May 2010
1 post
UP ON THE SUN
Up on the Sun is where I’ve been,
Golden flames before my eyes,
Deafened a year to earthen screams,
The blinding end to my sullen sky.
.
Wrought in the heat of her scorching flame
Fire Opel thoughts I honed
My early mystery quicksilvered there,
Sun of my flesh, my heart, my bones.
.
Fallen to Earth, to the grey, grey ground,
How can I touch the Sun again?
I wait in vain for a...
April 2010
2 posts
When I am young again
When I am young again
We will cleave the Alps
In a 50s British motor car, screaming my dreaming,
Speeding us, red-dialed, to laze by Roman fountains.
When I am young again.
When I am strong again
The sinews of my arms
Will strain to halt the spin of Earth
Until an answer comes (and no answer simply will not do)
When I am strong again.
When I love as I loved then
The...
Lain in the tomb
After the bloody birthing,
The slap of learning,
The first stirring,
The stone-smile masking,
Where were you?
During the slack-jaw lying,
The marked-me digging,
The wasted booking,
The crouched clerking,
What use were you?
Of a New Year’s meeting,
A biting loving,
A Roman sealing,
The ice advancing,
You had nothing to say.
Amidst the desperate ageing,
...
January 2010
3 posts
Land of yobbish glory (with apologies to Elgar)
Land of yobbish glory, all on CCTV,
How shall we defraud you, who are born of thee?
Wider still and wider, may our trash piles be.
Even the PM told us, there’s no society,
Even the PM told us, there’s no society.
Birthplace of the skinheads, give some dole to me,
We do as we want now, screw authority.
Playing dumb’s in fashion, it’s so plain to see,
Robbing upper...
A Petty Alchemy
Who will work a petty alchemy for me?
I have a famished scantling of a dream,
Once divined in silver and in gold,
That latterly cannot withstand
Corrosion by a base and ordinary breathing.
My name, whisper-kept so long ago
By hollow eye and calloused hand
Was written in quicksilver
Upon a sheet of muslin and cannot now be found.
Make me other than I am.
Recompound my elements...
On the Sea of Cortez
I dreamt of sailing on that spinel sea
That comes to turquoise as we outrun our dreary stars
And make them new.
The red-faced Sun, here not in mockery,
But sublimely sinking, beckoning beloved night
And all that is my truth.
At dreaming’s last the mountains of my inner eye
Sable-climb against the western ruby-embered sky.
I know upon awakening from my assumption
That I would give...
December 2009
2 posts
Carol for a starving child
Drown out the prone mumbling of the bloated boy
with the bursting eyes and the barely breath.
Chianti pairs better than Claret with poultry I find.
Mocked by his bowels at his closing
far passed the cares of indignity.
More turkey or beef?
A girl’s razored throat cuts into her time left
-quite young in dog years-
preventing her from gorging the air.
Leave room for pudding!...
Once around the Sun
All changed since then. That was the last day planned.
I had believed it was only in the shining small things that I might catch my reflection.
But then God dropped the world.
Smithereens.
For a few days I thought I got to decide how the continents fit together,
and could make the station clock stand still.
Some mornings I awake and feel that I still can. Hard to keep it going though.
...
November 2009
1 post
The four elements of Greek philosophy
At my first? Water.
Red scream-water of a mother’s pain
and the full-brim belly of the sea between.
Obscured child of the final fogs.
A drizzle-damped London baptism.
Earth of my parent’s famished story,
never my home but my only home.
Slack-jawed speech and sign of the cross.
Within, a petty civil war.
A sort of megalithlic mind is flinted
even before the years of jumped-up...
October 2009
6 posts
There are no accidents
I regret
slamming the car door and catching my niece’s hand.
She was seven and I loved her
as if I had played a part in making her.
Because I had not done such a thing myself.
A sensitive child, her lump-in-throat and dewey eyes
indicated that she was bound to journey on a solitary road.
I was her favourite, being of her nature.
Returning from a family lunch I played my usual role
...
Greenfinch
Do not cry.
In our time it seems a gentle heart
Is something to be gnarled
By a thwarted autarch of a petty fiefdom.
Usually your life is measured on a beige form
Which consigns the miracle of your existence
To boxes “A”, “B” or “C”.
But I know a secret.
In time the Greenfinch in your cottage garden will not sing
Of perceived percentages of efficiency
...
Speck
Last night I dreamt
That Gravity
No longer pinned me.
I floated unnoticed
From the surface of the Earth
And sang a psalm of gratitude.
Primer
How to measure my hope?
The colour of her hair
By the softness of her skin.
To estimate my love?
The touch of her hand upon my shoulder
Divided by the press of her lips.
The volume of my heart?
The waterfall of her western voice
Plus the fragrance of a London garden.
The sum of my dreaming?
The fall of her tears
Less my blind unheeding.
The total of all things in the world?
The one...
Ending The Iron Age
A few fragmentary artifacts,
Properly belonging to the field of archeology,
Are said to indicate
That there must have been a time
Before I was conscious of her.
This theory seems flawed to me,
Since why would I have scanned the stars
And why my endless wandering in those unfrequented regions
Unless drawn by the pounding of her imprisoned heart?
But she, of course, was strong...
First Folio
In our first folio
The pages could not bound
The leaping words.
