for 3 years straight the singers forgot how to sing. they would only scream.

audiences left clubs and theatres and auditoriums with heavy metal headaches. when they went into their ensuites at home and opened their mouths to brush their teeth, screams came out of their mouths.

sticking out of their raw gums they saw alien teeth.

I always thought if I stared at the window long enough, when the moon came
Unaware for that moment of my name, or any one elses, at my back
I’d face tomorrow, replete with happenings and sparrows of light and gazing
Days to come, like eyes, to meet my
Terror-speckled head, still unrequited. My whole heart

Would heave with light, receptive
Open, like an iris, full-dilated, full
Of him or of whoever was to come, with teenaged graceless
Hope, I’d face the window, like the sun, to squint
Into the darkness of unpromised black, divining
Moonlight from the half-caste mix of streetlamps, moon
And black, over the streets that—wrung with rooves in rungs
By day so red, by night so grey
Would speak to me of lifeless love, to live
In me at a coming future day

But always future. Always yet to come
My readiness was all of me, I had become
The drum of my own beating heart and head and want
With virgin simmering waiting on my heavy knees to see
A face cut out in stars or sketched like a figure-skating god
Between the dots that join the night to galaxies
Beyond galaxies, beyond systems of love and hate. I would skate
Out on the thin limb of my wondering ache, the thin-ice dream
Of expectation, sleepy-headed wonderings and roamings
In the shadows of a bedroom, no better really
Than any dreary midgets in the suburbs.

Those four panes, about which
I meant all these words to be spoken, I would gaze
And gaze into life as if my electric greasy gaze
Had worked primeval muck into those plates of glass
Enlivened them with eyes and tongues of clear, cold life
To take the image of my prayer and cast it back, in black and white-of-moon
For me to catch, a dimming boomerang of shadow-stacks
Into the room, so carpet-dense and solid, whole
Where I would beg
Those window panes, hung vertical, framed as a goddess
By my teenaged eyes, to answer me,
And hope that when I next checked (the moment pending)
His email would have arrived. And so reply.