SLEEP EATER 

I harvest the sighs in the house of my hunger

As sleepwalkers flood in the forest

And the forest creatures are still asleep

I move between spaces

Opening spaces

Drifting like dust through the flowers of dread

As voices make night 

In the blood of the desert

Where the sun is a smouldering charcoal

I bathe in cinders

Breathing thunder of smoke

I savour the ashes the vapour of onyx

Glutting on shadows 

And gorged on green echoes

Emerge from immersion in colours of sleep

With hallucinatory wings plunging in stolen somnolence 

I glide through murk of the marsh

To the mossy horizon

Where the graveyard also has teeth

Deep in scarlet weeds

Like mist I dissolve the bones of sleep

From what is devoured you’ll wake from forever 

Clutching at fog

The disappearance of night

BRIDES OF MELMOTH 

Surrounded by hollow hills submerged in the forest 

The ancient castle lies gathered in ruins

We’ve always been here

Standing in obsidian distances

Observing the old and strangely dressed pilgrim

With long grey beard

Collecting his colourful mosses and stones

In reaches of solitary emptiness

We’re here

In the colour from the dark

Unfolding like flowers before their time

While fed on famine 

Voluptuous and overwhelmingly sexual apparitions

Emerge from the mouldy cellar

Transparently 

And solidify in the soft evolving shadows

Avoiding erasure by moonlight

They come crawling along the broken battlements

In folds of green darkness

Through gloom-fed cloisters and cells 

In search of desolate presence

They drape themselves thickly around our floating heads  

Silence succeeds silence

Sealing our eyes with cement of sleep

In the castle

All sound has been banished

The ceremony begins with great festivities

BLACK CHANNEL 

There are others

The others thin like cobwebs drifting on wind

Lying low

In the desiccated spaces 

Of outer catacombs 

Observed in the red somnolence

The others

With green spears for long smiles

And cotton mouths

Their fingers lined with teeth

The others

Eating their meal of mould and water

The others 

Gliding backwards 

Through the arch of the church  

Sifting salt

With eyes in every place

The blood glows and bubbles in their veins

There are others

The others

They’re with you now

BELTANE  

When I hear your call it summons up apparitions 

Twilight swallows the mouth of plateaus

And voices say to look away 

The apparitions flow to my mood like mist

Lugubriously

And into magenta pools of moonlight 

Beyond my window ledge

Where the strange wind blows and gulps for breath

With a sour purplish odour

The voices seem to be moving away

They scuttle along scarab-like

As my body floats apart and into itself 

Traversing ancestral spaces

Which you raise like an inner red spectacle

Unearthing astral mountains

Down below

Where my invisible silhouette

Hangs in heavy water

Glowing discreetly with phosphorescence

Which you wear for a robe

While our skulls dissolve like sugar in doubled echoes 

We continue on  

Trundling towards mystery

The immaculate stain in the marrow of milk

ESP 

I hear you without your voice I am lost in a land of silence 

I vaguely recall revisiting 

Via strange transpositions of time and place

The tomb on the top of the mansion 

The past lives you’ll remember when the time comes

You’ll hear the sound of my voice

A strange presence an understanding walks between us 

And I’ve been wondering 

Is your wife still at the psychiatric hospital 

She comes to me at night 

We run away in a green sea of light

The last time the dead were unhappier than musty exhibits

At museums under curfews 

They often come to me pleading for haircuts 

To have their fingernails trimmed

Sometimes it’s the most beautiful thing in the world

And it brings tears to my eyes  

You’re horrified of me aren’t you I can feel it

Even you look at me with fear

I wasn’t there but if I was I was sleeping

So don’t be afraid

Place your hands in the palms of those sitting beside you  

Be receptive 

To the energies around us

BY THE SUBTLE GESTURE OF YOUR PREMONITION 

The black echoes reverberate in the eye of the labyrinth

As swarms of lovers catch their breath 

Lying flat on the pavement 

Like fish too tired to bother anymore

Where the portal of night swings on a rusty hinge

How many times

Have we tread this gelid turf

To gather the glowing omens of night worms

In the black house under water

Where gingerbread statues open the cave of teeth

Under water in the black house 

Where the green cobwebs frame the magenta shadows

The sconces ooze with colours

And corpses repeat with retractable grimaces

Emitting mists of sighs

Down there

The soothsayer’s smile is a graveyard

She whispers in many tongues of the metronome

And dark lichens pour from her mouth 

Oracles come irrevocably 

Like jewelled birds from far away astral cages 

Strutting along the avenues of jade 

All hot and bothered in the squalid month of convalescence  

Look up she says 

Or you’ll become like the others

A remorseless ghost

THE FEARLESS CHARM OF THE SOOTHSAYERS 

Welcome to our happy palace our secret meeting place 

It’s not a coven more a telepathic exchange 

Why thank you how do you do 

I often get nosebleeds in the presence of psychics 

The persistence of psychic vampires

Is as evident as whale music has a calming effect on the nerves

I can press my thoughts into your film

And you can develop them 

Place them into a scrapbook for safekeeping

Given the lack of long-term memory

From all of the drugs you’re taking from the doctors

The countess died in a trance at a seance

Come rain or shine

She was obsessed with talking to the dead 

Can you hear the spooky music from the parlour below

A shadow appears on the staircase 

Much like any other perceptual phenomenon 

The umbrella is dripping wet 

There’s a puddle forming on the wooden floor 

Something glows in the pooling water

The hand it comes out of the shadows like a green spider 

Don’t worry it’s just a dream

Charles

Don’t tell me it’s just a dream 

My eyes are wide open I’m wide awake

CLAIRVOYANCE

Waves come ashore like purple cursive script 

As night birds prepare to nest 

Brooding beyond the wall of slumber

The medium between the living and the dead 

Wears the amulet of a long dead witch 

The will of the long dead spirit is placed in our hands 

And unknown quantities of mystery

Are magnetically sealed in spider silk

The table shudders with sighs of levitation

Sound is dislocated at its source 

As ghost galleons emerge from night’s ocean

Fog carries the scent of star anise

And the flotsam of future eons begins to wash ashore

I am under your spell

Who are you

Eyes burn like fire