My rich phantasmagoria,
spewn molten, congeals black and dun,
dejection cone of scoria
post solidus, heat spent and done.

Damnatio memoria,
put one word down and then it’s gone
with a sardonic gloria,
a true Roman oblivion.

But out of folios thrown down,
a dead leaf mulch of red and brown
under bare branches’ bony sway,

green growth may break through to the light
in crocus mauve and snowdrop white
saffron gold-hearted, in new day.

The blue echoes the sun’s bronze gong,
Rings in the round dance of the hours;
Heliotropes and sunflowers,
Purple and blue, play tagalong

In resonance the whole day long,
And lesser arcs of groves and bowers
Give shelter from the summer showers
And noon’s strokes when they beat so strong.

Now every day you rise with me,
My tutelary deity
Aurora, brushing back the night

In swathes of indigo and bice
Like plumes of birds of paradise,
With rosy fingers, my first light.

You exasperate me
And it so sucks to be
This way, but everything else
Is worse

And earth’s imbecile weight
Of mortal fear and hate
Shakes walls hewn to ensure you’re
Secure.

Bring however much grief,
It comes as a relief
When all that is good and true
Is you.

Love, from the start, with two in one,
is paradox, a harmony
in counterpoint, an all or none
leap to rejoin my vis-a-vis

with no thought to the pro and con
engagement between you and me,
ready for what will be anon,
an opposite identity.

So, fronted by your sweet defile,
I slap and beat, not to defile,
but to ignite your torrid heat

so that, flagrant, you may, my dove,
burned in the Phoenix fires of love,
rise white and pure, affirmed, complete.