In the cold blue smouldering of autumn.
Among ruined gold leaves,
smoking berry embers -

pewter star-skulls gawk
from wet flower skeletons,

black-boned, with rickets,
arthritic knees.

Rusted wings burned.
Petal headskin unhinged - blown.
Flowers desolate beyond their own fragrant ghosts

which haunted summer in remission:
feverish green air, panting beds.

Riding the atomic sparkle, magnesium air.
Sweetening the twilight garden’s etheric breath.

Such darkless, sleepless, milky nights -
immortal North light
entering blood like a virus: white fever.

In my twitching,
hearing weird songs of a luminous owl,
godforsaken in a foil-eyed, sighing tree -

I know the world has killed me.
The Harvest Moon. Wine Moon.
Hunter Moon. Singing Moon,
I loved, is hauling gold sail -

will be vermillion tonight.
I can touch the blind silver,

put out my eyes with sodium stars,
because I am dead. Waned.

Up there in the Victorian purple -
light-embroidered vestments of Heaven,

lifeless planets sulk - my god,
they have even forgotten God.

Up there, something with red light for blood
is holed – fiery clouds are gory swabs.

The wound keeps gushing through the Sun
like a bullet-hole –

now goldenly yolking with clotted light.
I am hunted by slashes of cut-throat sky
haemorrhaging: daubed. Blooded,
flush in a convulsion of murderous beauty –
despite everything.

In the rosy pink grave of my skin, dripping -
to my bungling, flubbing heart-drum,
skeleton-schlepping march,

I must kiss myself better -
with my own wine-black lips.
Like the motherless, broken children.

Enculture flowery star-scars
burned into me like fancy chicken pox.

Shining only this one night in the year: Harvest.
Like blood illumining under ultra-violet light.

This is the guts of my grace.
This is the bloody mercy.