Category: Poems

Prospects

There isn't much that can be said
now he's finished, over, dead.

Perhaps a flimsy paragraph
is fitting as an epitaph,

a word or two beside the grave,
mutterings of being brave

to children as they clutch a flower.
It's complete in half an hour.

We walk away for cakes and tea,
remembrances, sympathy,

anecdotes about the way
he was before the thudding clay

reclaimed the hair, the bone, the skin
he kept his understanding in.

Now every time we think about
the silenced laughter leaking out

to fertilise the wormy soil
he's laid in, so our senses coil

with knowing where he's gone so we
will go, finished, over, free.

Peter's Saxophone

When you retired you took up the saxophone
And blew it in a slow, warm-hearted way
That made me wish I too could learn to play
With your quirky, off-beat, kind, melodious tone.
I'll miss the chats we'll now no longer have
Of football, friends, politics, Palestine,
How I'd laugh at your observations,
The way you'd giggle quietly at mine,
With a beer or two to guide our conversations.
I loved you for the way you made your own
Your wry, unassuming attitude,
How you were for the many, not the few.
Now you've died, I'll take up the saxophone
And blow it slow, in remembrance of you.

Editing the Timescape

We spent the day on a slip road hitching out of Rome,
you were dusted brown, sunlight in the hills,
our thirst like a desert full of cactus teeth.

Scorpions scuttled around us, fidgeting our bones
bleaching in the breathless heat, a blank Bank Holiday
and hence no cars on this cinerated highway.

Romans were home in blue apartments, filleting the shade,
hidden behind peeled shutters on polished marble floors,
tending indoor waterplants in high, elegant rooms.

The streets we'd left howling in the traffic's tight embrace;
an alabaster bath refracting heated light
through pink pulsing water curling from the taps

you turned like a silversmith pewtering a vase.
This room too we'd left behind after a blissful rest
from the unwashed journey, absconding from the south

and the myth of Corfiot beaches halting time and space.
There, hours were spent in seconds, seconds transformed to weeks,
you allowing silvers of sand to turn your hourglass hands

to the only timepiece possible beneath those green cliffs, Pelekas.
We'd used an ecstasy of moments strung along that shore,
counting the sum of previous lives we might have lived

had we not settled on the place and poisoned it,
drunk the sap of olive juice and perjured ourselves.
So when the ship and lorries emerging from it's hold

took us to the coming winter's rising amber moons,
we found ourselves alone again, drifting on this road,
till finally a Fiat stopped, slaking our thirst to move,

escape the city's humming sense, the clock's mechanic course,
north-east across the highlands vast systemic spine
and dropping to a sunfled coast. Once more the hourless sea

was turning back the hands of the moonsprung tide.
We knew then our future lives were lying there,
that we would now, forever, be editing the timescape.

On looking up for the first time into Southern skies

From here in the night
It's a strange, awful sight
To lift up your head
And see in the stead
Of the stars that you know,
Strange new figurations
That suddenly grow
Without some forewarning
Or permission of nations
But stand there unsteady
At infinite stations
Until the next morning.
It's very unnerving
To see them all curving
In east to west fashion,
This southerly ration.
And you feel that you are
Well, quite at a loss,
When you look for the Star
But find only a Cross.

From Brighton coffee bar 1971 to London coffee shop 2017

And here I am, sitting by a window,
notebook open flat upon a table,
watching the same rain fall into a street,
still with nothing much at all to say.
I notice though that this mid-winter day
is familiar, as rain turns into sleet,
as each and every day I've been unable
to imagine the means of denting the status quo.

Is it because, in the intervening years,
raising children, seeing them depart,
in turn raising children of their own,
a kind of bewilderment has grown?
The mind overtaken by the heart,
the vision often blurred by welling tears.

Collections of Bone

I go where the rot subsides, the flesh fallen,
the reek now of the soil's dense aromas.
Dealing only in dry bone I wait, calling

the scavengers by name. The vulture precedes me,
the fox outflanks my quiet manoeuvres.
The earth is bouldered with corpses. Skins melt

like guttering suns, noiselessly sweating in shallow
graves, become weightless like a million
words unhinged by misunderstanding,

unclarified, false and failed loves.
It is here I can sense the terrified,
the upthrust final fist, the instant

unanswerable bullet, the sword's unending
fatal arc, the momentary loss.
And sometimes, resignation, a last blue

sky lapping these eyes dull perimeters.
Here a finger shrivels inside a ring,
here an earring sparkles lobelessly.

I, from the safety of awaiting pause in mute
systems of decay, calculate
the profits of collection, research, display.

The Iconoclast

They gave the cheerful villain hell
For cursing in a public place
Where dissolutes are flogged as well.

Gathered there to buy and sell
The relics of a saintly race,
They gave the cheerful villain hell.

And preachers came to pray and tell
Of pious avenues to grace
Where dissolutes are flogged as well.

For challenging the faith cartel,
Which so enraged the populace,
They gave the cheerful villain hell,

For acting like an infidel
and attempting to deface
Where dissolutes are flogged as well.

Come the day we may dispel
Their ignorance, erase all trace
They gave the cheerful villain hell
Where dissolutes are flogged as well.

I was caught completely unawares.
Linda said the church at Sous-Parsat
was worth a look. We drove a circling route
that took in Bourganeuf and bought some bread
to later spread with fruit beneath the trees
beside a source of water from the hill;
cheeses, cucumbers chopped and chilled with juice,
tomatoes on the vine, bottled beer.

Before that though she took us through the door,
a portal filled with shadows like a dream
you only half remember as you wake.
I expected all the usual things;
a faded pastel Virgin looking down
as if in expectation of rebuke,
an alter screen of oak where woodworm drilled
graffiti, unaware of sacraments,
centuries of dust and disillusion.

But what we came upon was like a shaft
of light, a clap of thunder suddenly
unleashed, a pasture full of sunflowers
glimpsed through the window of a train,
the way your heartbeat catches at the sight.
The walls, vaults, the ceiling set alight
to tell the stories, even though our atheist
ways reject these things, we know beat through us
like a pulse, a pause for meditation,
constant, unavoidable, only sensed
as breathing is, or guilt, or love.