Regret

3.a.m. and I'm outside myself.

How can I miss things I've never had.
Explain it away but still the ghost remains.

Taunting weak moments
with borrowed memories
Culled from unknown sources:
the collective subconscious...or the supraconscious.
Memories of bones meshed and tangled tongue and gaze;

Unborn, yet they wear the skin of regret.

If I've lived epics of the imagination,
in planes that haven't yet been conceived
what does that make me?
Future tense or past imperfect...
Or simply present denied, deferred, refrained.

Recycled Ode to a Beachtown.

For Goa, December 25th,2000. Reissued for Galle, February 6th, 2011

Swimming out into the pinpricked night,
cleaving at the amorphous blue
with arms of curling smoke.

A spinning shuttle;
fairy-light spirals in my head.

A face in the dark - old; spry.
The dancing embers licking her fingers dry.

Beachfront in an hourglass.
Waves of euphoria pummel
the shores at the edge of time.

Orion sinking into slumber;
whisper goodnight,
and on the rim of the ocean:
crouching, hidden - Daylight.