wb :

Are written in the ink of night, and penned
With fervor on a sheet of parlour-white,
Blazed on the signs where gentlemen alight
And hold umbrellas, gazing on the sand
Fresh-turned, and splashed with wet sobriety,
The wording blotted by the feet of girls
And boys, all sombre, shuffling feet in swirls,
All watching the manic variety
Of frantic thoughts evaporating, quick
As silver, solvent in the evening light,
To leave a blank upon the endless reams
Of soil that covers him, his walking stick,
That hides his hat and, evermore polite,
So gently smothers what remains of dreams.

I built a flower, deep and red as rose,
As lucid as the dreams of dying men
As careless as the soil on which it grows
And sinful as the dolours of its stem,
Convinced by love that hearts are evergreen;
But they are dandelions, light and wan,
That break in flakes upon a winter wind,
And flutter, faint, their nectar bled to ice,
Each petal with a shadow's linger twinned,
Unfurled upon the ground, the peddlar's price
For holding on as love yet draws its close,
So stay your sobs and wipe your gleaming eyes.
For though you would entrap the summer's rose,
Your feet will tread it in the winter snows.

-~-

Because I love writing these best.

eight millilitres of water in a bowl,
to be overturned on the fourth of each month
and the drops spilled on the earth

slowly drying in the asphyxiating
throb of vines across a neverending field,
baking in the sun like bloated purple pies

watching as skeletons of cows drag their skin
on stilts across a plain of bones,
and the sun a grin of yellow death

that with its sadness brings the snows,
and with its madness rakes the wind
across a road that bears a single man

afraid of wolves that pant with every step,
who shudders in his sleep of nightmares,
and chokes on sand

there is a better place for him
that is a hundred journeys further on
so on the fourth of every month

he kicks the skull and spills the sins
that have accrued in eyeless sockets
and spatter on the earth like tears.