The Code

You may have seen it on TV.
A project called the HGP.
They dug inside a chromosome,
completely mapped our whole genome.

A breakthrough met with startled looks;
a boffin with a pile of books,
explaining that his printed self
could fit upon a large bookshelf.

Didn’t seem to find it scary
to become a dictionary
with each page a slice of him;
(three volumes each for ev’ry limb).

I’d like to print the Book of Me!
My shelves are full though so, you see,
I’ll get a pet, perhaps a toad;
a slender paperback of code.

I’d contemplate a little cat
but that volume’s rather fat.
I think it must be quite a slog
to have to read a puppy dog.


Next prompt: MURDER!

Nephew

I am 45, living nephew to
3 dead uncles.

Doug was an overweight detective
in his grave at 40
heart attack while swimming.

Brian was a jazz buff
lover of the clarinet
with late diagnosed cancer
of the everything.
I’m thinking he was 80.

Bill never married, traveled widely,
wisped away wild-haired at 75
smoking defiant fags in
ambulance bays
before succumbing to sadness
and whatever sadness uses.

I am 45, living uncle to
2 living nephews.

How shall we say goodbye?

Lumberjackasses

Today, to deliver the parenting goods
I whisked my three children
off out to the woods.

By the end, I felt rather ambivalent, sad,
but I’ll write another poem all about that;
about how and specifically why it hurts.
I’ll just use this poem to mention our shirts.

We decided for some reason, early this morn,
to dress all the same, like some uniform
code was somehow imposed on us all.
The sort of thing usually done by a school.

We farted around, trying various things.
“This shirt’s too baggy and that one clings”,
until we agreed on a combo that worked:
shorts and a tee, topped with a cheque shirt.

So off we went, cheque shirts on our backs.
An idiot hipster. Three small lumberjacks.

A Magic Spell For You

Dog Star rises.
In my hot blood
a tender hand.

No place to hide.
The drowsing Downs
cast no shadow.

Orbiting lovers.
Opposite sides
of a merry-go-round.

We muse on this.
Write sad duets
we’ll never sing.

I call to you.
You do your best
to tune it out.

The heavens rotate.
Dog Star brings us
faraway so close.

I wait for you.
A queen whose finger
still stirs men.

Dichotomy

My God, you’re a woman!
Oil painter of raw daylight
Mother/advisor/calm packer of lunches
Lover/fast driver/card-sending empath
My God! Whose thighs have seen
Men come and babies go.
You’ve breathed with the universe.

Pianist/fermenter/
Green fingered weed warrior
wood-worker/mad scientist
in your goggled laboratory.
Straw hair chop-sticked up,
full of particulate,
your mouth the soft finishing curl
of satisfaction.

Investing your work
With mechanical know-how
Motherhood, kindness
And the skilled use of a lathe.
Oh my God, woman! It’s just a mouse.

Sonnet For a Quiet Lady

I left a kiss for you upon your glass
then watched you drink with teasing, sparkling eyes.
You wore a perfect mask of grace and class -
Nobody heard our heartbeats synchronise.
In crowded rooms, you’re all I see and hear
as other conversations ebb and flow.
The night wears on and gradually it’s clear
we’ll live like this, each knowing what we know
and what we know is hunger may be tough
but we will thrive apart because at least
to know a love like this is food enough;
with you, my love, a fast will be a feast.
As every pair of star-crossed lovers know:
the sweetest love is love that cannot grow.

The Shower

If he listens to the water, she is there.
Her soft voice sings inside the spray.
His hands fetch handfuls of wet air
but somehow she always drains away.

Her laughter sparkles in the falling water
This secret queen, no longer Neptune’s daughter
but a Goddess who can wash his sin away,
Absolve him, and send him on his way.

He turns the tap and thinks he hears her cry
for him, but now the empty air is dry.
He’ll catch her soon, he never fails to try
for then the forlorn ‘He’ becomes the ‘I’.

To Catch a Thief

To Catch a Thief

I prowled over the rooftops

in Technicolor slacks,

a creaky old lothario

among the chimney stacks.

Below me seabeams twinkled

in Monaco’s wide bay.

A woman’s nervous laughter.

A firework display.

I found your window open.

I had cheated death.

Silently, I slid inside

and cat-burgled your breath.

The Cave

You were lost until I found you
living underground.
Your bulb lit into flower.
You wanted to be found.

I watch and it brings sadness
to see you shine so bright.
I watch and feel my darkness
devouring your light.

