1 New Poem

Doorways

I watch you standing, framed
in palatial stone, red and still
with crackles of unbound telephone
wire, hints of burning grass hillside
draw a smearing blood trace,
a sheet metal sprawl;

You lean against the chalk dusting
walls, finding rune carvings of old
gods upon them,

You are light, glow in the breeze
of six-lane streets.

You turn from the noise, back
to swinging cranes of capital
infusion, the umbrella stands
of blanket street sellers;

They looked so coloured, something
more than barren trees and Weberian
brick that stare back from
daylight windowsills,

I can’t walk through

so easily now.

1 New Poem

The Protest of Widows

I look upon the harp-string, still emerald
with graceful touch of old Eire’s whimsy
fingers, still ringing with notes of
scrap page brustling upon whiskey
sting of washing ice, the sunlight
orange-tinged through panes of Sunday,

the morning with police whistles and
charming coffee shop signs,
where I sat with warming water
radiator, the spikey paint job of
staircase handrails, where I fall down
in heart with pitter-patter logic

of staying in with equilateral
electricity, of having that choice
to organize the bric-a-brac in
closets or standing with dynamite
stick girls on grey stone corners.

How I came to be so believed,
talking about both sides of
chewing through a sinew spark
of crashing waves, too much drawing
of digital curtains from the problem,

but why did I have such choices?

Is it skin that I have lost in
scrapping up against bars of
dead iron gating?

No, the kind I still have.