The Winter Wood

Out walking in a winter wood
I wondered how the trees withstood
the boredom of just standing there
in just one spot. Did they not care
what else the world might show to them?

I tutted and I sighed but then
I took a moment, looked some more
and soon saw I could not ignore
how in each tree, each branch, each leaf
a monumental masterpiece
of nature’s craft was shown to me
and I saw too that, though I’m free
to travel, that I mostly don’t.
I could make time but likely won’t.

I focussed on an old yew tree
and, as I looked, I seemed to see
just what it was to be a man.
Oh! Suddenly, I turned and ran
through noisy streets of frantic life,
slammed my front door and kissed my wife.

Obsession

I have sculpted you
in mashed potato.

The hourglass of your waist
can be traced
in every stroke of my pen.

I have heard you
in the roar of passing aircraft,
in the whispers of ants
crawling
through an inch of broken earth.

I have tasted your lips
in every meal
carved you out
in handfuls
from the insubstantial air

to hold you.

I have not held you
but you hold me
as I fall asleep
each night.

Above the Below

And here we hang -
two baubles on a tree;
two tightrope-walkers merrily
dancing on a broken thread.
Whispers on the breeze
of all the foolish things I said.

I should not speak your name,
regret every song I sang
but putting my fingers to the keys
I find this melody’s just the same.
Don’t try to measure this in feet,
a language no-one understands
Just let your foot tap to the beat
as I measure you in hands.

Stupid Lonely Song

God’s asleep in Heaven
listening to The Band.
Who’s gonna carry the weight tonight?
Ah, not me, man.

TV plays commercials.
Devil’s in my chair.
Who’s carrying the load tonight?
Man, I don’t care.

Thought I heard you crying.
Heard a howl of pain.
It was just the wind outside,
just the falling rain.

You’re missing, that’s all I know.
You’re missing, didn’t feel you go.
God knows I know it’s no surprise
I can’t see you even when I close my eyes.

God’s asleep in Heaven
listening to The Band
I can’t carry the weight tonight.
Please understand.
I can’t carry the weight tonight.
Please understand.

The Last Time

We slept on Primrose Hill
woke with grass and daisies
printed on our cheeks.

We woke in the centre of standing stones
slept in all those sacred spaces
our love balled like a fist.

We slept in each other’s mouths
woke pregnant with joy
for the day ahead.

We woke in a clockwork universe
wound it laughing
with the keys we gave each other.

Walking by a river on a Friday night
we finally lost our way
and you walked back the way we had come
while I walked on.

Let’s Dance

The future’s soon so let’s not wait.
The future’s soon. Let’s not be late!
We’ll soon arrive but until then
let’s dance and sing our songs again.

The past is dead. It’s dead and gone.
The past is dead. Let’s sing our song!
Let’s shed our clothes. Let’s go insane!
Let’s dance and sing our songs again.

The present’s all that we have got
so love me now. Don’t love me not.
I drink my fill but you abstain?
Let’s dance and sing our songs again!

Perhaps one day all this shall pass.
Our songs and dancing may not last
but this is not our last quatrain.
Let’s dance and sing our songs again!

Fate

adrift on an ocean of my own blood
I am the lost mariner

whose flag is bleached to primer
by the ragged sun

whose skin has been flayed
and fashioned
into a sail

whose silhouette
is a dead tree

whose eyes are
broken pieces
of the moon

whose hands
clasp and clap
in prayer

whose treasure map
has no X

whose anchor claws a world
too heavy to lift

whose love arises from the dead
each Monday
and is executed each Friday
by a firing squad of child soldiers

whose poems are bright fish
swimming down to be eaten
by black mud

whose only friends
are the turtles
he eats

whose fate was to dream
and having dreamed
fall silent

whose pen coughed
and became still.

Tillandsia

True love does not need soil to grow.
In desert air, bright orchids bloom.
Their secret is to take it slow.

