Nowhere to go but home (if we have one)
Weeks have turned to hours and strange tongues
Seem no more than quaint aberrations
In the solitary ear that longs,
The mind that searches for a lost elation,
A past long gone of promises undone,
Of soil left barren by my own neglect
Of leaves that withered beneath a distant sun
Of dreams that hubris drove on reefs and wrecked.

The songs that reached across the sea of time
I heard at last, unbearably apart
From the hand that gave them and the heart.
The hill on which I stood once and surveyed
Through mist a dim-lit landscape of ambition
Sweetly conscious of your body pressed
To mine, and felt your breath and knew my luck
And threw it to the wind because the view
Before my eyes, the blue promontory
And the trees that nodded to the world
Were made of clouds, now rises above me
Too tall, ancient and wearied of my steps
To climb again.

Beneath: the dun earth

Where men plant bombs in markets and on trains
And roses grow in pots and people fuck
And shop for novelties they'll never need
But to impress a neighbour or a rival.
I look south towards the horizon
Where the southern cross shines on the land
Of your stirring and my awakening.
But my feet are mired in northern mud.
You are neither there nor anywhere
There is only the end of living
And the beginning of survival.


August 2007