I may have watched too many crime shows
but now when I go out I look for cameras
and think about living in a Surveillance Society
and the life of all this tape before it gets recycled

“Sick Man Back to Yogya” is the graffiti I see scrawled on the side of a building on Gejayan St. I don’t know who Sick Man is or whether it is good that he is back in Yogyakarta, but I appreciate the effort of self-expression in this often reticent and self-censoring society.

ox-blood skies but I meant well

words shift and re-form scenes from pirandello

verily, verily, verily, verily
life is buttercream

Petals everywhere as she watches the Mexican dancing daisies high on the wall. A rose pink blush to them as she sees their artificial counterparts scattered backstage where the new chap confuses Sleeping Beauty and Giselle. He loves me he loves me not with a quartet of prince’s each with a bloom to offer for take or toss. a missive of love. perhaps with memory future in a mirror I arrive beside you holding a fragrant bouquet. Leafing through the pages of a Scottish poetry anthology, it all comes flooding back as I cup a palm to catch the tears.’left the thorn’ beneath a fingertip discs of scarlet

I like the paintings of Paul Cezanne; I like the music of Gabriel Faure; I like all the novels of Jane Austen; I Iike the poems of G M Hopkins;I like the way this prose sounds rhythmic and I don’t like the fact I can’t come up with a title or haiku but maybe I can …tree and I as one my initials carved in the bark another’s hand

No.

The 1984 version is definitive.

mise en bleu
the antediluvian primrose
persists

my
eyes that
would hear silence

are

as hard-wired
for tragedy

as an old Buick
built
on Friday
after
four p.m.

through air
thin
as dimes and dreams

but are due

a touch
of lemon-yellow

moon

birches
bid me

walk on water

icicles
drip

with

anticipation

a hush

on
the other side

of time