I am lost in a forest of strangers,
Conversing with the spirits of the wind and trees,
Arguing over the rustling of leaves.
In deep with these ecclectionaries,
Throwing paint with the revolutionaries,
Writing in letters and wordily,
Plotting a course through the forest in poetry.
Through the Dadists, the Surrealists,
The Cubists and the Modernists,
The selfishness of these brutish moments,
Bleeding in and crashing upon vivid sands,
Through heroic hands holding the once and future.

A Forest Spring and a Forest Sprung,
The dead and the anti-dead things,
Colour life and magic, broken in time.
Books of shadows and demonologies,
The Vashta Nerada remember,
And the Cybermen must hunger,
Over the same places in heaven,
The Original and the Final positions,
Dwindling tempers of the centre.

The oesophagus, the Sun and Apophis,
Another cloud comes to remind me of her –
The eye of the whole and the eye of the half.
The fashions of delicate and indelicate things.
Discordant pixies rendered in Unity,
Craven images in the Blender of eternity,
Distributed like feed to lonely Pygmalions,
Narcissists falling like Mr Vains into their images.
And Venus envious, is watching.
Scorn sets fire to her broken babies,
Writes them as the giants of ashen footfalls,
Trailblazing through the forest as wild fire.
Sooty butterflies flicker and settle as dust,
Only the kaleidoscope can tell their stories,
The reborn, and the Impossibility,
Of death in the Mind of Someone Living.

Dominique says ‘We only remember fire,
When we burn the names of wisdom to stay warm’,
Then we fall silent with him in grief.
Because a spark can level the forest, the world,
And it would be fine because we are frozen –
Words on a page – remembered and domesticated.
But through the holes in memory lies the unsafe,
The wet inks and the wet paints trembling.
Pulling wool over our eyes to hide from another storm,
The ways in – and the ways out – are complications,
To the Compass and Needlework of our longing,
Neither is sufficient without references,
Without living citation and recitation,
What can memory be without life to remember?
What is a dream, if it does not belong to the dreamer?
What is love if we do not move from centre to centre?
When such a butterfly flutters by –
Become the intermission of Earth and Sky.

It eats the tales while I grow the trees,
I am a daughter, I watched them bind the books,
And mix these inks.
I’ve heard these stories told a thousand times,
Now I see a story upon a shelf –
And I remember her brothers and her sisters,
I remember she used to teach more,
Than the persistence of hunger,
Of memory and disintegration.
I still remember,
The difference between a dream and death,
The difference between living and the anti-living.

These words belong to life,
The hunger, to anti-life,
Pushing us archetype by archetype into a singular oblivion.