old poem edit - Problem with the past is...

Problem with the past is remembering

when now is where I want to be

where I am not a suitcase

on a step. The past is overrated

when we don’t know who we were

though the present would not look like this

now, when there are no gunshots, fires

and the phoenix rising – the phoenix,

on the step with the suitcase, when now

is a fine location where I am

not a suitcase 

on a step.

harvest

you know as sure as it is
soft and light around my shoulders
and warm as a mango sun
dipping the line dividing you and me
that the fruit of our labour
is a basket upon the sea
so tell me of one thing more magical
than the harvest on the table
this candle this flame
flickering here and there
vulnerable to a darkness this night
will never swallow whole





oct08

Feral Child

Feral Child looked for wolves and found a fox

on the golf course - they both hiding, both seen,

she in her orange coat and she in Khaki green.

Both camped out in bushes of thorns, as bold

as ghosts who can't be caught, snapping the traps

layed by the hunters employed just the night before.

Feral Child, a scruffy dove with one wing on her

right shoulder and a swag bag of treasures on her left,

looked the swaggering golfer straight in the eye.

A whittled craft box in her hand, she would emerge,

cocking her head: Can't even carry your own bag Sir,

to escape your Sunday home? I'll sell you these... and 

lifting the lid on all the bounty she had found:

...each for a quid, or these: two for a pound!

Her camps were legendary, never owned so never lost,

and so it was with irony that she saw them hunted down

in others' dreams...she couldn't save the blind moles.

But the other creatures dying in the bush found her 

or the fox's grin - whichever first would quench her thirst,

as it should be, quick; an edible heart, a twist or rip of the neck.

Dead. She would watch the kill, collect the poison pellets left

that scattered her tracks with future cries...So civilised, 

the hunter, the guest golfer - and they called her Feral Child.

2005

Return to Sender - edit edit edit

06 edited, again,

Her priorities were all wrong. She had said you were an angel in the haze of the drugs that she was on. So she'd tried to put things in their right place; boxed, enveloped, licked and stamped all the squares and pills left around but they had returned again as curled edges in the fog.

She would have liked to have said, 'I am not lost' and stay home, find her hazy way around the clock until it strikes a poem or a chime.

Transience is nothing to write home about, but this fixed abode was a straight-faced letterbox so she'd posted a poem to herself to arrive on the cold morning after she'd sat up all night - when she'd have watched the dawn light cut the smoke exhaled - and hungry for fresh air, morning sounds and places, would have popped to the cafe for a bleary breakfast and to the park for some sun upon her pasty face, then home to sleep just before the post came round.

She'd forgotten what she'd written and dreaming of the doorbell imagined the little poem sent wouldn't fit because it had grown so. Yet there it was, slipped through the box at rest under the shelf, looking straight at her but addressing someone else.

So she takes an indelible marker and traces last weeks snail mail pencil trail with ease. Next week, as poems are promises, she hopes that they will speak. 'Return to Sender, please' in bold but shaky neat - and she is out, back to the post-box, back to the cafe for a bleary breakfast; and forward, one step after another to the park with the marigold leaves.

Secret Gardens

She said I had given her a garden
dripping with scent that made her
heady heart mix elixir into songbirds and butterflies,

and I said it made sense that love makes gardens,
landscaping her breasts with my tongue,
she, arching a bridge over manmade rivers,
sliding me down to her quiver of lips.

She moaned too loudly for the thin walls
and told me to return nightly and make stars.

A Secret Garden, when love wants to sing
from the trees - I ploughed my heart and soul,
while she changed the lock and key.

I wonder if that wildness
is now all bordered straight; if honeysuckle
still climbs the walls, loved as much
by the green fingered gardener
with the key to the wooden gate,

because the heart fingered lover
wouldn't want it any other way,

neither, ever again, to fall for a garden
unable to be gay!

2006

Tanya and Norm

https://www.abctales.com/story/littleditty/norm-and-tanya

J.D, Coke, smoke, sister's leaning on the bar,
wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her coat
getting in another round - standards
slip along the frets of the guitar; a real
good looker took me under, no T.J. - Marley -
only Hooker, twirling on the B string,
twirling on the G string, dancing over the notes
like a real pro - when in comes Norm:
mic stand in his hand, my brother-in-law
Norm - he's the best - plays Harp like Bob,
'Hey Sis!' he says, kiss kiss, 'It's all
in The Breath..' plays blues and you'd understand
he's the true son of a preacher man, lifts me up,
toots the talk, toe tapping it up to God-knows-what,
plays Roots Harp for the heart to love again,
my Brother Norm...kicks it from the bandstand,
smiles over a tray of tinkle from the bar,
standards slip along the frets of the guitar.

*

mar/08

https://t.co/dJdvayhFoQ?amp=1 

Moth

Moth

Perhaps there is no closet
only the drum roll
and the opening
of door upon door
the act of moving thresholds
bringing light to another dark room.
A moth caught
porcelain on a windowpane
a translucency
once again framed.

