I

When Silent


.

Your standing at the traffic lights
Holding up a picture of your own face
Missing
But no one has seen you

Like pressed flowers in the layers
Of your skin
All those bruises are still there

So involved in your own
Melodramatic half presence
Too busy analyzing the stars in your mirror
To be in love

See your lover in a car inbetween red and green
And the eternal amber
Of the sun that says wait
Wait
And thinking
Should I know her

Her arm is resting on your back
While you sleep
Like a bow on a violin, when silent

.





II

Then Silent

.

The towers went on falling
Into themselves like fountains

Two lovers fell
As thier bones turned to powdered violins
Like chalk pushed into the pavement

Into a bed of flowers with notes attached
From thier ribs they leaped
Rather than burn in thier hearts


Soldiers went on being dead
The soldiers went on being dead
Under the trench of the sky like
An empty helmet with a hole in it
Their blood drying in the sun
And becoming poppies

Their souls the black centres
Pinned to strangers shirts
With eyes like surreal doorframes
In a desert

All is forgiven and forgoton
As everything becomes
But the worst is that
The consciousness never truly goes out

A dying lamp flickering
Blindly listening to the echoes
Of a few people trapped in a different time



Only slowly do the tears stop
As they shape into what has happened
Drop by drop
And each drop occupied
By an eerie iridescence
With what you dream to find
And will always dream of finding
Even if you never know what you will say
When you find her

In the rain. A streetlight goes out afterall
Having flickered like a jarred butterfly
Suffocated into a stillness

.






III

I can recognize your tears in rain

.

Hadn't your tears heard
The children in the snow
Were gone
And even the smudges were gone


The sunlight were turning the rooftops
And chimneys a nicotine yellow
birds were trailing like bows from some
Unseen kite
Held by your eyes
That through your tears
Like wet pavements brighten

How when you are left alone
With everything beginning from scratch
The half sketched station
The cold steel open-ness
Opens
Into small towns and fields and forgotton mills
You find your eyes following the birds
Whose patterns move onto the children in the playgrounds
And then into the sunlight coming inbetween
The railings like radio dials
Changing stations

Getting off on a new platform
Where a girl has fixed her eyes on you
Completely new. Smiles. winks
Walks away into never seen again
But makes you think


From an open window
You hear a violin
Through railings the sun blinks
A child runs a makeshift bow along them
Clattering along and away into the arms of a knelt father
A melancholy is being cried from the window
Someone, somewhere is waiting for you
To come home

.









IIII

Weight Loss


.


Each year
The letters become fewer and thinner
So do the wings
The birds fly lower and without pattern
The rain hardly makes a sound
Sneaking into the street at dawn
Dries by itself and the sun hasn't appeared

Your thoughts become less surreal
And simply occupy your vision
As rain does on a window
Splitting and trailing off

Less and lighter so your kisses
Like braille flat on the page
And dreams that float from you
Almost snapping and floating off completely
Thin and transparent
Into the thin and pale sky

More and more the world resembling
A tattered fair being packed away in the mud
You remembered as being so luminous

The wind leaves the clockflowers intact
But their petals simply fall with a shrug
Shaken snowglobes do nothing

Your tongue is thin as a stamp
You slip your thin soul through the narrow slit
Between waking and dreaming
Fall onto a heap of others in the dark
Unopened

And as each breath slips from you
So does an inch
Your memory is like sugar paper
The tattoo of the angel across your back
Is thicker than your skin
Her wings too are shrinking and shrivelling

Your tears sink into your skin like tissue
And your pain is absorbed all over again
This is how you dissapear
The world ending without effort

The slightest thing to finsih you off
Holding onto yourself as a clockflower does

A whisper from death
Nothing dramatic
And your gone
Before the words reach you

Offers you a light
And out
you go