Like air plants on a patio
or Spanish moss upon a tomb,
true love does not need soil to grow.

Forced paperwhites may even show
their brightest light in winter’s gloom.
Their secret is to take it slow.

We have no soil and yet we sow
our seeds beneath a paper moon.
True love does not need soil to grow.

I’m not much of a Romeo -
a rootless love could be my doom.
My secret is to take it slow.

For now, we have this status quo.
We occupy this little room.
True love does not need soil to grow.
The secret is to take it slow.

Bhopal 03/12/84

to wake like that
eyes boiled, baby dead
and have your own scream
swallowed by the night

and how those savage seconds
wouldn’t end -
hunting blind the shredded days
the torn machinery of the world
lifting you rag-doll
to pour your soul out
rip the sunlight off of you
forever

to blow out joy and hope -
a future of black dust
of empty pregnancies
and polluted breasts

to wake like that
eyes of blood, your baby broken
a thousand tornadoes
against your candle flame

to wake like that
and one day be handed
nine hundred US dollars
because your baby got dead
and to find yourself crying
with gratitude and relief

to wake like that...

My Insecurity

I set my world upon your outstretched palm;
the paltry sum of all that I could claim
then ran away, pretending to be calm
but though I sprinted quickly, I felt lame.
I saw that this is patently absurd -
this dance between the raindrops that I do.
Is this some pledge of love, just empty words,
or some demented scheme to monster you?

And now my secret’s out, what can remain?
The small talk that we came here to avoid?
An ever-shrinking love and growing pain?
Short absences which leave us both annoyed?
The truth, of course, is that we cannot know
but now you hold my world. Please don’t let go.

Daughter

Holding shafts of sunlight
you once fashioned into rods

tasting the tinctured tears
you kept in blue glass bottles

excavating the mysteries
of your thoughtful quiet time

finding new ways to see you
among your jars and shadows

picking up each brittle leaf
to read in unsteady breaths

letting her tea grow cold
she shall stand there too

and meet you in a new place
where grief can finally
sigh and cry and laugh.

First Date

First Date

The waitress comes and serves our drinks;
Earl Grey in an aluminium pot for you,
a cappuccino and a flapjack for me.
You watch me with pantomime caution.
Perhaps this whole thing was a mistake?

We talk for an hour about nothing.
You stare at my lips as I speak.
I fend off questions about my wife and kids.
I have never seen eyes as bright and wise as yours.

Outside, we walk aimlessly past a war memorial
and a busy pizza restaurant.
Your gloved hand slips into mine;
touching without touching.
I want to say the sweetest things to you.

The weight of unspeakable griefs and passion
is something you deal with very lightly.
You begin to tell me a little about a trip;
you are planning to see an old friend.

As we turn into a pretty, well-kept park
I place my hand on the small of your back
and feel you lean into me, hungrily.
I smell your hair for the first time.
Coconut.

We are an almost inconceivable mismatch.
You plant your feet and roots
grow quickly down into the water table.
My head is a child’s balloon floating
half a mile above the treetops.

Within sight of the children’s playground
I pull off one of your gloves
and look at your hand.
It is a thing of absolute mystery and wonder;
the strong nails, the delicate wrinkles on your knuckles,
the flat firmness of your palm.

I lift it to my mouth
and with all the tenderness I have,
I kiss the tip of your index finger.
It is the first time our skins have made contact.....


Every timepiece in the world
skips a beat.
The whole of human history and evolution
stops and immediately restarts.

You look me in the eye steadily,
lean forward slowly
bite off a small piece of my lower lip.
My long fingernails claw the flesh from your collarbone.

I am no longer urbane and witty.
You are no longer elegant and wise.
We are apes, wild howling apes,
whose engorged sexes just woke each other up.

We run back through the town, naked
savage and free
biting each other furiously,
stopping only to copulate on the pavement outside a chemists.
A woman screams and a workman runs to help.
We ignore his kicks and curses.

