The intimacy of anonymity

Be silent

Do not speak

Nor whisper

Your name

Its weight

I cannot

Carry

Don’t burden me

With your

Weight of history

Your body

In my arms

Is all

I can bear

Your tears

Do not

Move me

As our sweat

Trickles and

Pools in puddles

Between us

Be silent

Let seconds

Merge, as our

Bodies fuse

And breathe

Blends in

Muted moans

Then go

Unknown, back

Into your skin

Pick up

Your history

Leave me in

Intimacy, unknown

This inconvenient age

I should perhaps

Act my age.

Begin to settle

Into stultifying

Safeness.

The endless looping

Of mindless stories

To reassure that once

I held some relevance

Perhaps I should

Act my age

Accept with ungracious

Chagrin the things I missed

And smile with

Jealous maliciousness

At youth’s reckless

Gluttony of life.

Perhaps I should

But perhaps I won’t

For this is an inconvenient age

When chronology and attitude

Are at their antagonist best

While chronology creeps

At light speed

The insipient rebellion

Of youth blooms with

Flagrant disregard

At this inconvenient age

I will waltz

With the devil, and

Drink Bacchus’ cup

A broken heart

Is freed from fear

Its fragments resilient

Can carry regrets

Without fear of hell

Fog

It creeps surreptitiously

Choking dawns arrival

While dreams flickering

Play on screens

Of neural emptiness

Colour and diversity

Bleached into

Ethereal whiteness

Realities edges

Blunted

Birds wait in the

Suffocating sameness

While silence sighs, it’s

Aria of stillness

And dreams flickering

Fade

As day, stealthy

Creeps into the

Crevasses of sleeps

Blissful emptiness

Mown Grass

I crossed with

Mindless haste

Intent on fashion

Or, to be more precise

The salesman of the fashion

Somewhere half way across

The pungent scent assaulted

The odour of cut grass

Offended that its fecundity

Should now, impotent die

Then realising where I was

I saw those lines

Marked black

Straight lines

Tests of masculinity

Pubescent boys

Who ran

Straight and fast

Gained the accolades

Men in the making

While insects rose

Before me

In choruses of

Orgasmic delight

Feeding on decaying grass

I, in stepping

Out the lines

Remembered

The shame, of

Always coming last

Moments

The pressure of his hand

Anxiously uncertain

The sinewy sensuousness

Of quadriceps rising

To kneel in

Supplication or adoration

Ambiguously unknown

The warm toxicity

Of breath

Eyes searching

The boundaries

Of the face,

For some tenuous flare

Of recognition

Time eclipsed

In the masked ball

of reversed reality

Where nakedness is

Revealed but not

The intimacy of

Our name

Moments,

Fragments

Of time hunted

With Erotic intensity

The weight of bodies

Then elided from the day

Held in memory

Love's Distance

From afar

He said

I love you

He meant it

At least, he believed

He meant it

The residual afterglow

Of the friction

Of bodies

Warmth

Mistaken

For love

Pupils dilated

Search the contours

Of our faces

His history

Just beginning

Mine etched in lines

I love you

He said

Hoping it was true

But ours

Was a case

Of mistaken identity

He the youth

I might have been

I the man he might be

Too much distance

Too much hope

Too much fear

I love you

He said, with

Perfunctory politeness

I smiled

Knowing

Love’s distance

Same - Same

Once more

The barricades

Are built, and

Words hammered

Into one dimensional

Weapons.

Complexities are

Flat-lined into

Slogans

And flags unfurled

Men, who in

Humbler times

Acknowledge the

Unknowability

Of the mind of God

Assume the arrogance

Of God above God

And claim to know

The mind of

The Unknowable.

The foundations

Of society

Threatened by

A definition

Rather than

Our rage,

Our greed

Our failure of compassion

I have walked

These paths before

And smelt the

Sulphuric acidity of

Men’s impotent rage

That their fire and brimstone

Did not pillars of salt make

Of all the poofters in the place.

Instead in their fear

They shouted

As if that

Would send us

All to hell

Beneath the clamour of

The shouting

I hear the silent sound

Of grieving

Hope interned

In the mound of

Broken hearts

The dove of peace

Flown once more

And love

Cremated in anger’s fury

When will we learn?

When will we bow

In humility before

The diversity in creation

And accept

The diversity in humanity