De Profundis
Sometimes you are going past on a motorbike and you look up in time to see a woman who loved you hand in hand with a man
you don’t know, she stretches up on tip-toe, eyes wide and shining with the wine they have drunk or the love they will later make,
to kiss him as they disappear through the door of a bar.
Sometimes this doesn’t happen
but something else does. Say you are going past on a motorbike and you look up and there’s one star piercing through and it says
it’s alright Chris I am what you guys call lonely too but more profoundly so. I’ve waited a long time for the light of my face to reach
you Chris for you are my reflection on earth I shit you not.
And sometimes you aren’t going past anything
at all and you aren’t on your motorbike but you are on your balcony looking down and over and across the city at night there are
no stars but one red pinprick of light from the tip of the tv tower way out past the suburbs and you look at it, this single point of
red light on the lip of the city’s vanishing point, crying out its terrible waves of silence and power
Sea Song for Couples in Love
Oh crab, you are an
ugly bastard. And
octopus, stop
snickering behind that
rock, your horrifying
arms disfigured by
nipple-like sucking
suckers, disgusting.
But two crabs making love;
or two octopuses: the male inside
her, watching the pulsing
beak of her mouth, how deep, how
mad her eyes are.