Your petals reach up to the sky.
The Sun-King’s favourite flower.
He breathes his kindness into you.
The source of all your power.

Down in my cave, I worship you,
frightened to break ground.
Your roots are all I have of you.
I’m lost now you’ve been found.

Body Parts

My fingers trace old runic signs
on the conch skin
of your thighs.
My secret key to make you weep
in moonlight.

I put my ear down to the shell
and hear the whispers
of your blood.

The sky envelops us.
God sighs.
I kiss you
and pray for rain.

A Finish, A Start

Out in the garden

my spade is at rest.

Holly underfoot.

Old man's legs

take ginger steps.

Back in the house

piano rings mute.

Themes obscure.

Clumsy hands

that used to dance.

Up in our room

window needs mending.

Beds pulled apart.

Your suitcases

filled with our love.

The Spider

Ten million years from now
our dusty bones are found,
fossil twins
machine-worked by nano-crabs
their busy brush-legs humming,
then levitated for inspection by the
Great A Eye.

She’ll wearily survey our bones,
entangled and enmeshed,
welded by time
and, never having heard of love,
will scare the baby robots
with tales of a giant spider!

Lady Garden

My garden overflows this time of year
And, like most things,
It makes me dream of you.

You are the apples
Unpredictable from year to year
Sweet but tough
And given to cider.

You are the plum tree
Lazily uncared for
Unpruned
Refusing to give your fruit.

You are the loquats
Exotic beauty
With a cyanide core.

You are the raspberries
My sweet favourite
Wilding out of reach
Behind your greenhouse
Pinking my fingertips
Resisting my grasp.

I am your rhubarb fool.

The Fan

I want you to get hot
Hot under the collar
I want you to bathe in perspiration
Desperation
Each exhalation
An exhortation
For me to come to you.

Pick me up, I’m cool.
I’m your rhubarb fool!
I’m the only one who can.
You’re over-heating
And I’m your biggest fan!

The Gentleman’s Excuse-Me

What is a word
but a thought
we can share
with a friend?

What is a rhyme
but a chance
for two thoughts
to dance?

If you say don’t think of me
Of course you’re all that I will see.
It matters not that you don’t care.
Your words are thoughts
which now we share.

A little dance between
two friends.
A final rhyme and this
dance ends.

Baby’s First Rondeau

You take more care with fragile things
which know the arrows and the slings.
The wise esteem a mended vase
more beautiful for all its scars;
don’t take it for your cheap plaything.

A busted beak, a wonky wing.
You nurse that bird and it may sing
the ancient music of the spheres.
You take more care.

Those veterans with missing limbs.
The jasper who has lost her sting.
Those K.O’d fighters seeing stars.
The badly aged child superstars.
The puppet with the thinning strings.
You take more care.

Sestina for Kerry

When I was young I had the dreams of youth.
I tore up time and summer days were brief.
In vacant lots, I’d build my secret homes
and did not care if I were found or lost.
I’d spend my days and never note the cost
and built the sweet foundation of my life.

Yet nothing passes faster than our life.
No blossom withers sooner than our youth.
An autumn comes when we must face the cost
of time and learn our salad days are brief.
We’re not allowed to cry for what we’ve lost
nor visit ghosts in long forgotten homes.

Instead, I would wake up in stranger’s homes.
Unwrapping girls like gifts, I lived my life
and claimed I felt that nothing had been lost;
my greatest loves just silly tales of youth.
This teenage pose was mercifully brief
and passed me by without apparent cost.

By twenty five, I surely felt that cost.
Each night, I dreamed of all my secret homes
and modern summers seemed to me so brief.
Resenting every change that came with life,
I clung to toys and passions of my youth
and bought anew the treasures I had lost.

Hate grew in me. I felt that all I’d lost 
was stolen, not the ordinary cost
of growing up. I recreated youth;
I drank alone in those now empty homes,
distrusting any new face in my life.
My days grew thin, relationships were brief.

But those resentments were also to be brief
for Kerry found me, seeing I was lost.
She loved me and with her I’ve built a life.
With her each day was profit, never cost.
Three times, I’ve baby-proofed our little homes,
a steward now of someone else’s youth.

Knowing life is brief, I treasure youth
but now I am not lost. I’m truly home.
Ignoring any cost, sweet Kerry saved my life.

In Flanders Fields II

In Flanders Fields the cannons blow
young men apart, both friend and foe.
Such cries are heard when young men die
that poets like McCrae must lie.
The public cannot ever know

how much we wept; how days ago
we begged them not to make us go
over the top and now we lie
in Flanders Fields.

