My Room with Black Text

I live in a room, with black text scrawled
On ink-stained pages: typescripts piled
Ceiling-high, I live among notebooks and notes.

I have cabinets of ill-assorted documents,
Drawings sketching roads from there to here:
Roads well-trodden, followed for safety,
And those less-travelled, never taken.

But not for the want of deliberation.

Disaffection

What falls out of the sky was neither rain
Nor mercy: cold faces set hard
Against transgression only mirror it.

True victims are dead and buried,
But we take their status on till,
Like a sickness inside the family,
It rubs along with grief.

Out Patients

In the street, cold tranquility, traffic,
Yellow lines and wind from the east.

The hospital grounds lie green,
I remember, and the blossom,
Such as it is, pale red;
Too early in the season for warmth
With the vigorous chill of a sea-wind blowing.

Trees in the Forest

A tree in this forest grew for me
Rings around its heart, season by season,
Enclosing a hollow beginning, stretched to light
From a dawn in the leaf litter’s shadow.