Always pick a thing but never make it yours

Most of my names I picked at random:

I was always disingenuous like that,

Always grasping at the most

Floral pockets of air, labelling them

As if I could see different hints in their hues.

Written in water, crouching down

With a cold finger

To watch the ripples

Undo, then reclaim, serenity.

The trees swaying in the background

Like the baying crowd of a silent documentary,

Birds bursting through the skyline

Big as rockets, rapt as kids

The flowers groaning at the surface,

Popping sunshine and dewdrops

Like dilettantes, loved and damaged,

Blood pumping through their veins,

Veins pumping through the past.

I liked the scent of water,

Like the sense of resistance it transmits

When you push a hand through,

A bee blundering on its way to pollen.

I like the rage of the ocean-met river,

The one careening around the other

Like a beaver and the roots of a log.

I like the lot that it seems to put forward,

The soft thrill of rain

On my dilapidated spine

With the bone-froze cold

On my delaminated teeth.

But I write of it too much,

And I think about it never.

I remember, halfway home

To an olding house,

A youth in which I made up words

That, meaningless, would mean

The moment into which I spoke them.

I say them sometimes still,

Like the scarescreaming blind

Of a whizzing madman’s map.

I let the feel

Of the hard concrete from my old school

Press against my feet,

I hear the rain,

I hear myself a million days ago

I weep thick drops of golden honey,

Missing no thing and all things:

I write it in the water

And wade my way through the echoes

Like a hollow ghost

In a new home town.