Loneliness

 

She stands in her kitchen, turns, sits,

and feels there should be something,

there must be something.

But there is no other voice in that house

only the incessant radio gabble; she has tired

of it long ago; the repetition,

her brain on its spit; fatuous conversations,

contrived controversies, feigned remorse.

Or daytime television with its seeping mildew of cheap

dramas, old westerns and World War II;

a hundred channels, she can flick through a hundred

channels before throwing the useless remote away from her.

How can life have reduced to this nothingness;

she addresses the question to brain inside her head,

and it as voiceless as the house.

A Tale For The Times That Are In It

 

Drab, his room, like a prison cell, north-facing,

swill coloured; depressed outhouses crowded

into his window, a man-made fungal growth;

tea-coloured light oozed from the bare bulb

into his soul, till it too was of the same paint.

One day, he broke some daffodils in the park,

picked them up and brought them home;

left them lying, a rag of sunshine on the table.

Sunlight at last; he went back for more:

crocuses, tulips, ivy, grasses, bluebells, lilies.

Now a flower- bed larcenist, his room an explosion

in a paint factory bedecked from ceiling to floor

with all the flowers of the season, and his soul

blooming in colours that were, once, no more to him

than litter strewn across unkempt suburban lawns.

But as seasons passed and flowers died, unsatisfied

he learned to grow beauty; bulbs, slips, seeds.

That magic took him from his room to the library

where the tendrils of his research spread to faraway

places, and he travelled with them.

Books littered his table; a scatter of ripe, fallen fruits.

Sunlight poured upward from their pages, exploded

in firework blossoms all the way up to the ceiling,

all day, as though he had turned the house around;

and, in a way, I think you could say, he had.

Her Mind

 

Her mind

brimming with plans and schemes,

calculations and wishes,

possibilities of all sorts,

worries and cares,

memories you might keep in a music box,

pictures; movies, old and new, and never made

are box-offce in that Roxy;

the smoke-like tendril from childhood that loops about her,

those beautiful thoughts and philosophies

dreams, old loves and glories,

secret places like streams that play music on coloured stones,

or wells lost beneath ferns;

her creations, the wonderful, the zany;

her knowledge and learning,

her files, research projects, best or broken practises;

scaffolding half built on half built ideas;

the far reaches beyond plains, mountains, rivers and seas;

and cupboards she keeps locked on the shady side of the moon;

I hold it in my hands

while she has her eyes shut

and sleep is setting in.

Exhilaration

 

i

Shoals of fish leap

gleaming over the water:

sunlight stampedes.

ii

A running child

imagines

his legs are wheels.

iii

Eyes upward

into the abseiling spiders

that clutter the air,

muffle the earth

in an exhilaration of snow.

Beak, Flight

 

Air-slicked,

slivered,

low to

the ground,

arrow straight,

pointed,

concealed in speed,

flecked

and silvered,

particle, weight

and eye.

A Man

 

Happiness didn’t intrude on him too much

so instead he took to filling himself with booze,

which zinged his mind, sent him dancing

(after a fashion) home most nights.

He became known for dancing,

which was not to his advantage; it was a style

of dancing that people considered unseemly,

so they left him to himself, to dance himself home.

Made him very angry with everyone, he took to arguing

with himself, but in his isolation, he lost his volume

control, found himself kicked out of the bars onto the streets;

the streets where the traffic passes in an unending blur.

There seemed no reason not to argue with a blur; he did

continually, eventually becoming physical,

but the traffic didn’t stop

From Winter Trees

 

Cherry-blossomed with sunlight:

our black branches

above January’s whitened hills.

Let’s gather the berries

of these Fabergé-brilliant wonders

into the bright cans of our eyes;

let’s harvest their sparkle;

drench the old stones

that have long since forgotten to smile.

Walking Red Water

 

While walking the red water

into the bloody sky, above pitch

black trees, pilgrims to the shore,

a hundred thousand starlings fly

my chest to the blade-blue corners

of the world. I flap my coat, they rain

black cinders onto the lake, rekindle,

resurrect and flash; the clouds’ fire

feathers spread further eastward, and

there’s calm like I’ve swallowed the

wind; suddenly colossal, I hunt the sun

beyond the curve of the known earth.

In Patterned Glass

 

face drift

                                                               in patterned glass

         you

                                                    disordered

complete

and broken

                 your transience                  all in that one fleeting moment

A Moment Between Lovers

 

Kisses her closed eyelids, cheeks;

breathes warmly into the well of her ear,

catches the lobe between his teeth,

gently pulls; runs opened lips slowly

downward to her shoulder; she shivers;

counts the vertebrae of her neck with the tip

of his tongue, and beneath the collar of her blouse;

a lizard with electric feet scuttling down

the length of her spine; she opens her eyes;

a momentary shimmering of the air between her

and the window, then focussing, looks out onto

the field like the small exhilarations of her skin

are blooming there; his arms around her,

his fingertips kissing her still.

The Poet

 

His was a wintry man;

life bent him crabbed

like a thorn tree near the ocean,

shaped to gnarled contrariness.

He was a thorny man;

drink sharpened his anger,

kept his lightning bolts charged,

loose as the change in his pocket.

He was a raggedy man,

ripped by the snags that held him;

only his poetry escaped,

blazing like the gorse in June.

Affectation

 

A lifetime may not be enough

to recognize yourself;

I have a friend who, like the guy

who wears shades indoors,

doesn’t see what everyone does:

his affectation reveals exactly

what it was supposed to hide.

Writing, Ambitions

 

Reaching down into that sack

that’s always emptying;

scrabbling for ideas, having gobbled

the best of them years ago;

the left overs chewed

to the point flavourlessness.

Ambitions skinnier than wish-bones;

the best ideas: elusive sparks

that fly and quench.

Always running after notions

that were a May afternoon’s falling petals

forty years ago;

always straining for the psychedelic sky

colouring a different planet.

Warning, and not altogether joking

 

Parents with kids that go online,

sitting in the other room thinking everything’s fine;

you gotta keep watch, the dangers are immense;

the internet’s full of paedophiles and presidents.

Old Man Conversing With Blackbird

 Old Man Conversing With Blackbird

There’s an old man conversing with a blackbird

high in a sycamore across the street, whistling

up at it, grinning.

Odd-looking guy, long grey hair, pale face;

heavy coat pinned tight around his neck

almost down to his ankles; you can’t miss him.

Nuts, I’d say; oblivious to people passing,

looking at him; not dangerous though,

maybe to himself.

Only person on the street going nowhere,

like a rock in a stream; I think someone should come

and get him; put him somewhere safe.