Whose fantasies do I
provoke, swinging through the woods
with my ten-inch saw, light enough
to lift overhead,
sharp enough to take your leg
without blinking.
The manual is long, a detailed
song of woodsmen felling trees.
I am cutting firewood,
nothing more than thigh-thick.

(Previously published in Earth's Daughters #19/20, Three Marbles (Cranberry Tree Press, 1999) and Plane Surfaces/Plano de Incidencia (CCLEH, 2002)).

**************************************************************************
Jack Knife

Nicholas Alexander

flick
goes the gears
colliding thumbs in darkness
deadly units of gray

horrid bonfire
bad story after bad
leaves in the unhurried tree
mixed presoaked deadly roots

can never sense its
island drift into
wayward rock icicles
it missed

the flag refurling celebrations
the valid avail held
back by scarred minor
vacuums that scurry
along the creaking alley

the corner of a vortex
lined shiny and metal

“rees the vapo nort of the vospa”
was
raat on the dark fort in the estuary

ripped by wind

all swords swayed port
all vacant mort justification
spellbound august yet casual
a Mexican bandito relaxed into
gambling instincts borne of sweat
and riding in for wreckage
on the backs of fine horses

all the impossible heroics of cardboard
marketing campaigns eroding maximisation

pale yardstick of memoir fantastic
rise to bellowing and yeowing
the cautious marauders of wisterical flaws
a pause in the harsh morse
a lost half crown betted on a horse
or buried in the bourse

hurtling down
like an asteroid unfixed
like a banker transfixed
like the light that held its wrist
hurtling down
the biting metal of a sound
that your bones remember

when it hits
life blown to bits
by the jibes of the unfit
and the heaving of the jespers

the wheezing past of the jesters
the screaming of the weeks

and the laugh that lies
at the bottom of the sea


**************************************************************************

A Stabbing

Nicholas Alexander

Cutting the final edges
from the form

Loose change dangles
dignity forlorn

Stake in heart bleeds
life away

the blade drains the
soul breath away

Angels pass overhead and branches shake
out lies

The blade sinks in
and another victim dies

**************************************************************************

Harsh Light

Nicholas Alexander

Nothing but memory
Strike while it is still hot
and the skin remembers

Woken by the harsh morning
the man fingers the dust
that had fallen from the wire

the trees sway with misery
and the rope creaking on that
branch

like the pain shooting through
torn shoulders

no escape as she reminds
you of that cold, that dense cold