be with me now       in voice       help to lift me skywards, lady       arms like music box dancer, poised like ballerina       pink and blue gauze ballgown, costume jewelry tiara, lipstick smile and pale skin       music to dance to until we die       on a desk in my sister's bedroom one morning, thin summer light through single glazed window       brass window fasteners twisted to open, dusty windows never cleaned, cracked from tennis ball impacts       how we leaned out and looked over the gardens and the hedges to somewhere distant       our enclosed world       bookshelves and drawers and wardrobes crammed full of memory       accumulated possessions of 15 years emptied one day       our home, full of sunshine and voices, full of waking nightmares       we walked the carpets in the small hours trailing dreams from our fingertips       our skin and our smell we left in the corners untouched by cleaning       I am a small child lost in a red crystal       I am a man waiting for a small child to descend from the overworld       I am a boy lost in his own cold bones outside an empty dark school waiting for a man to come and bring him home       I am an old man trying to remember his father's face       lost moments strung together on a tattered string       lady, be with me now       let me live in the song you lift to the sky       your arms and eyes darken and you teach me about the sea       one day I said that I would learn how to swim       that I would swim the spoiled sea of my parents' dreams       let this story fall from me now       I am of the sky and the waves and the stars, if you will bless it to be so.

--

lost we reach for words       lost we       only for moments crushed       how blurred horizon breeds cloud ghosts, blurred vision like rainwater window, songs for sliding down       how in panicked sparks sunlight cuts into the mind       naming evanescences in amnesiac time, in time of perfect garden, age of gold, names given again for new beginnings       meaning emerging from chaos birth sack       love from eyes       horizon of sisters and brothers and lost toys, lost books, lost living brightness       friends poised invisible under weeping willow, unable to cross the water       lady wreathed in smoke stepping through puddles that do not touch her skin       soaked earth yielding fruit and footprints, lunar memories, a future death plummeting back through time.

--

touched by voices and listened to by light, we transmigrate       these are your windows and doors, winter-chilly and smudged by tears and fingerprints       doors in the dark, doors in the day, doors along an endless corridor of what may be       that window you flew out of in your mind every night       rising through tortured cloud giants       purple starfield and streetlight glow       naked temples flattened and opened like unpeeled tesseracts into streets and houses and staircases       mother and father embracing underneath the black gates like forgiven titans       sister and brother hand in hand under petrified glittering forest, canopy of silk and birdflight, music of absolution       memories of other planets, washed down through new mind as over waterfall in tiny urban park       where as a child you stand and sing, lady       where you stand and sing us all to wake again.