Writing

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Personal writing

Love Lasts Forever
This cruel negative
Is the taxidermist’s brutal revenge:
Your bones
Offering symbiosis in death
To refute our plain mortality.

Rendered inside out but
(so as not to cause offence)
Cut clean over the last three years,
Your fossil jaw
Mimicking the strata,
the slow subsidence
And the pain of final freedom.

Not true! our artist friend retorts.
Let the spotlight illuminate the palms before your feet
As by your sacrifice we exonerate the sins
Of destruction, the wheeling bluster of life.

Either way, I blink with the wry humour
I recognise so often in these scenes.
Animal empathy reduced to the thrall of creation.

Haiku

I turn the light off
We read each other in Braille
Our tender phrases

Charcoal canopy
Soft midnight applause outside
And leaks in my shoes

Exoskeleton
Won’t save you my little friend
As I raise my boot

I stand and watch you
As you skim stones on the lake
Hairs standing on end

Sorry officer,
Seems I don’t know my own strength.
Is that gun loaded?

Lazy man’s poem
Allows creative musings
But prevents boredom

A love grown stale
Falling from the winding stem,
A wooden petal

I walk behind you
Chasing shadows and the heat
Of your cigarette

Dry causality
As false refuge; synonyms
And exegesis