The crash town picking memorial flowers.
The right thing to say in a disaster for everyone,
Run or sit down.
Delay, think about it a while,
As you might settle in to your subject,
Feel the themes developing from within,
Unconstrained but reasoned along the lines,
The paths if you will, of language.

Titulary gift, running train of reflection,
It is not mirrors that are helpful in a crisis,
It is something else.
Some blue sky and a cloud
Of childhood and a running horse,
Hooves and coat and jerking neck under the rein,
The strain of the lift,
As a barge in the lock,
The donkeys on the old canal,
The blood of asking,
The soak of telling,
Gracious in debt,
Plentiful in mourning for the Ravenous one,
The too simple sum losing all contour,
Bartering freedom of the future
For the truth telling of the past.

The miniscule snickers of subversion,
The cracks of age in Imperial desire,
The classic now obstinate,
Over played in priapism and circumambulation,
The old God and the cinders of the parade ground,
The black path and the red river, the green banks and
The spiteful, lazy turn, gentle as mud,
Deep as land waiting to be a mountain.

To be born in time to the rhythms of dancing feet,
The ribbons celebrating how one, umbilical, is cut from another.
Swollen universe of identity wearing sandals on the hard packed sand.
The messiah in rags of lore,
The prophecy of the homunculus universe birthing itself
In the image of woman and man,
Coptic, diurnal, seasonal, epochal, crossed and re-crossed
As the letter “T” so often serving its function
Of ritual connection in the alphabet.
Like the plus sign in as many equations,
A sign adding in, keeping its mount in the sunrise,
With the horizon, the terrible sky cracked by gravity,
Riven by the splayed stars or wet weather.

The difference in notation,
As your underclothes,
Pressed and published and as the reader says, “leading us on”.
Daemonic and diabolical, the Manichaeism of light and dark,
Good and bad – the dualities have been scrapped
For a greater connected complexity of math.

Its “X’s” and “O’s” an ocean of its passion
Brimmed with the flat earth premise and
The borrowed man on loan, his seed his own,
The future of a migrant and
The mountain of his daughter, clear as water.
See her grow, compass in hand, sextant and
Rocket on the face of Mars crawling,
The God of War where fingers tickle the scratchy beard,
Where ale pours,
Where the lights go out and the power cut is daily,
Like a paper cut, it bleeds a red line on the horizon,
Call it setting sun or camp armies settling for the siege of night,
We wait too, on the edge of our beds,
Not really nocturnal, but worried.
How it all adds up and spares us.
“No one here gets out alive” – Morrison.
The carpet is hung over the window.
The bombers cross the sky.

Rosary is said over and over
As a crack in the seed where the rain gets in,
Where the head strong wander,
Where pillage is hunter gathering,
Where hands of five digits hang at our sides
But is it five in the morning or five in the evening,
Coming down,
A meal, repast is ready.

The door swings,
The howl and yowlers
Yellow as currency,
Green as forest dwellers with painted faces
At the center of the earth proclaim,
Quake, reserve the best rooms in the dream and
Rummage the sewers and open gutters where
Collects the fallen from their tribute,
For their gift to the almighty Aspen, quaking,
A nervous eye, animal watching
As if all the world were an alarm
And beware.