1 New Poem

February (Victorious)

I feel best when the music
gets up loud enough to
drown chatter of restless
narcissists, the sense that I
am alone, complicit in
waving shards, stacks
flame on the night sky,
television crystals.

Somewhere in the neon canola glow,
I lose myself to rhythms falling
at feet, to marshal stomp of
marching boots down laneways,
smack of hard rain against
windshield glass.

I knew shapes shadows would take
against stone carving,
holy places brushed clean of snow,

Clean of accusations against
life and heart, some kind
of communal elegy,
carried through crowd,

When the shouts became too much
for me to pass on,
and I let others speak
in dark noon of who was
gone that they remembered
just as annoyance,
as apparition;

The same as I,
after the page turned.

1 New Poem

Air Loss

The paper bags on the
live edge table are surrounded
by faded roses, turning
pink to brown in humid air;

I look to the weeds growing
defiant of concrete patches
across the road,
stronger than those things well-loved.

On a hollow bark stage
in life I felt the
wounds of desire,
ghostly sheets trailing in time;

The balmy hypnosis of summer
lawns in front of the BBC broadcast
castle, where a sparkle shone over
every avenue I could travel down;

I turn blue from the altitude.
My wife sends me a picture of
a Holstein cow, a mental health
slogan, an unchallenging affirmation.

The breeze catches again, petals
strewn across floor, ready
for a sweeping hunt of time,
stealing the new moon from sky.

1 New Poem

Songbirds

If I go first,
in the next life,
as a sparrow,
I’ll wake you with songs;

Our love will be simple then,
no more ink-black stains
of deep feeling to clutter
the picture, no more
shattering shouts to break
the silence of summer hours.

We’d still have distance,
but sharpened points would
be gone, just the echo
of sweet language unheard.

I could only touch you from
afar, see you through
windows and wires, an apparition
of what we shared once;

It was a mess
of glass, blood, sweat, spit, tears,
hacking screams in dark,

Before we moved to our new
places,

Before I could love you
perfect, through air

With songs in morning light.

1 New Poem

Evenings & Weekends

One day, all our
bookshelves will be organized,
our basement won’t have rats,
the water won’t collect at
odd angles to the foundation.

One day, the tree limbs
will reach in a riotous tangle
to god above the sky,
not cower in a broken form,
from the slice of blades.

One day, hearts will not
be so mineral, I will
cast light from every piece
of skin I have to shine
against the coming gray.

One day, we’ll cast off our coats,
dance free in rain, snow,
places hidden from glare
of great ills, the blistering
peace that chills an arid land.

One night, when things come alive,
the sparkling illusion leaves space
for withering love, toughened by
the silence of years, passed
between us, unnoticed in their grace.

1 New Poem

 4:27PM, Thursday

I am thrumming with the possible:
pangs of protest, violence,
stomach stirring;

As I sit with echoes
(bannerman in shadow),
knowing our songs

Will all be silence,
forms made anew,
reassembled to journey,

Electric against sky,
waves breaking beach,
wearing the sand

Smooth and broken,
polished for a danse
macabre, dizzy with strength.

****

There was a before,
there will be an after,
there is a now between,

That I live in,
with all possible things:
coursing currents

In my piece of time.

1 New Poem

Dishes

I used to wash plates

at the restaurant

my high school crush’s

grandparents owned, just

off the main street

in a little town with a

waterfront boardwalk

and a high school

on either side.

I’d scrape the leftovers into

a big plastic trash bin,

line cups, glasses, bowls

up against each other,

let the steam come

up over me, and wait.

Watching waiters bustle,

through narrow kitchen bends,

watching rain fall through back alley gutters,

watching summers come to an end.

I used to wash cutlery

in the sink of an apartment

that tilted to one side,

so that water would run

at odd angles, staining the

chipped countertops, pooling

underneath my roommate’s ashtray,

ruining his Zip papers.

Watching days trace into mist,

watching the in-out procession of friends,

watching absurd relationships take flight from couches,

watching dreams come into being.

