Saturday 28 February 2015

1 New Poem

Living in Theory

There is something to the age of smashing screens,
some errant, bitter clang of steel ash floating
away as updraft scotch mint wax wrapping,
up to streaming frozen amber cloud.

It is a hypocrite's oath, mouthing hymnal
book but breathing, breathing in sulfer tones, sacrilege
pilfering the smash-grab coin rotation
that brines a sallow sea-green drown.

Glass plates fixture upon clock-wall ticking,
not faces of hardened men, ready for
revolution's plunder; but that of babes,
flickering solemn in gas lamp silhouette.

Thursday 19 February 2015

1 New Poem

Stars On Shrouds

Last burned-out lights of the great
skyscape's embrace, shimmer suit-tie
dinner jacket blackness, thought of better
cleared falling forest steeple pine days.

Days of warmth drying on coat boot
leather in shades of dying steel,
crossing you as Catholic mistress,
wine stains on frayed dress stitching.

Stitching hem-cloth of ageless
form woven hair ribbon pleating,
decorative mantelpiece upon half-painted
wall, something to hang in life's absence.

Sunday 15 February 2015

1 New Poem

Arriving Home at Midnight

The key turns stiff, steel, welcoming,
cracks in cheaply stuck-on walls,
builders curse watch-word left torn
to let in fractles ever-growing bloom
blanket across the broad-stitched
trinkets kept piling, piling on the
wood stand.

Fish-eyed pound of back lighting anchors
flopping whale tusk tough to
blind estimation's groping gaze
across the cleared highland blaze
of whatever this feeling once was
whatever had a baldly convincing
tone of make believe.

I would see wider, and still wider
by set sounds, but never so close
as skin-to-skin rubbed brass impression,
never so close to stain parchment ink.

Thursday 5 February 2015

1 New Poem

Re: Politics

Maybe it's simply in the closed-off stitching,
that you lived like an open wound long
enough, been an Essex radical at 18
and still swirled about some social democrat
cocktail parties on occasion, leaving at
the point where champagne runs dry
and conversations drone about tax credits,
manufacturing incentives and the last seven
people you've slept beside.

Maybe it was all too much,
the whip-sawing like a Russian apparatchik
to oligarch in moonlight tangle of Moscow
on the peaks of Seven Sisters, that
shedding so simply of disguise coats as
yearly fashion, charged distance with
bolted lightning falling through the day's
hour slept away absent work.

Maybe, but, again,
it could just be you.

Monday 2 February 2015

1 New Poem

Fishing Weather

The dapple of morning's star bursting
heavy rain of sentimental yarns
tangle boat breaking hope tied
to sharp rock cast and cut,
still cut the placid azure by turns,
and spins delicacy sugars, Fall fair
candy cotton of shake-handed parallel lines
you drew.

You leave impermanent scars, covered quick
in honey-milk, dried in canoed boat
bridges, waterway picket planks bracketed
lily shade in timely falsehoods dawn by
youthful sunshines left unstated, unfinished
white elephant: like Chinese motorways,
like Kosovar airports, we leave many
scaffolds exposed.

Like darkness, light, sunshine and shadow,
the creeping pall of freedom's many-flavoured delights
draws over us, fateful as bone-dust
wreckage we run from with all our
worried nostalgias, clatter of keyboard
and hum of cellular towers to get us back
to that good past, when weather was fit
for fishing.