when evenings skin becomes brittle and breaks open

revealing a terrible night with all its hands

and the trees full of birds and a discordant song

across the fields a murmur begins

oh savage beautiful women here i stand

with a spearful of fish and my dagger of wands

i am the cripple dance man with my luggage missing in utopia

hey i am waltzing through your open gates

where a fountains spray has cooled my burning ardour

where my tumescent ambition has ripened into sweet actions

and the eyes may graze for a moment upon yonder hills

in the candle light all the lamps and buttercup runneth over

the liquid milk of midsummer midnight now long spilt

when i was once your barrow boy and rode home to my school

when i was your fletcher and arrows filled our day

when i was your little dog boy and you taught me how to jump

then your castles were only in the sand now wonderful queen

and you overlooked a battlement of haze and blue blurred horizon

no ordinary child you held future between fingers

i have returned then from my exile

in burnished silks i rode henceforth through the creaking leagues

the hymns immolated by gods true presence

of course i knelt…who wouldn’t?

i am purified on the slag heap of decades

i am exonerated by the same crocodile judges

who sent me down

i have come back now in my tosca gretel slim tone

i have come back upon coins and postage stamps

i have come back as a whisper down a long cold line

this is all nonsense why who reads such stuff as this…?

bless my martinet blanket wear you lay disrobed during your shoot

blessed the imprint of musk you made upon my faintest door

in a window you now seem to be captured upon the pane

i cherish the ash where my room burnt away letting in the sea

in a green rush we were laughing as a ship we are swallowed

in the long life of a sparrow the worm is still to appear

by that i mean europe is elsewhere now take these claws away

it seems i have been sitting on the swings forever and ever

now I’m so dizzy as the world whirls round

i clutch at the maple and myrtle and elm

i am the photo of antiquity taken by aristophanes

splinters of the one true cross i bear rivers to cross

among the tribes and cults i bring disco music trapped in a skull

unreleased from my sins i travel light the globe in my mystery suit

i spit out poetry to hounds and mynah birds

but i digress in this garden of your loveliness

with your tawny feeling thorn of softest morning

i am the dawn of an empire briefly flourished in a mirror

archived in the memory of a flash

translated into the words of the wind

the flowers that uncurl to the darknesses fingers

a sickness that preys on a pale child who walks away

a miserable dark spirit who keeps coming back again in new shapes

a malevolent shadow that lingers on even in the brightest sun

with winter shudders i approach thee now

stupid as i am i have found my way to these dreaming gardens

oh so heavy my burden of slurs

dented in an accident they beat my panels

in flannels and wool the dissolving pull of my lamb

the scramble for light that begins in a tunnel

by your lily pad ponds no doubt out grown and over fond

see me as the salmon rising for the wriggling nymph on the surface of your brook

the cold mouth river where i swam against the dam wall in the fall of man

think of me as the immediate distant taste when we kissed in my dream

the creamy edge of the land that crumbles into sand

you held me in your hand

and