Abandoned House in Donegal

The calendar

collapsed in the centre;

her chair facing

the wind;

the  tv

hanging in the wardrobe;

her bed stopped

at July 8^th, 1986;

a bottle of eau de cologne

howling through the broken door;

two dresses 

and a blouse down to its last drop..

February sunshine silvers bare branches.

She, sitting at her kitchen table,

turns her hands upward to run her eyes

down the insides of her arms,

to see how the water will drain

when the clouds burst.

She lights a cigarette,

then sits in the snake-pit

listening to the slitherings around her,

till deafened, she flails at them

so they become smoke.

February; heavy drops knock on her window

and she, conscious of  the thinness of  glass,

of the thousand mile spate that's around her,

crosses to the hob to make tea,

to forget  branches. 

Hughie

Hughie thinks of sex without faces;

he often thinks this way

because there never was a welcoming face,

so he never had sex,

and this July he'll be 46.

Hughie lives alone and is settled in his ways;

people think him peculiar,

never ask him to join them in the pub

or wherever.

He is growing more peculiar, they say.

Hughie has an office job;

colleagues bid him good morning at coffee-break

but sit at a different table.

He eats his lunch in the Arms bar,

and always sits facing  the wall.

Beautiful Killing

"One of the things we will discuss is the purchase of lots of beautiful military equipment because nobody makes it like the United States” 

With one word, Trump demonstrates the obscenity of our acquiescence in the never ending killing industry. 20 million people facing famine in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria; how far would $110bn go?

Our greatness measured in heaped up bodies.

Our refinement in not contemplating them.

Dead

His marbleised features are set at neutral;

a look that never was his.

So this is not him,

but was so recently.

Container and contents perhaps?

How does one distinguish?

Attitude

Intended to catch the 'does he take sugar' attitude to people with physical disability, the poem relies on the word 'owns' being recognized in the spirit I intended; I'm not that I've achieved it. 

Attitude.

Who owns the child

with the withered arm-wings,

who carries the mutation that weighs a ton;

who, when the air is full of flight, hops

and hops and hops.

See how the children littering the yard

launch like torn pages into careless flight.

Like gulls they hog the sunlight

while a sea worries far below.

This is the currency.

But who owns that child,

the child with the withered arm-wings.

The other day Louise and I promised each other our lives without speaking.

We made love and stayed in each other’s arms

for a long time without opening our eyes or talking,

                          but enjoying the lisping leaves and the guttering of the stream                            
between the yellow stones.

                Those sounds in our ears and the sun’s breath on our bodies           

held us, one heart.

For there is nothing to say that is not understood

when two feel themselves one because they are within each other’s arms.

Short Coversation

The moon is a hubcap

  fallen off the earth.

I am a pendulum

  treading time.

“I'm blind”

   says the moon.

 “I'm paralyzed”

    says I.

  "Let's go"

    says the moon.

  "Where"

    says I.