moon
That night⎯ the night he came back.
Standing at the door,
saying he wanted to stay,
‘Could I? Please.’
Uncertain for a moment, I demurred,
but turned my back on him
under the moon.
That night was early summer
a scent of cow parsley in the air ⎯
the night I lost him.
But his return that night
was a reckoning,
a tally of the many nights before,
when I sought him
stretching my arms out towards his silence.
In the morning he’d be gone,
the damask
spread over us,
torn ⎯
So that night, under the moon
when I sent him
back into the dark,
a bird in the trees
somewhere,
ceased its song.
Untitled
half-lit glimpses of you,
like broken shards of mirror,
pierce my dreams
and hang like baubling sequins
in my thoughts.
a notion of you,
swimming far out in a blackened sea,
leaving our shape pressed into the sand,
spoor and sperm and sea and salt.
A voice calls out,
‘Beware your shadows’.
lights glint from the glass,
and I creep away,
we were
riding high on autumn winds;
sailing, thrashing, whip-tailed kites
mastered only by the strings of our conception.
Your silent savagery⎯
once soft as gentle tributaries
now a torrent of shards,
a thousand mirrors cannot own.
Antonio’s Triptych
i. Orsino’s yard
you have written out
this pact we signed,
designed by you,
like some stagey conceit,
a play within a play,
now diminished and consigned
to scraps of script ⎯
ii. ariel
I lost much then, not brave enough
to taunt my own end,
we wagered and you won on the thrill
of my submission,
while I hid
between moments
of service and content
iii. caliban
There is only one thing
now I want,
the breaking down
of your beauty,
the fragments of our love diseased,
the caves of your distance
lit with despair.
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