Back at the war memorial,
we begin to climb,
our feet torn and slippery now with blood.
At the top, we bark and howl,
two incandescent Kongs,
silhouetted against the fire sky,
mutually masturbating,
kissing, grunting, indecent monsters
waiting for the planes to shoot us down.

Peeping Tom

Tonight I saw you creeping down the steps
into the midnight pool to skinny dip.
White moonlight poured its milk over your breasts
as you slipped nude and silent from your slip.
I saw you break the surface cautiously.
You gasped and then you laughed with sweet surprise
then, drawing your long hair up thoughtfully,
you grasped the rail, descended, closed your eyes.
Of course I knew that I should look away.
You showed yourself to moonlight, not to me.
I forced my wide eyes closed with some dismay.
Heart exploding, I stepped back guiltily
but then you laughed, ‘don’t you like what you see?’
That’s when I knew that you’d been watching me.

In Plain Sight

You are beyond the gates of the Palace
playing ping pong with the Queen.
You are hiding in the clouds,
negotiating with the fickle sun.
You are standing behind every tree in Green Park,
blowing raspberries as I pass.

You conceal yourself in other people’s music,
hanging your silences between their notes.
Your bicycle bell sounds within Big Ben.
You’ve buried your heartbeat underneath my footsteps.

You are as absent as Christ
as distant as the night sky
yet as close as my own breath.

You are always here, at arm’s length,
if only I knew which way to reach for you.
Right now, as I write this line, I feel you just behind me,
your chin almost resting on my shoulder.
You are the spirit that speaks through the ouija board of this poem.

My heart swells.
In a sensual flood that washes every cell in my body,
I feel you move through me,
searching for something I have also been looking for.

Quietly

My father went quietly mad and nobody really noticed. I guess it would have been contained within the five years between 1988 and 1992, roughly coinciding with my teenage years.

The precise form of his delusion was astrology - not just a passing interest in daily horoscopes but a full time, minute-by-minute appraisal of his and our circumstances according to elaborately detailed birth charts that took into account the grid co-ordinates and precise moment of our births.

The stars don’t look down.
Look up as much as you want.
There’s nothing up there.

I would make some trivial utterance about my day (a girl I liked, let’s say) and he would consult his charts and exclaim, ‘Ah yes, your Venus is square Neptune’ and I would take that advice away with me, quietly. These moments were not worrying or even interesting. It was just Dad and his odd hobby, his singular obsession about which none of us could get excited or join him or understand him.

It’s only now, since it’s crossed my mind, that I realise how peculiar his behaviour was and how frightening it must surely have been for my straight-laced mother.

A man rides the train.
At each stop he shouts out loud:
‘Magic brought us here!’

And now I am at the age he was when it first began and do navigate not by the stars but not with a map either. I orient myself with poetry and the coded instructions I find in my pen. I am a cartographer mapping the terra incognita of my dreams, my desires and my fears. I beat paths towards mirages.

This car is haunted,
writing its own directions.
Passengers don’t know.

Nobody, so far, has noticed I’ve gone quietly mad.

Waking Up

The crushing darkness of the morning light.
The charivari of the early birds.
Another day of dreaming how we might
one day escape the prison of our words.
Another day, another week, our hopes
as worn as driftwood, swallowed by the sea.
We’re broken fighters hanging on the ropes
without a bell to ever set us free.
Oh fuck! Tonight I’ve really had enough.
The sonnet form is keeping me in line
but dancing on this pin-head’s fucking rough -
I want to burn the world and make you mine.
Those are the words that I should never say.
Another dream of you, another day.

Magpies

One for sorrow
two for joy.

They dance together
on a busy roadside
two pied beauties
dazzling and dazzled
each transfixed by each
but never touching their tiny beaks.

Resisting connection
as though magnetism
or God
or the wind
or simply fear
lay somewhere inside
that unbridgeable divide.