Like snails under a hammer blow
our shells were crushed. That constant flow
of shrieking boys, none knowing why
their mothers packed them off to die,
were absent from McCrae’s rondeau
‘In Flanders Fields’.

Rondeau on a Rondeau

We love to write our poetry.
For some it’s form and symmetry.
For others it can help get through
another day, a bleak world view
dispelled in words and so we see

how verse can tell us how to be
and how to live. It sets us free
and that is why we always knew
we love to write.

Antonia lay alone but she
made hay: in rhyming poetry
refracted melancholy blue,
delineated every hue
with coruscating honesty.
We love to write.

Man #2564753

On picture postcard beaches,
perfect men with perma-tans
pull sexy blondes and surfboards
from the tops of camper vans.

I watch them from the shadows
in my long-sleeved shirt and hunch
then timidly let a seagull
come and confiscate my lunch.

In business, I am baffled
by the pie charts and the Venns
of men who count in billions
while I barely count in tens.

In pubs and clubs, I enter,
fully knowing that soon after
shall come that dreaded descant
of some girls’ derisive laughter.

I've spots and scabs and pimples,
blobs of snot upon my jacket,
burn every piece of toast I cook,
eat cornflakes from the packet.

I drink too much. I cry.
I’ve never found my niche.
I’ve never had a girl.
I love cats, read comics,
eat quiche.

Little Clouds

We sat in class like little clouds

watching the high windows

seeing a vast mirror of clouds

higher and brighter than ourselves.

Walking by a river on a Friday night

we finally lost our way.

You walked back the way we had come

while I walked on.

Lost days.

Nettles through your stockings on the Heath.

Drinking wine from jam jars.

Your face lit up from within.

Hedgehog Honey.

The Eye

If I hold my breath and
close my eyes
on certain nights
the bathysphere descends
on a string of perfect pearls...

Deep down past reason
past all sense and spontaneity
past a graveyard
of scuttled ships
and all the drowned sorrows of my days,
past treachery and spite,
there
uncoiling at vast
tectonic scale
a jealous eye is opening.

Leave me here
please let me rest
fathomless
unsoundable
radio silent
in a thousand atmospheres of you.

Trading Standards

She conjures a list
on the edge of my bed,
of things I did wrong,
didn’t do or never said.

A trading standards officer
of her own heart,
betrothed elsewhere from the start.
Waiting to be traded
as a stranger’s wife,
she hitched a ride on
my unarranged life
for the few bumpy turns ahead.
All but pillow talk was left unsaid.

On dance floors, always wilder
than the other guys,
I see needles in the gemstones
of my lover’s eyes.
She whispers softly there are
no good goodbyes.
My hands fall from the air,
shit-bird of paradise.

The Longest Word

The Longest Word

I had a baby with dark hair.
Honestly, I didn’t care
but Auntie Dizzy got upset.
She called her friend, a Chinese vet.

He told her and she told me
he’d donate a pot of pills for free.
Auntie Dizzy left there beaming.
“This’ll fix your brunette semen!
Put these pills into your wand!
Get babies naturally blonde!!”

Nine months later, oh what joy!
A bouncing blond-haired, blue-eyed boy!
By some mysterious mechanism:
Auntie Dizzy’s tablets meant aryan jism.

BLACK SHUCK

Should you venture out in Beeston’s night,
be warned that you might get a fright.
Hiking up on Beeston Bump
you’ll hear a knock, a thud, a thump.

You’ll wheel about, say ‘who goes there?’.
Then squeal in terror, shock, despair.
Stare into a bright flaming eye.
No time to run nor wonder why.

With gleaming teeth and glist’ning jaws,
with lion’s mane but tiger claws.
You’ll know then you’re outta luck
There’s no unseeing once you’ve seen Black Shuck!

He will not claw nor tear nor bite.
He’ll soon be gone, merged with the night.
You breathe a sigh of sweet relief.
You’ll tell your tale in disbelief

to tourists in some Cromer bar,
drive quickly home by motor car.
Undress, fall woozily into bed.
At sunrise, your family find you dead!

Sweet reader, should you hear a sound
on Beeston Bump, don’t look around.
Just close your eyes tight shut and wait
and you’ll avoid this dreadful fate.

If you peek once, you’re out of luck
if you see that hound of hell, Black Shuck!
That canine fiend with teeth so big!
Black Shuck! That dog don’t give a fig!