Each signal met at once
By an eager distant lantern.
But now all is known
And a duty never thrills.
My Book of Hours is, it seems,
Rather pallid once read
And a phrase will suffice
Where once words burst their banks.
September 2009
6 posts
A Monday Sonnet
If life were mine to order and command
Yet still I’d wish, not bid, you to my side,
For you have lifted memory’s dead hand
And with your touch brought flow to that slack tide
Which knew no soothing breeze, no beating crowd,
For such a time as ossifies a heart.
I spurn regret to be my early shroud
And fire-breathed come late to play my part.
Since never was the world remade as...
Ode To Gin
You may sing of your vodkas premium
And your whisky blended or malt,
Of how brandy banishes tedium
Or Margaritas are better sans salt.
But for serious and constant imbibers
There’s no doubt the verdict is in.
I’ll bypass the beers and the ciders
And head straight for the London Dry Gin.
T’was William of Orange, the Dutchman,
Who first brought the liquid to town.
...
The Cloud Of Unknowing
In my childhood the beacons blazed,
Bright and reassuring,
On my imagined distant hills
And brought me always safely home.
But as I grew I doused the flames when roving out
And thought myself a new Magellan.
But soon the stars to steer by
Were draped in mourning velvet.
The charts that guided other centuries
Had been discarded long since.
Forty years becalmed on some unbounded ocean
Has...
Under A Neon Moon
Under a neon Moon
We stood on that ancient 1950’s street,
Surveying our fiefdom
And waving in acknowledgment
Of our druken subjects.
Joyful their faces! Flushed red with cheap alcohol
-Beer for the men, Margaritas for the women,
In imitation of the King and Queen-
And flashing harlequin with reflected motley.
In honour of our visitation
The Via Sacra Antiqua was bathed in...
Crossing The Bosphoros (A poem of another age)
As seeping water cupped between my hands,
My hopes and tawdry dreams have ever been.
Some fallow trace lies light in other lands,
The remnant, silent now, so seldom seen.
But still the embers flared a fiery red
The day your breath fell first upon my skin.
A Lazarus arisen from the dead,
Your kiss of life has bid me live again.
For love, in aura, rays from you each dawn
And all you meet...
In the chapel of Saint Venantius
In the chapel of St. Venantius,
On a February day a thousand years ago,
The Saints depicted in the seventh-century mosaics
Looked down upon the two of us
With detatched aristocratic Roman expressions.
If they really knew the years of sadness to come
Why did they not cry out
when the Monsignor sought objection?
The priest intoned his ancient plea for God’s assistance
But I know now...
July 2009
2 posts
Far to the west
If you would come to Ireland
We might sail upon that western ocean
With inquisitive swans, bobbing Sarah-necked,
Upon that sea of weeping.
Like the declining blood-orange sun
We will set course for that land of wonders
Where none may follow.
For, as every Irish school-child knows,
There is a magic realm, far to the west,
Where our hearts and dreams can be made whole again.
Can you hear...
The woman who lives in the phone
Last night, knowing only her spirit form,
I met that woman who comes to me
In my most restless sleep.
It is very difficult, I have found,
To exchange written words with her,
Without believing I can fly.
She has the power to unhorse me down pat
And, given minutes,
Makes me feel aflame in a manner
That would be considered inappropriate
For a man my age in this three-putt suburb.
But...
June 2009
5 posts
Something's gonna blow
Something’s gonna blow.
If I don’t live the way I need to,
If I don’t love the one I want to,
If I don’t write the way I wish to,
Something’s gonna blow.
Someone’s gonna pay.
If my sadness turns to anger,
If my heart becomes granite,
If my mean essence shows,
Someone’s gonna pay.
Someone’s gonna cry.
If all the years mean nothing,
If I...
In Other News
In other news it seems that last night God was bored
And, being in a mischieveous mood,
Swatted an Air France plane out of the sky.
Some of those squashed and broken-brained
Were earlier drinking highly- coloured cocktails
And thinking illicitly of beautiful Brazilan women.
On the other hand there were some
Who just wanted the kids to be quiet.
It’s quite a distance from Rio to...
Inject me
Inject me with your restless blood.
Make me whole and feral
And loud and weird and drunken
And a breaker of promises
And a remaker of reality
And an occasional drug user
And a wearer of paint-splattered clothes
And a mate of who I want when I want
And a damn straight bourbon drinker (no ice)
And the most out-there lover
And a champion of selfishness
And a do as I see fit when I see...
American Dream
Breath free Big Sky Kennedy,
Hot Dog Harley Cowboy.
Dow Jones Down Home Manatee,
Empire State Burger.
Space race cool pool Mustang.
Stars and Stripes strike zone.
Crazy Horse Cadillac Hoover Dam.
Babe Ruth Alcatraz.
Washington by lethal injunction,
Jack Ruby slippers.
Rocky Mountain lyposuction, Diet Cocaine Diner.
Organized Jazz crime shocks Califreeway.
Ladies who lynch Oval Elvis.
...
Alive, actually
It is often said that in my speech the word “actually” is over-used,
But for me it affirms the sentence.
Actually I sometimes feel a stranger in a child-like land.
Actually I often eat alone because I have returned
A lesser love than I have received.
Actually being a cowardly sort of lion
I had decided to check out permanently
And drive to that unknowable country.
Actually she...