MUTE

Becoming more like a metaphor
Whore, failure of my expression
In granite valentine scripts
Of how Dad wrote to Mum.

Broken breath enters a stanza
As snapped bone breaks a ballet.
Singing a washed-up shanty
To summon rusticles from wreck, but
The harbour waters run still.

Sometimes the night wakes in the pillow
Fear that any movement should silently stop.
Fright’mares cut
                    never ending network of cables.
Skin light dreams into being that is real
…………and nothing but the truth.

Across a chestnut-horse smudge of river
In the slumped lurch of moon-shot,
Foam trails lead to houses of stone:
Plinth and balustrade of departed
The so-called dead.

Like being lost in the country at night:
No landmarks
Only outline of black and solid hills
Stretching further and beyond.
Like a piano playing in an empty room.
Like JFK riding the Dallas sunshine.

Like the feeling of my deep love,
Universal.