Adam reaches up to Heaven
and God reaches down
and, feeling lonely,
I start to wonder
if I am seeing joy at all
or merely witnessing
two deepening sorrows.

Perhaps I just need faith?

On the Road

We took the one oh one
and drove North, winding up the coast,
leaving dull LA to bake in the sun,
stopped to pump gas and bought Blood on the Tracks
for a buck fifty on compact cassette
and three Pepsis so we could make a toast
to adventure, saying we’d get
a nice bottle of Johnnie Black
to toast it properly later.
Adam looked tense and ignored the rear view
as you called me into the back
and kissed me sweetly. Instantly I knew,
as Dylan got Tangled Up in Blue,
I’d be spending my whole life with you.

Tactility

In places like that
in high street coffee shops
I always hear softly ringing bells,
musical notes I do not recognise

- uptown we laid out
in a backroom, two bums
spread bohemian on a Costa couch
like lovers after love has
washed the world away

we laid out,
your body reclining into mine
your black stockinged thighs
moving against my caresses
like two cautious cats

I held on like a shipwrecked sailor
to a knife blade of desire;
what I felt in my hands -
well, there is no word for that.

If there ever was then
that word is now a magic spell
that could turn a whole ocean
upside down -

We could say ‘love’
but that word is absurd -
it’s every piano key in the world
being struck at once.

I cupped my hand
over your right breast
and leaned down -
leaned down to kiss your cheek.

There. Stop.
Let us at least keep that single moment

our faces just touching
my breath spreading across your face
into your mouth
your body pressed against mine

Let us have that moment of gentleness,
together, two softly ringing bells -
let’s listen as we close our eyes,
hear those notes we both now recognise.

The Opening Chord

The Opening Chord

George’s Rickenbacker twelve-string gets a strum
Paul hits his D-string bass note like a drum
George Martin’s Steinway adds a mighty G
John doubles George’s strum acoustically

and Ringo’s buried somewhere under there;
a right-handed ride and a subtle snare.
This gives the notes GBDFAC
but somehow they’re connected magically

because of course it’s not the notes you play.
A pot of paint won’t make you Claude Monet.
It’s the attitude that takes the breath away
as The Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” gets underway.

Nothing Plain

Have you met my friend Jane?
She wears a fat gold chain,
a dress with a long train
that’s as thin as cellophane.

She twirls a carved wood cane,
lives life in the fast lane.
She only drinks champagne
(on top of the cocaine).

Her dog is a Great Dane
She’s dyed him candy cane.
He’ll give you a migraine.
At the very least eye strain!

If you ask her to explain
She’ll just shriek ‘NOTHING PLAIN’
then with a look of pain
sigh, ‘Please don’t speak again.’

It’s hard to ascertain
quite what is wrong with Jane.
She’s probably insane
but I’m not one to complain.

Dover Beach, Half Remembered

Dover Beach, Half Remembered

What is that line from ‘Dover Beach’?
The world seems ‘beautiful and new’
but really has ‘no love nor light’
and we are on ‘a darkling plain’
where ‘stupid armies’ are fighting
and all we need is ‘love and truth’?

Well, that poem’s a total peach
and strikes me as profoundly true.
I’m not sure I’ve remembered right
but, even mangled by my brain,
it remains a piece of writing
I’ve been in love with since my youth.

Anyway, not to over-reach,
it somehow makes me think of you.
The poem’s saying ‘let’s not fight’,
that love can somehow help with pain.
That’s simple but worth highlighting
though Arnold offers little proof.

Perhaps I’m ludicrous and vain
but don’t you find this exciting?
Ah, fuck, perhaps I’m too uncouth.

Timekeeping

Timekeeping

We wear a watch, we watch the clock
but never keep one tick nor tock
The minutes pass, a year is gone.
We may keep time but time moves on.

