This deep voice

Comes graven with

A hateful honest timbre

Earned through the pain

Of a long life lived

As witness to the truth

That all beauty

Is a lie that covers as

A dust on the flesh

Of the unmoved dead

Lying empty in the sun

Returning to the nothing

From whence they did come

Sometimes I still text my mum…

Hope and truth

Dance round one another

Like binary stars

In a touchless waltz

Bound up in mutual gravity

Where truth is the sun’s return

At the warning day’s dawn

And hope is the yearning for it

In the cold heart of a darker night.

Truth stands uncaring in the distance

While lonely hope anticipates it

And seeks it out

That together they might create joy

The gold and red angel

Atop our Christmas tree

Has toppled over,

A bright victim of gravity –

And now she is looking

Right at me.

I wonder what angels see

When they topple over and look at me?

Do they see the guy I wanted to be

Or the embodiment of some

Grimm fairytale you approach cautiously?

Who really knows what angels see

When they topple over and look at me?

Probably nothing at all

As they consider their new station

Lost in a pleasant,

Somewhat unheavenly reverie.

A man finds his gold

In the strangest of places

Digging in the dark all the day;

A man finds it in the night

Pulling it cold from the earth

He places it in front of him

Staring amphetamine-crazed

And he’ll kill anyone who comes near

Staring and staring and staring

Until his heart explodes,

Until death takes him by surprise,

Starved and stinking and wild.

A man’s gold should stay buried.