The Test 1 No hesitancy in this. I press my nose against a plank of wood sniff in the resinous atoms the sun’s dry handiwork. You could say I’m making a connection or perhaps this is the action of a very confused man who’s been wearing the moon’s hat for too long. 2 The lake is like a sheet of steel. An old lady rakes her fingernails through it tears open reflections and a red ooze leaks from the mother church a blue spill leaks from the father church and the lake is finally roughed up by a swirl of hands. 3 A certain physicality is registered. She kisses the youngest recruit then tells me it’s all part of an act. Who for instance she asks will stand tallest on the day?

Birthright There’s more of you on this bridge than I can count. The scenario is a river a city of cards in the process of collapsing. There’s more of you high at noon hearing the water gurgle. The moment begins to go under. A lean-to companion appears and a closeness retreats from afar. You wear a yellow scarf visualise an orange birthright of temples floating where clouds should be. You visualise bodies in the river drifting like plants tugged from their roots by the loudness of water. I share with you the life of a mountain in the blue eye of a stone in the sound waves of our footsteps in the bare branch of a willow gripped by birds.

Emissary Send me to the town’s bruised core to the late-night girls caught out by the early sun. An implosion of grace and the last owl tunnels home the first magnolia opens. Let me find alternative routes, lived-in dioramas souls dyed in red iridescence fag-ends attached to the mouths of brothers and sisters. Like a born prodigal I walk through kaleidoscopic patterns that bedazzle paths that keep halving, quartering. Curled up in my hand a message stains and smells won’t rub off. Persons unknown read to me amputations of sagas washed up on a beach.

Looks/Snapshots 1 The gritty mnemonics of a handprint reveal a life. What life? 2 After the rain puddles capture looks snapshots intensities. You’re easy to forget easier when I want to believe you’re not real. Because I’m compelled to I prise open the knotty appendages of undergrowth that enclose us nightly.

Kinship 1 From where should I start to gather ghosts at ground level? They assemble annually at the same place same city beach dodging traffic. It’s a case of zigzag living ascending descending. It’s repetition. rightly or wrongly. When meeting you, I meet them too female glossies

those legs

those well-thumbed undulations that peroxide. Like you, they flash god-manufactured digits soaked in the finest of fragrances. 2 So what from here? I check the bloodlines the best fuddy-duddies in the land who have our names. You say I’ve got my grandmother’s teeth my mother’s proclivity for regionalized moles. You say there’s more similarities yet. On the beach what’s done is classified as a ritual.