It never stops to catch its breath
but pulls us onwards into death.
The clock won’t give one second back;
we ride on trains with finite track

and yet we spend our precious days
in work and worry and malaise.
Reader, friend, you must have fun!
Everybody, old and young,

break free from watching clocks at last!
Live now, before your future’s passed!
Live life right now or all you’ll get’s
a nice gold watch and then, regrets.

Cyrch A Chwta #1

Cyrch A Chwta #1

Walk the muddy bridleway,
cross the booming motorway,
climb a hill at close of day.

Let the dreary light decay
see the vivid interplay -
jet black night and Milky Way!

Leave your sweet perfume behind.
I may find that hill someday.

Blameless

Blameless

Blameless, baffled divorcee,
I write about my yearning
like I’m fucking Hemingway.
Meanwhile your ears are burning.

Acting like a bird of prey,
I find it life-affirming
to enact my passion play
regardless of your squirming.

I drink too much Beaujolais
but promise I am learning
how to slowly pull away
and not be stomach-churning.

I had better hit the hay.
I’m getting pretty shameless
leaving you in disarray
when you are clearly blameless.

Writer’s Block

Writer’s Block

I sit once more and try to write of love
but know that it will always come out wrong
I’m reading Braille while wearing boxing gloves,
trying to paint a picture of a song.
“You are the moon but I’m not Neil Armstrong”
That’s all I’ve got so far and it seems trite.
I point my pen at paper all day long
and feel so many things I cannot write.

Man of Hidden Shallows

Man of Hidden Shallows

I planned to write about the universe
and all the clever things I learned in school
but down the carriage sits a student nurse
so all I seem to do is stare and drool.
The best I’ll manage is this puny verse,
this grim admission that I am a fool
whose poem about cosmic inflation
was derailed by daydreams of fellation.

A Moment of Silence

A Moment of Silence

The gravity of mud
compels him down again
to the broken earth
another dull dog
wrong way up
in a river of shit
and spent casings

and now a shell lights up the line
and for a moment
falling snow, like pillow down
calls him back to fights
of long ago

attacks and cries of little boys
all rehearsing
without knowing
how their worlds would someday end

those boys, useful only as
they left their towns in droves
with cigarettes
and songs that brought more boys
to join the crowd
with cigarettes and songs

dreaming boys
unwakeable now
forgotten now, powder now,
scattered across the defiled
and unforgiving land
their roasted skulls
all filled with mud

he wakes from insect sleep
with his muscles on fire

a hundred yards away
wild laughs
German cat-calls promising
their hurricane of hot teeth
their quick science flying
to take his skin
scrape his bones
lay him out
like a woman
to die.

on his back, face up to the violet night
he feels some kind of change
believes he may have discovered
a completely new way
to look at the sky.

Headline

Headline

A child was nearly snatched outside my house.
An adolescent girl grabbed by the arm
she screamed and kicked - good girl! - and got away
A driver stopped and no-one came to harm.

This ‘hooded figure’ didn’t leave us much
to base our new parental fears upon.
He burst into our happy, sunlit world,
provoked a single scream and then was gone

though when he left, he left something behind -
a fear that percolates deep in my chest.
Each day my teenage daughter walks to school
and though of course I do my very best

to kill the thought that she could come to harm,
I do so with a painful pang of shame,
commute each day to London helplessly -
Eastbourne may not ever feel the same.

https://www.eastbourneherald.co.uk/news/crime/investigation-after-attempted-abduction-of-13-year-old-girl-in-eastbourne-1-9139067

Second Best Rondeau

Second Best Rondeau

Antonia will post the best rondeau.
There’s something in the way she makes them flow
around her mood so form cannot be seen -
her whisper has more power than my scream
yet I’m compelled to have another go.

I’m bound to end up looking like a schmoe,
outdone by that poetic so-and-so,
that mistress of all formal verse, our Queen -
Antonia.

