WAKING, DREAMING, DREAMLESS
The horse of old age is on the horizon,
mane ruffled by the black north wind
and lit by the setting sun. It gets closer
even as you look the other way,
carrying in its saddlebags
fragments of the future: a riot of rocks
that time’s fast glaciers will leave behind
as they gouge an empty plain
where lonely memory stretches,
sharing its secrets with the sea.
DEPARTURES
A town created for the railway
is an empty platform once the trains have gone.
At three in the morning I hear
slicing through the desert-tinged air
the clank of wagon after phantom wagon
carrying away the well-remembered dead:
old people smiling in vanished summers,
schoolmates lost in traffic accidents
and those who hung, gassed or shot themselves
because the isolation told them to.
There’s a vacant second-class seat
in one of the very last carriages,
but I’ll tear up my ticket tomorrow.
Published in The Horizon
SECRET POEM
[Written in white ink on a closed black box]
The content of this poem
is invisible
and known only
to the writer
Published in Dadakuku
S.C. Flynn 