Half-sleep Shard-scenes

A poet sleeps

To steal Dream’s

Shattered scenes;

Their stories flee

The breaking

Dawn.

*

A half-hill in black

Sailing on a lake

Of ashen mist.

*

Vermillion skies

Meet a bludgeoned cop

Car on the road.

*

Clouds like coal

Encroach on a quaint

Pastoral.

*

A wave-worn sloop

Nears long-missed

Pearl cliffs.

*

A wandering child

Breaches a hedge

To greet the grim

Forest edge.

*

A back-lander uncovers

Unbidden mourning

In the winnowing white.

*

Beneath a ruined arch

Whispers spill secret

Histories as the twilight

Sets.

*

In the lost nether dark

A winged flare guides

The herald hither.

*

There’s a Tolkien-esque

Divergence where

Green prevails

Yet roles reverse.

*

A bald man twirls

On a sword like a Beyblade,

His head blindfolded,

One arm raised towards

The furrowed dusk.

*

A game of chess

On a whaling ship

Ends when the leviathan

Rises. Darkness follows

As marine blue blobs

Are eaten in a candid

Flash.

*

A fisherman leans

Over the jetty’s edge,

Gazing through the sodden

Murk to meet, in a blink,

An undine smirk.

*

Light-years away

A being interrogates

The sky: Where are the children

You promised before? Can we

Hope for their descent?

*

A crag creature burrows

Deep beneath your home,

Sculpting hollows to house

Its foundling godhead.

*

A woodland warden

Finds our faded traces;

She leaves her own

To herd us home.

*

An apocalypse spent

Gazing at flame-fall

And starlight tears,

Watching endings,

As beginnings unveil.

*

You, scrambling

Through a cardboard

Warren, tearing its walls

To reveal endless paper

Depths.

*

Me, transcribing

Scriptures of ineffable

Sanctities, sowing

Meaning only through

The serendipitous

Variety of being.

*

And on goes the drift

Into occult bodies

Of senseless seeing. You and I,

Eternal castaways,

Kissing the shores of veiled

Subconscious, sniffing

Its salts, snatching its precious

Shard-shells to save

And unseam.