I gave up competition long ago
and though I hoped my lesser gift might grow
no evidence of progress has been seen.
This rondeau posted first because I’m keen
but for the best one, please check down below.
Antonia?

A Sailor’s Life For Me

A Sailor’s Life For Me

The ocean currents carry me along
but lately I’ve been feeling all at sea.
I’ve let the water take me for too long.
I always thought it meant that I was free.

Free? Ha! Free to what?
To abdicate crucial life decisions?
To go with the flow, maaaaaan?
To grow old?

My life so far has been a bullshit waste
of time and now I’m fucking forty five;
too scared to rock the boat and so it goes -
the ocean currents carry me along.

Mornings

Mornings

My train crawls through the dreary morning light.
Past Croydon now we wend our weary way
as, bleary-eyed, the passengers all stand,
half-dreaming of the sweetness of the night
but caught now at the wrong end of the day.
It must be hard for you to understand
precisely what it is that you have done.
Let me explain just what you give to me:
your sweet, soft whispers from the darkness come
into this cage like fragments of the sun;
your kindness sets me free.

Definitions of Non-words

Brale - a common hedgerow species, producing an inedible orange berry.

Fud - a rope clasp used to connect railway sleepers.

Ingolly - archaic A prostitute.

Cald - A covered path or alley between buildings.

Fald - A fur garment, worn on the lower leg.

Tald - Welsh The chamber of commerce of a parish or ward.

Ungkwo - taboo slang the clitoris

Ib - a hiding place or treasure trove.

Nof - A very basic computer acronym No Other Features

Jux - noun. A relationship of two seemingly unsuitable people. (Contr. of juxtaposition.)

Bew - An extinct bird, the common ancestor of the parrot, parakeet and macaw.

Bea - nautical One of the key Atlantic trade winds, originating in the Sahara Desert.

Va - a musical instrument of Inuit origin.

Hilched - A town in Gloucestershire.

Rale - The audio portion of a 35mm celluloid film print.

Ququ - an Andean dice game named for a mythical bird.

Quai - medical an area of calloused or toughened skin.

Quok - The administrative capital of St Vincent and the Grenadines.

Ik - a unit used in the measurement of density. cf. icky

Wuwu - A Levantine hunting weapon, similar to a bolus.

Gikking - colloq. v. flirting, making lewd remarks.

Bur-nav - v. In painting, to enhance a colour by shading with a complementary or opposite, a common technique in pointillism.

Shaf - prison slang Smuggled or illicit personal items.

Shafed - The second ashra of Ramadan, consisting of days 11-20.

Jih Od - (1913-1989) founder of the Sony Corporation.

OpWer - The final preparatory phase for the D-Day landings, commencing April 10, 1945. (contr. Operation Werewolf).

Azh - a hardening agent used in terracotta production.

Biss-Bor - Met. The largest meteor shower ever witnessed from Earth’s surface (Wyoming, June 14-17th 1977)

Maf - A juvenile female owl.

Hur - v. In hemp rope-making, to strengthen by boiling.

Pessed, Ivan (1982-) - Estonian chess Grandmaster and former World Champion (2013, 2016)

Gopping Kusk Oblast - Federal subject of Russia, located in Southeastern Siberia (approx. pop. 231,000 (source: CIA World Factbook, 2011)

Lov - obs. A lookalike or doppelgänger.

Ungrif - A precursor, and early competitor of, the computer mouse. Any handheld pointing device.

BWAT - Canada’s most popular talk-radio station, broadcasting on 103.7FM.

Bway - the musical accompaniment of wayang, Indonesian puppet theatre, traditionally played on the gamelan.

Juff - Informal. Offensive. A Jewish person.

Ke alop alosh - culinary A sugar replacement derived from the banana palm.

Bi-Flis - Dimmable, one/two-way, electronic window glass.

Anmis - A stove-top pan for brewing Turkish coffee.

