Poems
Seen
Or show me another thing I’ve never yet seen
like nippers and hikers watching for bombs.
Maybe there are too many sheikhdoms
and globes for them to care who wins.
Show me how railway stations flinch
at midnight when seeds are homeless.
Tell me about those marshlands emptied of
alphabets and slinking untold to another bereft sea.
Show me how agnostic you’ve had to be
amongst almshouses and heathens, how easy it is
to fill your workshop with more clangers,
to slop on your wastelands and one-time saints.
Show me your brights and detachments, your old
fashioned faxes, remind me of chalkdust and wasps.
Show me an almanac where we still may appear.
I don’t need a weatherman or any more luminaries.
Call me when your neckline’s gone so I may thread
another transgression, then rearrange labyrinths,
empty the synthetics, douse the detectors,
and hold you above salt-free technocrats.
Then I’ll undo the synods, the bonfires, the statesmen.
Paris is rusting, and London bursts with machines.
Come south, here are the sloops and sediments.
Be my irritant amongst all the clampdowns.
To Live By Seeing
How love proceeds, light along the thin path.
Bones crack, I turn on them, the wind blows.
The form of strands, beginner’s green in the sun.
The image is in the language but you can’t find it there even looking behind, as
letters fall away.
The hammer on rock, earth rings heavily.
Blood brown as a bruise permanently fades down iodine’s blessing.
Diesel rushes into clouds, tatters day-gone sun.
Scratching birds eat, lift, and carry away grass to nest, as if nothing is
effortless, wings in their motion and storms in season.
Wearing cold on my shoulders, heat at my ankles, empty between?
Paused like a bandage wrapped and here’s the orange ground scratched with thick
not-thinking sport shoe.
Crows, clouds, outlines – washing black in the breeze.
The road home unravels familiar, dark, strange as recurring dreams.
Sleep, something white and intricate, or sudden.
The hole in the lily leaves us breathless after the storm.
I Am, I
I am, I am a little, I am
a parcel, I am yet
I dreamed this mortal
I grew up bent
I had a picture, I hear a river
I like a ship in storms, I put
your leaves aside, I remember
the clumsy
I saw the spiders, I struck
the board, I that have been
I, too, I wrote in
the dark