Impatience

Here, under older nervous hands,
you slowly let yourself the satisfaction
of a purr, take a whiff of nicotine flavoured
breath, and grimace in your sleep.
Taking these sinewed wrists into trembling
hands, I breathe uneasy, watching
over my shoulder for prying eyes.
They work overtime, past usual
hours of adult desire.
All the while, with stray dogs barking, I
whisper simply to myself untenable prayers.

When our blood has cooled, our bodies shall, too,
take respite from unequal, unintended promises
of eternal understanding. Till then, we wait, not without
impatience.

Seaface

While waiting for another whiff of unrequited longing
I stumble upon bare arms that shimmer
under streetlamps in a distant city.
The quiet swish of a fluttering
sleeve from a strange home
tickles the still-
laughing eyes from another land.
The slow return to arms unreturning
in my waiting mind reminds me
of the seas that lie
between here and everywhere.

petals underfoot

My brothers' dreams flow swiftly:
sugaring swiftly through and past
drowning ankles: chattering amongst
themselves, shconspiring, whispering,
whipping into twelve-barred conversations
little parsts of us should never
hear. Lovers and conspirators, the keepers
of secrets buried long within a few centimetres
of crackling paper towers held
gently, gentler than lives ever will.
Racing dogs racing past slumbering minds,
racing to sit still on silvered slivers of alliterations.
The krschickoush of lent-out dreams
waddle past us and we pick on the dreams of our brothers,
togetherly grate upon the iron-schqueek gates
of togetherness and together walk
perfectly paved pavements of petulant petals and cliches.

signs of humanity

By the by-lanes whipping through
the city the walkers saunter and stroll,
parading past vacant eyes
looking upon families of fours. The plumage
of such exotic birds bears no electric colours
or blooming feathers, just little sandaled-feet
and slight touches of fingertips.

By the pebbles and stone-fragments
lie white dogs and a black wolf
amidst scampering rodents who dare
scuttle by the fingertips of pensive men
with vacant eyes. A misheard siren
in the distance forces the baying
of wolves and a sudden silence imposed by the quiet of the other few.

The signs of humanity stretch
past the cobbled side-walk: the buttends of days
and nights waiting for a fresh breath
within the bags that contain our separate lives.
The churning of wheels loses itself by the seaside,
the breakers stumbling towards the insurmountable
walls of our walking feet.

pin-striped designer suits

The dreams of my brothers get sucked into thin air,
vanish into evening dust,
take rest upon uneasy shoulders, still tired
from fucking ugly girls
walking down well-lit streets. They are bought dirt-cheap –
a pittance – are taken into back-roads,
turned into carnival rides and goatee-clad assholes,
vigorous biceps and stable marriages. The dreams of my long-lost
brothers are sold as sure-things, or as dowries to women
who cannot read more than a page, even of excrement
listed on best-seller lists. My brothers' dreams slink
down staircases, across hallways ill-lit, through
the bright sunlight of open fields where we played as children.

The dream of my brothers finds escape in dark
corners of childhood memories,

each walking towards it as long as no one else
is looking – the dreams of my brothers fumbling
and fighting for themselves, for being liked
in vulgar terms – the most intoxicating kind –
where my brothers' dreams were stolen
and bought, and traded. And we wax eloquent
about ourselves in masturbatorial pleasure
unknown to the prudes,
our dicks hanging clean with the after-cum of unsatisfactory fucking.
Always willingly,

making this a most lucrative trade for us all.

We, the owners of such valuable gifts, we the bastions
of times of old, the ones
who swerve off the path, those few
exploring the safe areas around paths of safety. We skipping there
where money and spouses abound.

If only they knew that the dreams of my brothers have been sucked up and
regurgitated. If only we knew
that we were eating shit and puke, selling
it to the whores,
to the souls of our younger brothers.
The requiem plays so softly at times;
the bugles of our youth
working their soft ways into our souls, asking
abeyance to our thoughts and to matters relating to our lazing brains.

Never have we known the truth and never shall we with luck on our side.

I have seen the dreams of my brothers drawn into caves
where the lure of lust seduces the last bit
of us into submission,
without seeing that the simpler worlds we once
had are sold for sums bigger than our simpler vocabularies
of longing will ever understand. We struggle
towards the uniformity of life
with trust
but we see each other selling
our dreams into groups of unknown heritage,
trusting the world to pan out and let all that is good be.

I have seen the dreams of my brothers fucked with
and
ejaculated upon,
tied down
by nice people
in bed, whipped by subdued maniacs,
whispering into others' dreams that they would prefer
death to torture rather than choices.

My brothers' dreams keep me up through nights,
dreaming of tsunamis and destroyed hotels, bloody
cages of glass, and dogs attacking
each other without the correct provocation. I have seen my brothers' dreams
attacked by hungry dogs and jealous cats,
by voices modulated through jealousy;
those dreams never understood.

I have seen the skin on my brothers' arms fall off into the abyss where the corpses of dreams lie.

These dreams wake and walk
sometimes, troubling the fable creatures and legends of yore,
the masks and labels.
They talk of pillars in the courtyard often.
And of the pangs of hunger from the choice between soft
amnesia and satiation, sometimes without battle.

I have seen the dreams of brothers
disappear into sex,
into hash, fermenting
into nothing exciting,
nothing that competes
with the heroes of poetry once venerated,
no overdoses here, no fucking up, a few lines, a little puking,
no tragedy. Maybe we deserve
no fame except amongst the giggling
group of once-upon-a-time-teenagers we'd rather have mouth-fucked. My brothers'
dreams never tell me
if I should be grateful for fantasies or pour a drink.

alley #34

I cannot find
the poetry I had dreamt of
as a boy.

The wisdom of ages
is showered upon
me,
as
I
tremble and am told to sit still,
to watch and to speak,
to say little.

Trying to understand the
whispers of men who told me
they know more than I can.
The men whisper to me
words that are heavy
with smiles of the sorrowful.
I beg for more and doors I will never
enter are thrown open for me.

The memories of boyhood cluster around
seedy dreams of waking up. Sleep winds
past alleyways imagined as a child.
I weave through their grey insides and stumble
upon words from before.

The old are jealous of the young.

Children envy the past
that belongs to the dying.

Do you remember
when we walked
into the strange landscape
of cluttered words,
silent musings,
magic dust?

first-printed words

Still, though years have passed
and our paths have diverged,
my only reaction to those glorious
first-printed
words mirrors your disgust at
the adolescent discovery
of desire and the unknown. When those
simple sentences poured through
my closed eyes I worried of no parents
and judgements, no censorship from truth. A simple exclamation of the heart.
Yet that disbelief and shock rattle
past a mind struggling to reconnect
and all along you ask for another.
No accusation,
nor an explanation, just a simple acceptance
of the way the windows rolled up
every time we went out for a drive.