The Dance

The Dance

each morning I dance down to the shore
to sculpt her in the sand

some mornings I might shred
my whole earth
yet cannot contain
how she might pull a glove
onto her right hand
with her left and teeth
beyond conservatory glass

some days I stare at a teaspoon
of her pauses
my wild hands pressing quickly
what little I still hold

but then
without a word
she dances down to the shore
to show me some new secret

I taste the complex minerals
of her breath
as she takes my open hand

and suddenly I realise
she’s sculpted me
in sand

The Raiders March

The Raiders March

duh duh duh duh
dah dah dah
duh duh duh duh
dah dah DAH DAH DAH
duh duh duh duh
dah dah dah
duh dah DAH dah
duh DAH dah
dah DAH dah
DAH DAH!

On Falling

On Falling

When you send your mother
her Mother’s Day card
nobody tuts and says,
‘Dude, you fell hard’.

When you have a child,
no-one gives you a shove
saying ‘be careful, mate,
you might fall in love’.

It’s only the moment that
romance comes calling
that friends start to offer
dark warnings of ‘falling’

But I believe love
lifts our feet off the ground.
Love finds us and binds us
and helps us feel found.
Love lifts us up, breathless,
and keeps us spellbound.

Though people are bound
to be scared of what’s new,
when you and I met,
as my feelings grew,
I ignored all the warnings
for I knew what I knew:
That the deeper I ‘fell’,
the higher I flew.

This poem is goofy
but I think this is true:
I might fly, I might float
but I won’t fall for you
and, if you feel ‘fallen’,
get up off your knees.
Your heart is a bird
that must be set free.

It must fly at all costs
even from me.

A Dance in Darkness

You took me down into the dark.
You followed me, I followed you
and in the darkness, felt a spark
in that old place, heard something new.

You followed me, I followed you
and listened down into your heart;
in that old place heard something new.
You contemplated this upstart

and listened down into your heart
could not deny that it was true.
You contemplated this upstart
and, with my whispers guiding you,

could not deny that it was true
and in the darkness, felt a spark
and, with my whispers guiding you,
you took me down into the dark.

Echo

1.

The wind plays its cello in the high poplars.
Through a tunnel of leaves and light
the hunter comes
in the perfect skin of a deer.
He took it with an arrow to the eye.

The thrill of that perfection
to match his own perfection,
this hunter god
body supple as a girl’s
powerful as the fiercest bear
this hunter god
whose family opened their own throats
with flints
to praise him.

His quiver full, his bow loose
he dances through the forest
no sound among the brittle leaves.

2.

She looks and looks
a hurricane in the jelly of her eye
a jaguar spreading upwards
from her womb
to dig its claws into her heart.
One breath escapes her hot mouth

and he turns
body steaming in the cooling light
fingers rising to brush his arrow flights

“Who is there”, he calls.

The Goddess.

A thousand streams of hope
flow into her, through fingertips
and toe tips
lassoes of light
a mist of fireflies in her rising breath
joining a tidal river to find
the edges of a lost land.

She hears a cry, her own voice
sounding for the very first time.

“Who is there?”, she calls.

His fingers relax as he turns away.
She sounds again
the light now shrinking
the moment lost
slowly burning to its death
“Who is there?”, she cries, softer still.
“Who is there? Who is there?”

The hunter has moved on
coiled spring to chase a deer
leaves perfect love behind
a love he would not hear.

Muse

I’m struggling to write an opening line.

I cannot seem to get the words to fit

and everything I write just turns to shit;

my water isn’t turning into wine.

It may well be that all the wine I’ve drunk

these past few days has clotted up my ink.

Perhaps the booze is why today I stink

and why, instead of singing, I am sunk.

But then I think of you and suddenly

the volta happens right here in my heart

and, all at once, my ink is running free

and though, my darling, we are far apart,

it’s obvious at once this much is true:

that when I sing these days, I sing to you.