on the small harbour quay - a restaurateur tipped his garbage casually into the Mediterranean. A night of fish bones, cigarette butts, bobbed in an oily slick. West, into shadow, Ant’nošs anchored off the headland, outboard silenced, dynamite exploding like an octopus under a shoal of fish beneath.

Alcatraz not Minoan ruins. Morning mist hangs its garden off the Golden Gate bridge. Men in fog loom large. Fog or ram’s horn? Container ship - warrior barge, passes under with another load of Japanese cars to feast upon freeways. ‘Straight guys are at a premium’ you said. (Or so I overheard). Seven months under your roof in your bed. I never got to Texas - never hit Route 66. Marooned on my Isle, deep within that lustful, solitary confinement.

Do words bring to mind flat-sided buildings, cliff face, waterfall? Each emotion to its respective season and climate. Age means era, epoch, each physical transformation (our) body plays out. Journey from foot to fossil print, the single breath, misting to humidness. Blood shadows a dense valley; untidy buildings, an old saw-mill; blood thins to Gods’ ichor. I approach you like a drive-in movie. Memory’s what we miss, we spool reels of it.

Serpent-backed bridge profiled: the city, chalk-toned, laid out like a shooting gallery. From Green Point (sub-net ghosting to Georges Head) a V of gulls speedily hugging the harbour; its surface serried, grey disturbances. Wind grain. Yachts coasting, canvas slap. Manly ferries, (green, beige upper work) slide between white, salt-shaker buoys. Trouble in Paradise? Never! Spring thunder ain’t no car bomb.One quadrant of sky turns,
face up, black as the ace of spades.
Much as a God can manage
muttering from the side of his mouth.
Star flecks, nova spittle. Rage of
emptiness pours through, for the hell
of it, endlessly. Looking back to
what beginning. The whole shebang
advances toward, beyond our
best efforts. We live under a Niagra
of star fall, huge optics dilate time,
blackness like velvet slips over
chrome. Sounds of nothingness
strung between a singlet of lights.

Barrel of the sun, gun-wad,
cloud packed, cools to Napoleonic
afterglow. The sun is soldier
and hero, after all; always on call
to strike the last pose, profiling

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