Soldier

Great is the darkness between
That place where the gaps flow smooth
Reaching out to one another
Never quite to touch

Out pours that viscous liquid
Thick with the flows of the ticking clock
Straining to catch the second
In its spinning teeth

Round pools the warmth
Curling at the finger joints
To spew into a sandy maw
As wide as any I've ever known

Long beats the chest straining
To keep each gap from swallowing
Drinking each tick down, down
With a fat, slow, hungering tongue

Sealed are the eyelids
Resigned like gutters to the pavement
Holding the end in shutter-tight
But it stutters in uncaring

In the light greater than any darks
It singes away the shadow's hairs
And leaves... nothing
To drip, congeal, set
Into the final inscription of what was
But has now slipped through desperate fingers
And drunk the dry desert wind.

Don't dream that
Or you'll never wake up.

You'll never know your future
in a bubble of the past

I said sorry to my dad
For the mess I've made
Of the hands that he gave me
Nails rising like driftwood
Chalking above the sands
Fingerprints smudged guilty
On the glasses of now
Fingers scrunched and tossed aside
Into despair's waste bin
Holding desperately onto nothing
Till it bleeds away into the warmth
Of cramp and strain and futility
A mess with the stamp of dead-wood
Jutting from palms that know no peace
Except the comfort of arthritis.

Even puppies have wings

Inception

Some nights
I stay awake and wait
For the bump
The feeling of reality returning
The dream fading fast into the undergrowth
Swallowed by the jungle noise
Of a million eddying lives

Some nights
I lay awake and dream
Of the drop
When the legs fall out from under me
The world rushing past on squeakless shoes
Smoothly like a looming pickup line
A race to the floor

Some nights I think
I'll actually wake up
And remember this
With the forgotten clarity
Of the dream that it isn't.