Words, the lot of my days has been fiercely clouded in words;

to what breath of the soul should I treat myself

so that I may feel blossomed again

and not shut like an oyster shell?

Maybe to the gleaming of the moon’s haze at dusk

or to the resounding hush of the moon’s children?

Or maybe to the loud and boastful wails of lust, sported

from balconies where bodies and forms stay hidden?

I was blinded by reason, by these years bereft of sense.

Where, moistened with touch, my body fled

from the dense stickiness of responsible living,

of dreams cut for reality.

Unlike the crowds feasting on these neighbourhoods,

unlike the weary motorways and tramlines of Monday mornings,

I was never blessed as they with lightless moods

that threatened to swallow the world in warning.

Born and welded in words were our eyes, raised and quenched

in words, and in words bound; with words, an eye fixed

to the soil, the other forced to the sky. Each life by words measured,

each body in words fashioned and with words tethered.

Many came from words, most did not abide in them

and skeptic of words’ dominion they resolved to build

a keep to withstand words’ Babel with an immovable djed.

But not me: I remain at their mercy. And though I long for

the rich and limbs-awakening smell of true things

(which of late seems to spring solely

from the deeds and doings of work), the exact nature of being

escapes me; I stay anchored to this faint exercise

to this stubborn critical gaze;

nothing rests in me, even

nothingness stays away.

From “Poems. 2016-2018”