Ascending scales
Notes of wave like music in my head
I want to fly north towards
The peak I stood and saw the sea all around
Cape Rachado gate to spicy Malacca
The force below the lighthouse has laid many merchantmen to die
At sea
But I look out to calmer blue line water moving
And wanted to float wings spread
Up and away
Higher still over that crystalline marine

Poems

Poems

The scratching goes on

Looking at each other scratching

One brown fur and eying

The other polyester prim and eyeing

The orang utan

Wondering

Why he is his keeper’s brother

Square box images
Of rough television love
Are no power to cook
The mind’s raw thoughts
Still out of that scene

I keep the key to the dragons of joy

Then turn the key to moving delight

Rushing out in a circle dance

Free of the music dance box

Of the dolls in delight

No I will not jump with another

That near incarnate expectation

To jump while dancing may be to fall

But oh tempting possibilities

The search for a sense of all

Is it a tumble in an earth bound

Hollow sound of shattered expectation

Dragons like wingless butterflies

Gossamer spins sycamore into the dark

I see key like shapes sold metallic

Uncut hardness

On the floor of an image making mind

I stagger up

Think of her dancing

And close the door

You used to quietly sit like laughing Buddha
I didn’t know inside your head
As little came out to say how
Your head was
So I would quietly sit
Not knowing you were not
Interested in knowing inside my head
Only knowing that
I wished I knew

Dragon images
Curved backs twisting snake flows
With strong lines of spiky protection

This picture of power
With open mouth of fiery being
Is in front of me
Dragon dancing on porcelain
Like mind moves symbols caught

Moving hard-edged soft curves
Inside fire sleeping
Dragon in my mind
Dragon ever dancing

Ascending scales
Notes of wave like music in my head
I want to fly north towards
The peak I stood and saw the sea all around
Cape Rachado gate to spicy Malacca
The force below the lighthouse has laid many merchantmen to die
At sea
But I look out to calmer blue line water moving
And wanted to float wings spread
Up and away
Higher still over that crystalline marine

To burn in the aching sunlight
Now right now
Outside a small window
Where I sit in quiet gray
The notes inside my head descending
To bass thumps and long spaces
Land-based straight-edged city
Sing of less joy
The time hits hard
When I think of capes of land wrapping green around blue
The sea where you and I looked out to horizons

Today I found a black tie
In my cupboard
So clothes are snapshots in memories shuffle
The black a mourning signal
For death inside of something
One no longer has
Seeing the giver in an inner photo
A black tie with colours splattered through colours sparkle in the cold dark
Of an empty room

There is a tie in my cupboard
And a knot at my bare throat

If distance is a poem factory

Two forbidden miles

Would be an epic

Said in one word

You

Freeze-frame
It’s that image of you again
When not a word confirms your being
My thoughts go shutterbug in witching hour
Drift in the heat of humid noon
Not knowing why you come
As a picture
In nights dark moves
Bright light days of dream making
And still you do not call
And I in quite pride
Cling to my freeze frame pictures
Waiting

When you hear the only voice in the room
Is your own
Dark presses to a place inside
Its reach out for waves of sound to ride
Its up to hip-hop and the breathing of Andean flute
Till its silence again
The dark of the inner voice
Calls for the enveloping
Of a warm pair of arms

In the hopscotch switching
Of my brain there’s no need to read
Of cyberspace information overload
Inside one tiny space
Between two ears
Synapse guns are firing
Rounds of sound bite postcards
Miniatures of all the complexity
Of life’s swarming swimming parade

If I could freeze the kaleidoscope/channel the noise
Like the boxed reality of switch on & off cyberspace
How easy surfing the world would be

Inside my hurricane country head
Parts of who I am and was
Blown off course by sweeping moves
Of changes unplotted

I hold a pen to dot the ‘is’ and
Cross the lines
Yet sentences are struggles
Of humid contexts
Where the absolute of a word melts
Tropical cities parading sterile pictures
Parts of where I’m going and who I want to be
Are melting in a mix of old and new

It is the witching hour
When ones body is with aloneness
The hum of traffic
Welcoming as a distant affirmation
Of hustling market places
Games on new courtyards
Movements of dance more predatory than
gentle

In all this - a search for quietude
One wants poetry in life
- enough words