I knew from the very beginning

A day would come

When the sun of the mountain

Would cast you aside

As a sacrifice.

A shadow on your bedroom wall

When you were a girl

Green and tall,

You waited for me to make a clean breast

Of it all,

Of desire;

But the wall just got higher.

......

I knew from the very beginning

That, in my heart

There is no balm.

It's always fooling me

This open-wound.

.......

 

This wound

Is a significant key to understanding you -

Permanently closed yet weeping;

Weeping, stressed not simple,

With an urge to repeat.

.........

My vortex of doubt,

Breaks into pieces,

Rather than change;

The day before he died

He drew up a table of dreams.

I walked and walked and walked,

His lair was the only shade I knew.

.........

I was tired and broken

You had given up on me,

Separated from the evening

I do not want you to die tonight

Our eyes kiss the sun

I would like you  to be cured

To breach this death shelter

And then, to fly as high, as you desire.

........

Blessed by an unholy curiosity

You reach out to all that is mortal, dies,

The pungent smell of hot tar sent me back

To summer days spent wending away

The dandelions parodying the gaudy sun,

Stones were reserved for having fun,

Skimming water.

.....

In the dark church where heavy incense melds

With the stink of priest,

Sweating for his immortal soul, again;

Did I dream the frozen moment when I pushed at the heavy door,

Stared myopically down the nave towards the altar

Admiring the immutable calm of the white burning candles?

Not seeing the conscious act of sacrilege on the altar?

......

Mummified unwindings

Like a dark, tepid river,

Fear begins to snake through the empty spaces

Where my veins should be, arteries deep inside of me,

Where all the souls of all the lost girls and boys coagulate 

Stretch this nothingness of not-knowing way past infinity,

The unguent messes of the priest's eyes

Closed in unctuous supplication.

......

The insensibility of stones is a staging post,

On the never-ending road, to unfenced existence,

Where every line of badly drawn flesh is a labyrinth

Of a life lived apart from the breeding ground  

Of well-scrubbed killers.

.......

A line-up of Brutus’s killers on the Ides of March

Dilemmas created by an overweening uncertainty

Go ahead and allocate your fist full of $100 bills

To an orphanage with a uniform dress code.

....

White robes won't do it; burkas don’t do the trick,

Blood drawn by air strikes might enlighten you to

This off-shoot of the industrial-military complex:

Boys throwing stones at tanks in occupied Palestine,

Have all been loved by girls and women, 

Suffice it to say a ‘hum-med’ approach by the NGOs

In their 4*4’s had little impact on the killer-regime.

Unlike those young Hasidic scribes, who make the flesh crawl,

By wailing and insisting upon staying alive,

Into times of dancing and singing,

.....

While the monsters of His-story

Organise killer-tolls on the produce of the small farmers of Africa

For they know the cost of everything, the value of nothing:

Unlike the Yemeni children, regularly blown to bits on our HD screens.