She Leaves.

She leaves
a country of mountain tops,
pencil points in nothing
and crosses on current arrows
to where the sun shines on a space.

Angels
look over the rails,
cheering ferries on the sea

of her worries;
for that is where she bobs,
among all the sparklets
on the sea-top.
And fears
scratch their fingernails
down the glass

she has left;
not left,
left, not left.

Inspirational Bacon

Three Monsters (Sunfire, Dedalus Press 1998) is based on Francis Bacon’s famous triptych. The visceral nature of much of his work cuts straight through to feeling and so makes writing more heart-felt and immediate, that along with the mind-bending imagery which aids innovation.


Three Monsters.


Here are three monsters :
Agony, a greyhound skinned; howl.
Hollowness, a hen plucked; peck.
Dementia, a bundle of hay; scratch.


I have stood them on furniture
to pose.


They were in the entrails of spirit,
I picked them out with a forceps.
I thought they looked remarkable in the light.
I thought the viewing public
might want to scrape at them
with their spatulas.





Attitude (Sunfire) came from another Bacon image, "Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge)".It has probably further from the spirit of the artist’s work; somehow the image engenders feelings of pity in conveying delicacy and vulnerability.

Attitude.


Who owns the child
with the withered arm-wings,
who carries the mutation that weighs a tonne;
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.


Whatever about the success of the poems, Bacon’s art is wonderful.

A Question I Ask Myself

Is the photography of the victims of war, famine, crime, natural disasters etc. acceptable? The argument, of course, is that it makes the rest of us aware and maybe mobilises our sympathies to the point where we do something about it.

But what about the photographer on the spot, who prioritises the photograph over the victim in a fleeting situation? The media circus attached to certain disasters?

And what about myself who buys the books?


A Brief Note on an Imminent Famine.

Everyone here will starve:
each bone will be a stripe,
each hand a bowl,
each leg a stick.

Then there’ll be the gluttony
of cameras:
our threadbare skin
will be devoured,
our eyes exported
shining like pickles.

Poems about Love

I’m surprised how many poems I have written that relate to relationships both in and out of love.

I could do a reading presenting them in a logical order to tell a story, but then I’d have the makings of a play, and that would probably be more entertaining. Then I remember Sam Shephard and Joseph Chaikin’s “Savage Love” (read it at http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~dxu/poetry/savage.html) and so the play thing’s been done; and that’s why stuff ends on the shelf.

Meanwhile here’s the backbone of my proposed story,3 poems that were included in the collections "Sunfire" and "Turn Your Head"

1

When I am sleeping
you come
softly over these stones;
I turn deeper.
You slip words into my ears,
liquid syllables,
sickles sliding down.

Night-time turns drunk;
longing for more,
your tongue to enwrap me;
I turn deeper.
You trickle down dreams;
our limbs braided,
we slip into one.

2

It's a certifiable moment
a punch-drunk second
a pulse's high tide.

A dog eats grass
a water drop shivers
a barrel fills to its brim
an apple falls
a body drifts
a face buckles
a lover screams.

At the tip of an orgasm
passion powders;
the creek turns to dust.


3


He, who covered my body
with snail-trails,
whose hands were wrack
swept over my skin,
kisses on my back
a colony of shell fish.

He, who would have crossed a mountain range
for an hour between my thighs
now crawls over me
with wizened passion.
Gutted of love,
he comes clawing,
scavenging;
and insults me with lies
that have made greater pincers
of his mouth than his hands.

What does he see in me?

Meat to excite him,
his groper's desires,
even his fingertips betray him.
But no more,
the erotic becomes ugly,
decrepit manoeuvres disconnected
from their original meanings;
the touches stain you.

I have watched him slither from my gaze
a thousand times a night
while slipping the word love
from his vocabulary;
watched him develope this communication
of knives and forks.