I wash the glasses while

looking through a window

that turns to the sunny side

of the street, ringed by

houseplant leaves and the

Simpsons ornament my

wife bought two Christmases ago.

I listen for the sound of

pattering dog paws, as

I soak my hands in sudwater,

splendor of the suburb sunset

falling on the kitchen mat

at my feet.

Watching children play on concrete,

watching for a day’s relief in eyes,

watching the time wind rush by us

watching my heart's love wound.

1 New Poem

Song for Those Gone

I’ve heard it said
some things lost are never to be found,
but all things must return:

new forms and shades,
new shapes and names.

In dreams, you flutter on air,
butterfly wings too soon silenced,
taken under tow of time and weight,
too beautiful to be born.

We imagined you
speaking in schoolyard codes,
pitter-patter of nervous foot on floor,
tasting the first berries of summer.

But, maybe, you’ll come
as a rainbow
a sunbeam
a songbird
a shading tree.

Something that holds only joys
for you held nothing dark of
the world, nothing to spoil
from becoming all you could.

But you were all you could be:

Ours,
loved,
all seconds we shared.

1 New Poem

 Blankets (Stardust)

When you were born,
shivering,
you already held,
everyone you could have
given to the world,

the same as your mother,
and hers before;
all hoops joined in chain,

I see when I watch
the women with exhausted,
purple eyes, falling asleep
on their husbands’ shoulders,

under the digital readouts on
healthy eating in the first trimester,
billing costs for reserve scans.

The same as when
I hold you,
glacial,
I hold all the ghosts
of troubled teenage nights,

that wash away,
against light of
next thousand lifetimes,
we hold together.

1 New Poem

 Moon Cycles

Often, in silent times, I think
of trees and death, and how
they are the same:

Circular, replenished, endless,
taking, growing in kind,

Set between plastic places
that echo art that tastes
of bitter ash, bootleg cigarettes,

Back to the spring from which
all things flow.

I think, “why the Garden,
why plants, rocks, sunlight, rain,
why things so small hold joys?”

They are circles,
reminders of home.

1 New Poem

Embers

I was a great collaborator with

wartime cigarettes, an artist

with the conical scream-sighs

of life under bombardment.

I trust you more under

a broken street lamp, under

a shattered sky space,

where time stills

Than I ever did at dinner

tables pushed together on

sidewalks where some grand

conspiracy was hatched beneath

Breath you took in so

easily, not as now with

cracked plaster, mulched brick,

petroleum haze.

1 New Poem

A Note for Fathers

You dwell in memory:
blazing, soot-smoke, refined flame,
shifting, yet stone-hard,
with weights unbound.

There are scarce words
I would have written,
amongst polish concrete monuments,
amongst pine-willow shade,

had I the blood that now courses,
breath that now fills,
webs of infinite electric complexity
that pour themselves onto paper,

now.

Then I was bereft of all,

shivering for the slight,
tender touch of idle hands,
offering frozen comfort,
knowing some other truth.

In the chisel marks,
you persist
doing now no damage,
knowing now no strife,

knowing not how
grass, water, time,
can move boulders –

do not dull wounds.

1 New Poem

 A Long-Ago Castle

There was a vanished treaty
between us, an unfinished thing
in pieces of air,
in words of departure.

A promise across waters,
in amber remembered,
that I held bright, praying
for broken bells to ring.

Your signature, after I took
the hill, bloody and wracked,
dripped from lips with
wounded tone, but I

took it sincere, in a lampshade
way beneath the din of
the Turkish restaurant ,
beneath the pale light of
London black cabs.

Mine, as I stare now into
infinite regress of couch fabric
patterns,  brutalist math
of spreadsheets, time punch cards,

Was holding something back
some patterned longing
with no words to name:

This would only be memories,
written on the parchment of
windbreaks and stream lines.

1 New Poem

A Time in Spring

I heard the Cranberries in the back

of the Yogyakarta taxi:

Transmissions from other times,

lingering like window lights

on the dusty street,

warm glow of iftar dinners,

That rushed past as we

sang into the humid night,

Irish troubles bleeding

into a symphony of

Motorcycle signals,

street vendor shouts,

Warung announcers pushing

unfiltered cigarettes, on passing

Tourist crowds.

