I Have Witnessed Your Redemption

I have witnessed your redemption.
It didn't come like a flood
With a tragic surprise,
It grew with patience and power
In precise brush touches,
Oil on oil on Venetian stone.

I have witnessed your redemption.
It was not couched in false verses
Of maidenly rhymes or pious hymns.
It just fragmented,
Light from a pinhole obscurer
Scorching a cyclorama.

I have witnessed your redemption.
Not in dreams so much as prophesy.
In visions that come as ready-cooked
Revelations for the exhausted.
Your psyche was warm and your skin, sinless.
Your joy was not delirium, but born
From a rigorous noesis.

I Have Witnessed Your Redemption

I have witnessed your redemption.
It didn't come like a flood
With a tragic surprise,
It grew with patience and power
In precise brush touches,
Oil on oil on Venetian stone.

I have witnessed your redemption.
It was not couched in false verses
Of maidenly rhymes or pious hymns.
It just fragmented,
Light from a pinhole obscurer
Scorching a cyclorama.

I have witnessed your redemption.
Not in dreams so much as prophesy.
In visions that come as ready-cooked
Revelations for the exhausted.
Your psyche was warm and your skin, sinless.
Your joy was not delirium, but born
From a rigorous noesis.

Seven Sisters Blues

Two lipstick harlots gossip on the doorstep at Sauna 2k.
A silver Golf GTI sits like a preying cat,
Headlights insomniac in the red of the dark.
There's a menace in the railway girders at Finsbury Park,
A trapped tension in the bolts of the rust.
Greek cafes and hooka bars are empty but open
And boys talk football and bitches at the fruit stalls
Selling oversized watermelons and mangoes.

Heartbreak is a blessing.
You capitulate or you blossom.
Every time we love someone,
We become one of the prophets,
Tossing our souls like dice
Onto the sand,
Hoping the seed will find wet dirt.

Can you feel the crucifixion
In each of your summer breaths,
Your veins bleeding liquid truth?

This is the meaning of your sickness.
God's grace comes as pestilence,
In a contagious loneliness,
Disguising the sublime
As coal stains bruise Portland stone.

Midnight Belongs To The Boys

Holloway

A magpie cleans itself on his folium.
The clouds are careful among icebergs.
Apples green like erotic buds. The air shifts
In fractal choreography,
Freshening the fingers of the root.
Branches bend their hips like Hindu dancers.
For a moment a stillness comes with a glance of sun,
The wind pausing for a replete note of rest,
Before the city's saxophone blast.

We don't prepare for our passing.
We swallow our joys whole, forgetting to chew
Between each mouthful of light. We want
Salt and bitter citrus, treacle,
Instead of the slow malt aftertaste
Like paintwork on our curious tongue.
We want a shudder not love. Pressure not touch.
We think beauty is locked in the eyes and lips,
Not the toes, shoulder blades and armpits.
Our passions are gaseous light, suction lusts.
We neglect the wood fire chakras,
The slow cackle of heat and burn.
As a woman's soul cannot be traded,
A man's cannot be bartered or plumed.
Closeness is still theater, the body proscenium.

Defence Is The Best Form Of Attack

Riddle

Each kiss speaks its own poem.
Each touch is that of a sculptor,
Pressing his fingers into the wet world,
Smoothing out new forms of corporeal truth.
It is not a response to beauty. It creates it.
It is chivalrous, a defiance
In the face of infinities.
Even in madness, it finds new tactics.
It is not baffled by emptiness,
But sees loneliness as a possibility.
Sadness excites it, like a gorgeous, dirty city.
All noise becomes music. All hatred, a reason to live.
At its purest, it is furious.
More dreadful than a battle between two suns.