*

05/2006
https://www.abctales.com/story/littleditty/moth

Barley moon glows so

Sagebrush smudges blot flutter 

butter stained paper wings winding

a barley full moonslide, pinballing the crescent

through to inky countryside retreats.                  

The fast track hard tarmac negative white

and black slip to slip-road soft grey gives way

to earth path potent country lanes, moonwashed

blues ultra to indigo, felt tip. Feather quill scratch-breaks

breaking a charcoal softening wave like river mercy

cradling the bends to sea. Turns headlight a hammock

across fruit grove trees daylighting the night drive

with colour and summer, my grain moon

longing a full green corn august glare

to golden, when this sturgeon moon glows so.

August full moon - Sturgeon moon, Grain Moon, Green Corn Moon, Fruit Moon, and Barley Moon

Points of View - edit

The slats, those scenic backdrops will lift 

or slide each moving panorama of moments

marking instants or occasion with importance.

This enormous artistry fixed in views, minute portions
of the transcendent, setting the scene.

Sublime slices will flick-book partial moments of eternity
whether outside on the pavement, treading the boards

or sat alone in a comfortable chair. (She deviated,
a random variable to their fixed value,
and they thought she was mean.)

When the momentum of absence is felt in each scene
and you cannot find that moment there or anywhere,
forget all other points of view; 

who is running down colonnades, falling through 

squares, smashing what is warped enough to want you

sat, reading on a park bench, panning into insignificance,
the September rose garden, the fire on a blue sky.




06/08
edit abctales

Rescuers in China are digging up miners, 2016

to edit


Rescuers in China are digging up miners

while refugees bob the Aegean sea.

Elninio windchimes, and here is The New Year's
Old News Bulletin. From southern ice
cruising to a warming North Pole

we have a spot of unseasonable weather.

Slightly inclement poetry should be

noting the internal rhymes of amber

whiskey clinking a thick glass, silver

to gold draped over the evergreen smell of pine,

reminiscence nostalgia of human-kind

cosying starkness, not nature’s best-buds, geese

and daisy daisy deer nibbling at a new fast food joint,

munching on non seasonal bouquets, missing flights, 

missing in extreme weather events

until radio waves are seasick ill

with statistics on seasonal roadkill.

In the morning, the radio soberly maps how many

by the length of a roll-call foghorn. Bugle volunteers
can’t dish out kindness quickly enough.

Diplomacy’s PA makes conference calls

to organise a conference call to call

for a conference shortly before the North Pole

measured a few degrees above zero – where were

you in the floods?

Paris had an election and citizens
leapt the learning curve of the earth’s tilt

through uphill struggling steps, bloody tantrums

to the straight levelheaded path ahead. Were you

there? Was that canned laughter added after

the already standing ovation Trumpeted across the Nation?

Alternative facts on media stations. Outpost agencies wracked up

sales per inch. Pinch Pinch. Wake up.

Pinch Punch first day of the month

of dirty dancing and stepford wives

deal and no deal gameshow rodeos.

Down will be up along Route 45.

Up will be down along the Boulevards and Promenades

along avenues and high street tweets, the drums

the marching, the solidarities, the liars.

News agencies are touting for your cognitive bias. Obscene.

Join the discussion, be a hero on apps more addictive than heroine.

Misinformation of the Nation, head bowed to a screen.

Date@china miners
Ah 2016
Brexit Trump Paris Christmas New year 2017

Highlands halfway cafe -

Rain and storm, mist-charm and cloud,

dusk and dawn, owl and barn.

Horizon lines remind of here

and there like a rainbow’s ‘and’ -

and is for breakfast at ‘The Golden Egg',
Highlands, halfway up or halfway down, where

on the wall a snow hare lives, and what remains

the wind snares in;  tumbleweed, jasmine, thistle 
and ivy trails around her crown
wave here at least, where ice terrain may stay.

Outside, glaciers have melted up-shining fossils

in baked snow sheen. One-day tourists

cluck at the kiosk hatch, flexing a clutch

of hot chocolate cash, too early

for ice cream Sundays. Every day,

stretch runner hikers reach for summits

marked on health insurance policies, tax returns, 
2 for 1 vouchers in waterproof wallets,

passing face-down remains of climbers 
as altitude pins on app markers; but from here, 
at The Golden Egg, breakfasts are divine. Heavenly

is… cracking scrambled eggs

in all kinds of weather, even

as the meadow mead below

is littered with broken bottles,

haiku shells and feathers.

The Golden Egg - London

At The Golden Egg, a cafe,

where ugly folk eat all day breakfasts,

we sip, smoke, read The Mirror,

The Sun, take notes in reams.

An old couple in bobble hats,

crater expressions face their plates,

each other, over his fried slice and beans.

They slurp with all the time in the world.

I think they must be cold, no jokes,

nothing more to win.

I think it’s all over – until she chokes,

dribbles on a bit of gristle

and he wipes the egg yolk from her chin.

05

uka