1 New Poem

Riding the 55 Bus in Mid-Afternoon

These days, I live
in ruins of greater things,

stray thoughts of greater minds,
last embers of roaring effigies.

I can hardly imagine a shaping
of steel for shelter

A shaping of brick for walls,
asphalt for roads, bridges.

Where did the hands come from?

Were they as simple as mine?

1 New Poem

Lucky Ones

We hashed out life over
quarter-beers in the Hamburg bars,
over the foosball din and
the tap of shoe soles on pavement.

We knew how all things would go,
from the patterns of planets to
the flutter of sparrow winds,
how all of it was one circle,

Ourselves at the centre;

Two wet-soaking amateurs,
their backs bruised from
pressing against invisible walls

So tight for warmth we
never flew, beyond the hazed
windows, weeping for the fires

That burned across the alley corner.

1 New Poem

Summer Skin

When I slipped out of
old clothes for the new century,
the tired rags coming off
in great display,

I took the last half of it laughing,
luminous against backdrops of
half-filled water glasses sitting on
kitchen counters, sticky atop Formica,
sweating in lakeside heat.

I was the imaginary boy, a
boundless whirring of pregnant possibility;
all chanting in soft voice how
great the wings would grow
despite their bent angles.

Until I dropped robes of old time,
the light box of arcade plastic
and screen reflection dulling me,

As I take timepieces, calendars,
silver dollars, baby spoons,

All down to a penny pawn shop,

Sold for good firewood.

1 New Poem

Pine Tinder

In the stolen wonderland
of interlocked train cars, crisscross
traffic between stowaway kisses
off concrete paths,

We burn bright,
white phosphorus and corner store whiskey,
in ragged-end dress and worn elbow coat.

We are wonderous against a thousand
microphones held searching
for explanation, for the why/how
of it all.

We brush past,
unbothered in the acid glow,
cast by bent street lamps,
cast by quarter-shade phones boxes
with copper and change
long since stripped.

Until we round corners,
catch faces against motor oil pools
in blear-eyed dawn light;

How weary, how extinguished,
how like the spectacles-and-watch crowd,
we look in afterparty haze.

1 New Poem

A Sunset in Shenzhen

Nights in the city settle graceless,
metallic, shimmering pavement
glass of the new, recycled tins
making sturdy struts, thrust
into indifferent airspace.

In a different life I loved
school carnival fireworks,
noon tea, marching in formation
and tying ribbons on old oak.

In those lives I remember
days of thrift store couches
in three room apartments,
and Blue on hi-fi,

The days of reckless whimsy,
faced against worth of
fallen things, brutal math
of loan files and above-guideline
increases.

I remember ways things shone
in moonlit silver, before
a veil dropped, revealing
butcher’s blade beneath,

Our holy words.

1 New Poem

 Dancing in Kali Yuga

You say bread and salt greetings
to the morning, dull sun on
the damp flatpack flats of Dublin –

Remembering the trapse through
Javanese back fields, acting
pith helmet past,

Marching with
IMF retirees, teak furniture
executives: observed exotic creatures

From motorbike perches,
from cross-wise wooden windows
set over streams, between rice stalks.

How everything grand seemed greener,
eyes sharper, less bittered
by years after falling,

than now with rain in the teacup,
how things would have moved
so different, had it all been

leading back to this stuck-on
place,  where trees bare bitter
fruit, chemical exports,

that soon drift like black fleet
sails, over all skies.

1 New Poem

Star Transmissions

I remember days when
you flowed like a river around
me, arms dangling through
Thames and Seine,

Out to oceans, seas beyond,
horizons we could tell
from each other in mystic mist,
would be severed one day.

Soon, you’d say, we’ll go on
journeys separate, taking twenty-three
grams with us, as much old film,
phonograph recordings as we can carry.

I looked back to calm when
we traced, paddled all this way to
arrive at the cross station,

Soaked and ragged to bone,
marveling, still mouthing
the winter white hymnal,

Holding you against the pitch sky
as sparks faded.