RED DUST

Bulbous bright, eyes thicken on stalks

In the pavilion, giant monitor lizards

Slink low after their own eggs

In swelter that cannot be touched

Only witnessed, the cacti have swollen

Purple and the spines bristle

Someone is sculpting some new green

From the stump of his leg

Everything murmuring its life 
A regatta of flies sail past and cheer

In the red dust is the hand of a loved one
But those are not her fingers
Wrist curling, uncurling, working
Up to a rude violence, smeared
Red with love, an eager egoist
A foot falls through the earth

Crawl in the dirt, hair on end
To a cavern and out through

The tunnels of the eye

Into a crude world 

THE SNIP

Fixed in front of myself

Another stood behind

A cruel-looking Perseus

Two swords in hand

Sharp for a scalping

We do not talk O.K. 

No news of the world

No mention of the Joneses

Just 'take what's needed 

- No more than that'

Good, this is ceremony

A rite of passage

Through damaged locks -

Unsnarling of dead roots

From the temple gardens

Beneath these shears

A just thought is loosed:

How much have I grown 

In the months since we last met?

How long is a piece of hair

It is not true that tooth,

Hair and nail lengthen

In death, a trick of the flesh

As the body recedes 

Even in loss
There moves a weave

HELIOPOLIS

“There is a hall in Bloomsbury


That no more dare I tread,


For all the stone men shout at me and swear they are not dead


And once I touched a broken girl, and knew that marble bled.”

James Elroy Flecker

In the blue terror of evening

Men came - shards of tile and mirror

Flaking in their stubbly hair 

They linked the sun on a chain

                                        And pulled

Guffawing at their Aten shuns
Gelding long and quiet ones

We lay down in a box and drove

Through darkness, a moth light

Frazzling the tall grass, a channel

To the kingdom of weeds
Outside the gates, a rabble wrenched
The horny membership
From their stone likeness
And crumbled into dust

Allah à la jardin, the gardener

Redfaced man of allotments

His pruned bush; his pollard tree

                                     Eyeing all

History from his drinking tin, said

'You may not barge in, out with you' 
We shrugged, it is cold in the shadow
Of yet another reliquary
There is no god but all

So we left the land for other suns