Floating

Life less knowledge
    Events spooled out and frameless

Unreachable, escaping
    Like posthumously viewed

Knowing fate’s an end
    But small to stop it

Sensing that the most part’s nothing
    But as yet unprepared to scratch on air

The Eyes of Sharon Tate

You already saw them?
Look again.
Honeyed,
with a ring of darkness.
Knowing, in a sense—
the purest sense—
you’ll look at them for longer than you guessed.
In eyes like these we see
the only good we’ve ever needed.
But whose eyes does she see?

85% Docility

                Children of nowhere,
                              knowing nothing,
                                         slide towards unending darkness.
Near-miracle it is,
facing this,
there’s 85% docility.

A Short Ride Through Death

I’ll not succeed where better ones have failed
to put death into words, words into death.
I’ll not succeed because no means exist;
and yet the need to try still overwhelms…

I cannot make the claim that death is friend:
that, generous, it takes us to itself
and lets us live forever peacefully.
There’s no suggestion why this should be so.
Nor can I call that final state a foe:
that it’s an adversary—a worthy one—
but enemy the same; one with which
we fight and should resist until the last.
This I cannot see. For to ennoble
death like this robs it of its rightful place,
which is, alone, as marker of the end.
Distracted poets wrap it in these terms,
but best to see that death’s too serious
for us to classify it as ‘adventure’.
We all must learn to live, and learn to die:
a process too important in itself
to be reduced by airy thoughts and words.
As to fear, now that’s a separate question:
what only individuals can know.

But certain there are hours in every life
that freeze us with the spectre of extinction.
And if you were to ask me: ‘What is death?’
I would say that I suspect it’s nothing.
A pointless end that, following a pointless start,
completes a pointless kind of logic.
Effectively, the last flick of the light.

Sonnets from the Portuguese, 43 (Revised)

How can I fuck thee? Let me count the ways.
Per normal, to the depth and breadth and height
My tool can reach when, buried out of sight,
It finds the ends of Being and of Grace.
Or maybe, in our more adventurous days,
I’ll practise what for some opposes Right
And push it up thine arse, twixt blood and shite;
Or else refresh thy mouth with fervent sprays.
I’ll fuck thee with the passion put to use
On porn-drenched nights, both in and out of twat.
I’ll fuck thy tits or armpits if thy choose—
However fits a sexual acrobat.
And pills I have for when my strength I lose—
I can but fuck thee better after that.