The Desert and the Nomad

where did the sun go
has it penetrated my skin my eyes
where did the sun go as the wind blows against my tent
has the sand hidden my face

the surface of the dunes shifts
in infinitesimal migrations
crests of suspended yellow swarms
beat against us as we fight to the sandy summits

these are the masters wind and sun and sand

the nomad is a listener a seer or not at all

what a lesson to know you can never win
to know domination is in vain
and indeed vanity must be banished to the dark alcoves of night

i have dined with the nomad
i have listened to his music
i have witnessed his closed eyes smiling

these moments of light will rest within my eye
as the voices of dawn painted by the wind

i shall continue to sit outside
ever more convinced in my choices

the nomad writes directly in the sand
he writes directly in the sky
with her hands writing love on his black body
in silence the songs begin
just as babies cry at the heart of the camps

take up your instrument
and bide your timelessness

Through the Desert

where does the light fall
from the colossal bleeding eye of dawn
where is the immensity of everything
as it dissolves into deep blue
as i lose my hand in the dunes of golden sand

here the night is full of donkeys screaming sex at the stars
full of your absence
and the smiling voices of children

there is only the sun now
so hot this desert so blue the skies my love
the houses are mud ovens baked with straw
the walls are hot like winter fires

i have been touched by respectful fingers
who know the heat and the mischief
which burns on the heads of liars

come to my house and drink tea the man said
my house is your house he said as he axed the emerald palm branches
come taste these dates they are good for the heat

what this berber man gave me
was part of the nothing he had
just carpets on the floor where he slept with his ten children
his house full of pride
full of the desert
full of the oasis

i have four dates in my pocket
i have already eaten four others
should i eat them
what can be kept of a moment
of dawn as it pours into midday
i have closed my eyes again and again
to empty the living gut of my pain

how can one keep what cannot last
is love the only fruit
which defies these laws of time

The Innocent Ones (for Vincent Van Gogh)

i am with the innocent ones

the ones who never willed fame

the ones who understand the suffering of women
their kindness beneath the shame

the ones whose steps
become apparent in shy moments
barely audible fractions
solemn scrolls on dancing shoulders

the innocent ones
who wrote letters
to the day
to the hour
to colours

the ones who feared the winds
and the grumpiness of a father
the shackles of religion as they constricted a mother
into denying the art in her son

the ones who carried out a minor task
a craft they loved and which only they could do

the innocent ones
who could only try to understand how or why
doubt and uncertainty within their every sentence
like the cold sits in the mistral
like the ache in the vertebrae from an unkind comment


one does not await one's hour

moments approach

a poet cannot invent his reader
any more than gold can convince a thief

gingerly i walk these lost territories
stones jangling in my ripped shoe

i do not rue the day i left the path to sit under the olive tree
it was the day a canvas looked at me
and asked me to paint

11.9.11

sometimes Nina Simone sings

the depth of her music
stretched over water over land

i can listen to her today
because what happened then
was already withheld within her broken beauty

she still sings from the future

a symbol strong enough
to enter catastrophic time

in the belly of my wounded being
the parched ground shakes
miniature deaths falling into my useless words
burning my eyes with speechless prophecies

sing with me now
with what of the true remains

There are no Answers, an open letter to Tim Barrus

what is beauty? i have often asked myself. why does one feel compelled by one image rather than another? what emotions are there in between myself and a painting, a poem? what emotions which are only mine because the poem or painting instills them in me?
what has washed it all away? beauty and emotion both? a kind of pornographic violence, a dulling of the wits, an attention deficit raised to the level of world.

what is disgust? greater perhaps than anger i can speak beyond anger because my disgust for this world is such that i can stand away and vent far more than anger, and show all my pain. i can write it but i cannot show it without hurting. thus what you have done is to me impossible. my anger is invisible. it is a moment permanently superseded with words which flow constantly even when then pen cannot act.


what happened to Pasolini? is like asking what happened to the truth? why did the herd turn on him then? why was the sexuality of his pain so evident then? what did he go seeking? was he so consumed by guilt? an exit from love? from the love of his mother which dominated everything forever? could one hate society more than Pasolini? could it have grown worse? poetry in the form of a rose and 120 days stand side by side, antitheses one man could no longer bridge.


those who live without pain are not our friends. we can only disbelieve them. i write because i live my pain as an offering, a walking over, a step to the side, and i write it.

we live our pain victoriously. i do not mean we have overcome our pain. i mean we are unashamed to be who we are and feel what we feel. we call it a dialect of wounds.


so the shame at being human is a disdain for sexual practises which are locked within power games, within ounces of punch, grams of speed and high. it is a question of being to them when love is always about feeling. being is a sham. i have never been anything but a river of becomings. and yes i have been punched but i have retaliated. they have come for me in numbers just as they came for Pasolini, plotting his murder, plotting a rape, a perfect crime.

love and sex ever pushed further and further apart. money the liquid key used to exchange dreams for fantasies. fantasies of big and better. fantasies of forbidden. fantasies of a long way away, never to return… only you have to and sometimes there is hell to pay.

we seek poetry within certain fields, we seek it out but in a way it is the only thing you cannot find. it is there already or not at all. in that outside particle of becoming. when a guitar stands to play and propels us beyond with fingers from heaven. what is personal becomes universal, it unfolds a story which could never have been told otherwise. it was always there. it has just been chosen.

pornography is not a science. can it be an art? i have my doubts. but it is a form of commerce. and very effective at selling through subliminal manipulations. the kicks hidden. the broken jaws of children as they break on the rocks of disease and racism cleansed and polished. everything shines even the sexual organs of drugged actors as they oil the cogs of anti-seduction. pornography is monotony itself, the repetition of a knockout blow. bodies empty and fill in complete irrelevance. what is animal had to be overcome, the human being a stillborn nightmare. we are nowhere near achieving anything at all.

i saw the Pasolini in you. i saw the monstrous sincerity in your words. i cannot read your videos but i can string the abstract line which takes the sex away from your brain and lends it miraculously to the river of becoming. there is no sense in lying. we are too far gone for that. some of us can barely dance so scarce is this air we breathe, so full is it with the converted lies of dystopia's being, the radioactive insincerity of governments overcome by marauding reality.

our blood breathes in poems. every moment saved from murder writes itself to us in adulterous pitch. this is just the beginning of the end. it will take us a long time to die.

Saturday Rain

suddenly the rains camebringing grey-black marauding strangers
to world's end horizon
this ancient land
where Aeneas once came and left

the vines of Byzantium
seeded in this sweet red earth
entwined with skulls of massacred Christians

the scream of a Gypsy
on the dry cascading rosemary stones

the serpent in the cistern
sitting patiently on a crucible of quiet

the fiendish steps of a dancing woman
smitten by a tarantula on a scolding hill

in this location in this operatic chest
words fall down like sacred rains

four months of drought
banished in one october night