(Not) In Love (Five Tankas)
What left me that day
Hard to describe in absence
Still unknowable
Burns through me like heartbeats stilled
By seismic shock - an earthquake
Didn’t know you lied
Lied like that through omission
How your truthful face
Had concealed some other truth
Known always only to you
Released from that pain
Of encoded silences
Trapping me always
With every turn of your cheek
In the new pain of freedom
In recovery
Plangent tears provide no balm
The beast in my chest
Howls complacent platitudes
Longing for a healing sleep
Reawakening
Conscious that my heart still beats
New life has claimed me
Offered gifts of sprung roses
I bathe in their fresh perfumes
Eyeless in Gaza
Eyeless in Gaza
Lachrymose, morose
hidden faces
shielded eyes;
the years of war
like purgatory,
a putrid sore.
Like Samson was,
his eyes put out
the actors in this
sordid play
bereft of love
of empathy,
forever blind.
On the Knocker
On the Knocker
I knock your door to see if you're ok,
to ask you if there's something I can do
that puts food on your table, feeds your kids,
protects you from the scourge of climate change.
Your answer is a stare of bewilderment
as I try to explain what I think is the cause
of our immiseration, our defeat;
the power of financial capital,
the gross inequalities of wealth,
the longest pay squeeze for two hundred years,
the greedy prowess of the oligarchs
that leads to war, displacement, refugees.
At this you seem to wake, Yes them, you say.
If I had my way I'd take 'em off at the knees.
When the Fox Got the Chickens
When the Fox Got the Chickens
Remember when we drove to that farm on the edge of the Forest. Fordingbridge was the town we passed through in the old Montego coughing diesel fumes embarrassingly blowing grey dust out behind. We’d made the decision to go for chickens and had spent two days constructing (is too technical a word for it) a run, digging in the wire for security or so we thought.
We felt four to be about right gauging the amount of space for roosting. Of course we hadn’t counted on the fact that chickens are shit machines; more crap to the square metre than a field of Jersey cows. The cage we’d taken seemed too small but when the farmer crammed them in we realised what cowering creatures they are. I could have murdered a pint in the pub across the road but leaving them steaming in a hot car seemed too cruel to contemplate.
So we brought them home and carefully placed them in their hut, hoping for produce. And, sure enough, it came. Creamy, textured eggs with yolks standing proud poached or fried. Boiled, the yellow smeared our chins and soldiers, enough to bind you for a century. Eggstatic would be the word to use for the state of mind induced by this free range bliss. But when we let them out the neighbours didn’t like their borders battered in the scrape for worms and fixing fences put me in mind of the poem about it. It saw me blocking holes and more holes when those were blocked. He’s all apple orchard and I’m all chicken shit and it’s said that ‘good fences make good neighbours’.
So soon we became affectionate, liking to stroke them when they’d hop-run up to you weeding or drinking in the garden or sunbathing on the grass. At dusk they’d head for their hutch and we’d find them roosting there as night drowned the place. Then we’d shut them in as the dark creatures came. Until, that is, we forgot one night and came in the morning to find a few white feathers left in small piles.
Remembrance
Remembrance i.m. David Baker Where they died is still the sand and rock you encountered then, fought for by an army of young men so similar except for the uniforms they wear. Born to mothers under their blue skies but somehow distant in ideology and time, yet war is their familiar, their eternal link; how each young man dies. The seventy-five years separating you has, it seems, been wasted has it not? The lessons which you'd think we should have learnt we have not learned; it appears we have forgotten. Of course, each generation forgets anew the truths, the lies, those things we thought we knew.
Jackdaws
Jackdaws
They arrive again in this early Spring,
homing in upon the chimney pots,
lilac wing-sheen shining as they turn,
land quite drunkenly, settle on the rims.
They soon begin their foraging;
indisciplined construction showers twigs
upon the drive and block-paved path below,
as off they fly for more from trees nearby
to scratch and scrape and saw. We hear them
on the roof, inside the flue, the urgent
impulse braided in their hearts to nest,
to build these fragile havens for their young,
a threnody as ancient as the stonework
of the house they claim, this Spring, as home.
Beachcombing
In boyhood he stalked the Warsash shore
intent on treasure, found preciousness
in cuttlefish bleached like polystyrene,
light as cork. Lifted stones disturbed
with light translucent creatures a low tide left,
awaiting the lung of a flood tide freeing them.
Among the tarred stones and green weed
were barnacled bottles filled with darkness,
archeological cans, driftwood smoothed by
a hundred years afloat and, once, a pirate's chest,
like a piece of left luggage he hid in the marram grass.
And now these images, worn like the driftwood,
haunt his declining nights sleeplessness.
He spends his dreams rearranging the contents,
picking over life's findings like flotsam,
discovering again those things he counts as treasure.
Magpies
Magpies
If only you could taste the way they stare,
Disdainful as a lemon, bitter as gooseberry.
Their mock Tudor plummage neatly pressed,
They line up in pairs with jocular eyes,
Calls, half cough, half a swallowed laugh
Waiting for the next jape they can pull.
Of any birds you'd like to have a pint with,
Let it be these avine comedians.
The Crab Road
The Crab Road
Leaving Trinidad we drove west
to find the tobacco fields,
fringed a green Caribbean
filled with weed swells.
That week we’d spent punch drunk
on rum sun, Havana Club No.7,
a bottle a day bursting our eyes to starlight,
could not prepare us for that drive.
We were making good time-
before the oil stopped,
soviets fallen, sugar and cigars
decaying in the fields-
careering with cicadas in lime groves,
plantain and banana bulging green.
We sensed the scents for miles
before we came upon
a seafood salad boiling
in massive waves of air,
a mirage of pink tar, hovering.
There was carnage there
but still they came,
small robotic armies
spawning from the woods,
impulse driven to the sea.
We braked hard but the locals
knew better, better to accelerate,
wind up the windows and sauna than hear
their crunching screams under hot tyres.
Instants before annihilation they’d rise,
pulling up to full height,
as big as two hands, claws akimbo,
snapping in mimed shows of hubris.
We crawled for miles
weaving through their flesh.
For days the stench stayed with us,
that hour on the crab road.
i.m. Awaab Ishak
Awaab Ishak
How do you write about
a tiny boy who's died
coughing mould up from his lungs,
his fragile body robbed
of all its preciousness,
despite his parents' pleas,
their belabouring of those
who could have saved his life
but inexplicably chose
not to? Whilst they luxuriate
in their 100k's and liberal debate
his ashes moulder further still.
There are lessons to be learned
but, given the history of these things,
I doubt they ever will.
Poems, Polemicks and Licks 