Your cannon eyes thunder without a sound
and the incoming scintillating round
whistles to me, till I look just in time
to get knocked backwards
into Kingdom come

you know, that tenuous tenebrous
gold-lined twilight of the soul.

It’s not nearly so glamorous
(or as agonizing) as that place
St John got so cross about.

This is the place that sits
on the dusty outskirts
of that land he called
the Dark Night of the Soul.

The wind blows across the mouth
of those cannon eyes and I swear
that in the mindless cheeping
of the springtime frogs I can hear
John Wayne out-shouting
John of the cross, declaring

“there’s a new sheriff in town, pilgrim!”

The laws and logic of this place
hang in that suspension of being,
where soul and body swim
and are different and liquid.

Sometimes you eat the temporal
and sometimes the temporal eats you
while eternity is always hard to bear.

Shell-shocked and alone, I remind myself
that the logic of God is so different
to the logic of humanity.

Yet I still chase after shadows
a haunting enticement of so much
substance without being and
the substance myself.

where reality lies
and where shadows seduce.