Me and the Moon

A playful rapport

with the space-suspended Moon.

“You orbit me,”

I tell it to its face;

just banter.

We’ve weaved through hard times,

me and the Moon

“Where have you been?”

I ask it after the clouds have cleared.

“You look different.”

I think of an African fable;

a mosquito who thinks it matters to an elephant.

“Goodbye,”

it says to the grazing giant, who replies,

“I didn’t know you were there.”

Tonight the moon is sulky;

an unglamorous gibbous

in a cold cloudless sky.

“I know you’re there, Friend,”

I reassure the Moon.

“I'm here too.”  

The Gull

This morning

as I walked to work

sipping at the idea

of solipsism

and the perfect spring morning

I couldn’t be sure of

a Hove gull breached

what I was beginning to think

was a lonely periphery

Erratic and out of sync

with the morning crew

and traffic

It cut through a cloud

of starlings and away

out to the giggling sea

and I knew like the yachts there

I was not alone

The Tall Teller

Forgive the autumn traveler

as he catches glimpses

Recalls himself in a song

or a beam of warm sun

and sometimes after

the first seven or eight sips

thinks yes

This is it again

He remembers the fruitiness

of vintage summers

honeyed air

that he’s not sure

really happened

or the salty kisses

of ocean flings

that didn’t for sure

It doesn’t matter

Memories are as

real as lies

So forgive this autumn traveler

as I sit and stir wine

for stories

and fish love through

rays of light

It's Wired

I love my owl:

a substandard

piece of African art

from a blanket

on a Jozi pavement,

where it was by far
the cheapest

and least ambitious offering.

My owl, I sense

would stumble and fall

with its next step.

Don’t think it's sober;

it’s never truly been new.

I love my owl.

The Cleaners

We clean in lieu

of conversation,

we sweep passed each other-

spectres in an untouching waltz

on finely cracked thin ice.

weightless

loveless

apart

Our flat, like lustrous crystal

in a museum of such things-

polished brilliant but unused,

to be looked at, not touched;
a home of ghosts and echoes.

dustless

lustless

empty  

Finding Out There Were Mountains

the mountains here are wild;

you'd never know if you didn't get out of the city

which can consume you as it almost did me.

for the first six months of my living here,

I truly believed the entire island to be a metropolis.

I knew my way around town, Taoyuan,

having purposely lost myself a few times

on my motorbike- my Sanyang one-fifty.

I would ride around; I quite enjoyed being lost,

until I'd see something I recognized

and doing it this way the city soon took shape,

like a forming jigsaw puzzle.

it was on one of these adventures

when as lost as I'd ever been,

I reached an interesting cusp,

where the relentless city gave up as

up until then I had never dreamt it would.

In its place cut a deep valley;

the road I was on, the number seven,
wound down into it.

I could make out a river in a huge floodplain,

making tributaries of itself and reforming

like a silver child with too much space to play in.

but it was the mountains on the other side of the valley

that ensnared my gaze and attention- steep and jungled,

and clearly the number seven cut into them.

I took a chance on the petrol I had left in my tank;

the gauge was broken and always showed full,

and made for them, popping out of the urban fizz

like a cork.