
Deep and Dark
Music

Hark:
I want to write 
About how I question 
The Point
Of Poetry

When all the original
Best Work
Is spoken between me
And Universe
MotherFather

Silently
Quietly
Inside
Pure, raw
Unfiltered, unedited, true

And any attempt at recording these conversations in realtime
Seems an approximation
An indulgence
I’m not fit
But I do it

Greetings From Within The Overlove

Ultimate surrender

When you said,

- Could you just reach down
And feel how wet I am,

When I was, 
In fact,
Imagining some other scenario
And responded,

- Not yet

Then woke up with you on my lap
(No!)
Ok.
Intimate stranger,
When you climbed on top of me

- What are you doing up there?

I laughed

- Playing

You said, eyes barely open from sleep

And finally  
I was right there
In your departure lounge
Sending you off
With rain falling just for us
No clean clothes but the morning sunshine,
Knowing, and fierce trust

And then

- Guys, I think I’m on the Spectrum

And then

- I think I’ve actually run out of time

And then —————————-


And I can count the nights I was actually able
To find sleep with you
In between all the stories we had to tell

One
Beginning to bleed,
Our first night together,
After biting you on the shoulder.
Hours later we rolled in random directions
And your right buttock somehow found
My upturned inside out right hand
Over the joining of your two single beds;

Two
Somewhere on a cloud
In your threadbare winter sheet and silver grey wool blanket
After I made you make me

- Come so hard I cried!

Smiling to see you having
Your experience of another woman’s bliss for the first time;

Three
For about seven drooling unhinged minutes
When you patted your heart
And invited me to just 

- Come sleep here on top of me
And I flopped, full frontal
From the exertion
Before I realised
I had to reach over to switch off the bedside lamp;

Four 
Every single night
For five weeks
In France, Germany and England,
(Bar the one night in Flensburg when
I could not bear my father’s snoring)
Thinking of the miracle of you
Wondering where you were
When, where in the world was I?

Five
Aye, there were those grasping sliding shining arms glory nights
Of legs, shoulder blades, breath and bellies folded just right
Small hands in big hands
Holding our perfect puzzle piece bodies in sleeping asymmetry

It was usually your snoring that shook me from slumber
Always, always smiling at the miracle of you
Being there
Next to me
New forms of meditation were born on those sleepless nights
All of my years meeting all of yours
Our lives making sense of themselves
Inside the shimmer of shared dreamscape

And always off you went
In full safety and comfort
And always I stayed, 
Happy to be able to give you that

We were a richly wrapped birthday present
We ripped open together on Xmas eve
And desperately, urgently relished

- Queen

I greeted you on that last day

- And You

You replied

Composure

Dof and messy:
The Muses always seemed to find me
In inconvenient moments
Inopportune timing totally,
With their opulent offerings.

And eventually I see
It’s not trouble they cause
It’s just into forests they want to take me 

When they leave me
With all these reams of editing
This Beauty that needs to be shared,
And that’s why we made jazz and blues 
For loosening up and dancing

Enter, soul people
Greet in original language
And proceed in King’s English

As we reel off the evening menu
And do our best to remain composed
Polite, Civilised, Controlled
As we take the first
Sip

New Year's Day: Versions (orphans)

Orphan ghosts
Children of slaves
Rarely knowing which way is up or down
Constantly disappointed and anticipating trouble
Waiting to be seen by others
To be seen
By the Light
Whose despair do we carry?
For we are but children
We pay attention
Honour every thing
<God shows us why we are here>
Full of pleasure, full of pain
We are the loneliness, boredom
And pointlessness of God

We are children of the Morning
So full of His Story
We choose to heal all that has come before 
No longer content with this inheritance of heaviness
No lamentation, cynicism or doubt, now
Only praise and celebration 
The way we use time
To measure our lives
Soft children made of Light
Delicate. Fragile.
We come to earth in utero
Wrapped in these seven colours

We are river, we are earth
We are sky and forest
All the old things
From the time before there were people
We learn that we sense
And learn what we sense
We hold and grow ourselves
To make a better each other 
We are the other
It pulses, beats in our chests
Each night we willingly die
Again and again
Our dreams teach us
And bring us back

We make our mistakes upon each other
Then use guilt and shame as moral compasses
We course-correct and realign
Forgive ourselves, give thanks
Then seek kinder, gentler ways of being
As our dreams show us different versions of ourselves 
Shedding skins, many lives lived in one,
Our dreams show us the stories in us
Our Karma Drama

We are roses on the roadside 
Surviving 
In the best of all possible fashions
We only know our sharp edges, 
Until Grace and our own perfume
Show us it’s OK to soften
At Zero point
At least eight times a day
We are hearts beating
We need to beat our hearts often