Ghazal From Miles Away

Gulping Mother’s Ruin, through the last chapter of day
Blue because tomorrow’s morning’s still miles away

Feeling a fool...know what I signed on the dotted line;
"We'll be partners in crime, when we are miles away."

Reminded of you, when earlier I discovered a worn,
High-heeled shoe in a gloomy room that's miles away

I watched a film set in the north, fox of midnight blue
Hollering at a pair of eskimos on a mountain miles away

Who knows if they've an igloo, those two; don't know the end
For thinking of you, the deeds we can’t undo from miles away

You turn to face me and you're like a song who smiles like a screw;
So wrong, so long, Annie Lou, and your taste for places miles away

how the hopeless are made

how you are here again
like a prayer, but
then you stop there
and, oh god,
I don't dare,
you see, ask you
to help me help
you help me...

thus we stand,
and we dither like
fools on a stage
till I turn to go,
and you turn the page
as I stumble off
into town, drink
a dreadful night down
and I wonder without pity
if this might be how
the hopeless are made

A Frank, 21st Century Woman

With no propriety, you turned
To me in my discovery of
A too brief audacity
"So old-fashioned and fair..."
This is what you wrote to me
In double History, I thought,
For a dare...workbook all bare
You waited as I wrote some care
Some rubbish, something debonair
On cheap paper, stuck in Stalin's ascent,
Seventh chapter

Eight hundred nights yonder
We ambled down some street
K Town, at daybreak
Ninehundredth new slate, just
Like us when we made it,
Merely memory bright...
But mystical powder waits
Like alchemy in our veins
Turning gazes huge, tongues leaden
With the weight of our secrets' sake,
Stirred from the depths of another
Secret morning akin to this, forgotten
Discarded as dark, absent, untrue, rotten;
Last millenia's festering dress of 'blue'
Or fag ash grey, before we got cotton

A poisoned bible and poison perfect pictures,
Our only souvenirs; photographs faded,
Some depicting the War, torn from familiar walls,
Dipped in Dutch beer, and that is all
All we have of that year