Lines Lifted From Other Sources

I go extinct the moment you are gone
I’m E.L. James, you’re Hemingway 
All star-crossed lovers watch our signs align
and we twerk through uncertain years ahead
proud against the belly of the sky.
So comes the spring, so comes the rain
from a distance, it looked okay.

My trusty songbirds start to make me sick
unmusical and often wrongly stressed
dogs will disregard their bones
while at the shore she tends her empty nest.
Some day the weeds will grow right where we stand
for now at least that dappled rainbow fades.
The End.

Hands

I don’t know what it is about my hands
that makes them hunt like wolves each time I dream.
They gorge themselves on insubstantial air
while you, in sheepish pelt, stand silently;
tell tales in finger snaps of fallen fruit
and men on whom you’ve squandered mother’s love.
I don’t know what it is about your hands
that makes their shadow puppets come to life;
the frightened fox with thunder in his heart,
the unseen peacock laying dead, the roots
of trees, worm-filled in your vision of love
with my dark failure frozen in your eye.
My ape-like hands just fumble with the air
while yours distil it and the world recedes
as all your grief and falling tears become
the spring-blown blossom of a cherry tree.
We shade our eyes, both startled by the light
and then I feel you place your hand in mine.

The Dead

The dead do not return to us
but hang suspended
in our dreams; barnacle-
encrusted puppets
of white fat
and prayer flags,
pulled apart on morning tides
reassembled each night
by the dreaming sea.

No ferryman no boat
avoids the toll of nightly sleep
and so at different depths
all drogues gone
we pinwheel down
through an indestructible population
of delicate souls and demons,
furious, featureless,
the forgotten and the authentic dead,
our shark-tormented lovers,
slack dogs and ruined women
with moonlight dribbling from
their mouths.

We drink until their deaths
clog our stiffening hearts
then resurrect, sleep-washed,
collapsed into our own smallness
in the grudging dawn,
cry not for the lost
but for our helpless self
adrift in bright air
both owl and field mouse
counting the hours
until we sink again
or rise again
or die.

The Avenue South

 “...the unenticing sky has 

an avenue south.”

Inexplicably 

I awoke with the phrase howling

in my pillow.

Its echo took an hour to fade.

Spent the day digging

dandelions out of the lawn.

I’d heard they were

the wrong kind of beauty

so I killed them with a trowel.

While I worked,

I heard Bruce Springsteen

sing that he would meet me

further on up the road

and I thought of that

long, wide avenue south

and how one day

we might stand there

you and I

a single yellow shadow

against a green dawn.

Light and Dark

 At first we have gravity

torturing raindrops

pummelling towards the field line

where agitated cattle form a circle

and go cross-eyed

comprehending death.

Overhead wires

are carrying gunshots

between Playstations,

cars are looking

for places to crash,

a woman stands on a shoulder

of damp stubble

dreaming of being murdered.

The sky is now full of fruit bats

trapeze artists

thrushes in full song

hurricanes of broken glass.

Everywhere rabbits

are battling the planet,

mice are worshipping the moon.

Worms declare their form of war

on the ragged sunset.

Two men stand back to back

on a small dark island

refusing to interrupt atrocities.

The endless dead

lie undissolved

blackened with rot

and puffball spores.

The horizon fills with brutes

whirring through the dusk.

These are the hunchbacks

who dream of nail bombs and semen.

They are planning

to trade their limbs

for magic spells.

In the cigarette ends of battle

a crow dismantles a pigeon.

His omniscient God

of calamity and cannibalism

is a pair of discarded spectacles.

And you are there, my friend,

in blueness

in stillness

in your wet silk

in the furnace of your calm.

You are that star

called Wormwood

neither real nor unreal,

the last blossom from a polluted rock

and I, a lean coyote.

In this bright silence

beyond the twisted wire

and maddening dark,

out of our bodies’ prisons

we can rise,

a single candle flame

that builds and burns

with beauty in the night.

Bubo

 smoke becomes ice

clawing in the dark underneath

it’s time to hunt again

eye open in a cone of light

test the one-two of my rise

my tilt and strike

thunder flexing from my mantle

fall silent onto wingbeat

draw talons into softness

the ice is falling through me

find the river of the air

search under the white eye

lose the grass dance hiss

lose wing flap moving water

lose drums of warming blood

everything but timeless night

stillness hanging 

crucified against the Milky Way

hanging the noose of the moon

over great balls of the harvest

the gleam of my sniper sight

tunes the teeming field

the slap and sorrow of their feet

a lame individual

pushing down on diamond arrowheads

through the eggshell of his bone

the yolk of his ruined brain

standing on a new nothing

pulling the world apart

ice becomes smoke

the ice of thirty million years

on the hypersurface of the present.

He was born to be killed here.

A Poem Before Rain

 You were the kind of girl who

rode your bicycle hands-free

and yet I still

under-estimated your powers.

That first month, 

you threw away

my books

and told me

to buy new ones.

On summer days

we’d play frisbee,

wander through cities;

you’d show me how to pull

handfuls of sunlight

from your hair.

Your father once confided

he’d gotten lost

during a thunderstorm

and found you

in a beet field.

You sang through

every argument;

if we had to fight

at least you’d make it pretty,

kept your prayers

in the hollowed-out heels

of your cowboy boots:

“Jesus will know

where to look.”

You never turned

your back on anyone;

walked backwards

out of rooms

saying it’s the best way

to the future.

I was your ‘favourite concertina’,

expanding and contracting

to whatever size

you needed and

after we married,

we only made love in

cheap motels.

You said you preferred

other peoples’ memories.

I asked you which of us

was lightning

and which was thunder.

You wept and laughed.

You were the tree

that got split in two.

I was the barking dog.

This world without you in it

is that tree that’s split in two.

I don’t believe in Heaven

so I guess that’s where you’ll be,

listening to The Rhythm of the Saints.

I guess I’ve let you down

because you always liked

my clever rhymes.

At the end of this poem,

the dogs will bark,

the rain will start to fall.

An Announcement For Women

Summer’s here, I’ll wear dark glasses
and slyly check out all your arses.
Of course, I’ll try to be discreet
each time you pass me on the street
but, as I grade you out of ten,
I’m bound to notice other men
who stare and leer. I’ll meet their eyes
and nod and smirk because we’re guys
just doing all the stuff guys do
which, now it’s warm, is ogling you.
I know that sounds hashtag MeToo
but nonetheless it’s what we’ll do.

I’ll trace that sweet curve of your breast.
It doesn’t matter how you’re dressed
but if you think I ought to stop,
why wear that sexy halter top?
You chose to wear that tiny skirt
so why pretend you’re all butt-hurt?
You chose to get that gorgeous tan
and did so knowing I’m a man.
You say you’re not a piece of meat
and yet you hang out in the street
like veal chops in a butcher’s shop.
You’re bound to get stared at non-stop
which is, let’s face it, what you want.
Although you act all nonchalant,
you love the fact that old men stare
and, on the tube, we smell your hair
and push our crotches into you
as though that’s what commuters do.
Then later, as we masturbate,
we have your hair to contemplate.
You volunteered that piece of you
when you bought lemongrass shampoo.
You knew we can’t resist that scent
yet bang on now about consent.
It’s obvious that you don’t care
about the fact that what you wear
wakes up red-blooded men like me
and that’s what you cunts hate to see.

See what you’ve done? I’m angry now!
It’s all your fault, you fucking cow!!
You made me lose my chill with you!
I’d better simmer down now, Boo,
splash my face with cold tap water
and get home to my wife and daughter.