French Fields.
Home keys not pressed
rest.
Crosses trace the contours
white.
A chorus of silenced
chords,
string across the wind.
Labrador
By the shed, a Japanese Maple burns
over brown seeded heads of summer plants,
where your shit lies,
damp with the sheen of dawn.
You strained here,
pink sphincter stretched white
over weak legs.
You pushed the brown head
onto fallen leaves with a leech of blood
and looked for me.
There’s a print of your paw near the back door,
and by the shed, where maple leaves flame red,
the ridged twist of your bowel
on faecal clay.
Sepia
A carpenter crafted this.
Bevelled grains with subtle stains
that change the texture.
Her mouth is whittled from willow;
thin lips lapped by the wind.
Her hair is styled mahogany;
a forest of dark grained Swietenia.
Her skin is oiled olive wood
carved in Byzantine Bethlehem.
Her eyes are of the hazel,
wand wise.
In the bright lit room she sat,
pillow propped,
lolling to the left,
starch white waiting.
I closed the door.
Asylum.
With each drag the man’s sleeve shifts
to show dark skin, pitted with deep
white scars; bowls of cooled craters hot
with old pain. I think of Helen.
She had skin like silk, softly tanned
by the summer of ’76
with fine, fair hairs that melted first,
curling crisp in the glowing heat .
I ask the interpreter about the scars.
“Self inflicted”. She said.
“It’s not uncommon, the pain blinds,
briefly, the mind’s eye.”
It started with a pound note, a match
and a crumpled cigarette .
I didn’t smoke so her fag felt awkward
between my finger and thumb.
It was her idea. The trick was to wrap the note
around her slender wrist,
drag on the fag
and burn a hole before she fainted.
‘He says they made him watch her die.
Held her high on a bayonet.
Passing her one to the other
Laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing.”
I sit across the table from
a brown skinned scarred man,
who reminds me of the girl
I’ve not tortured for thirty years.
Meg Green’s Freight
Meg Green’s bed trembles
with the weight of passing freight.
From her window sweet chestnut trees
rise above the embankment.
Fish-slice leaves, gloss green
preen themselves in summer;
concealing from sight
the muffled passage of trains.
In winter, after the leaves have left
their litter on her neat cut council lawn,
she can see again.
On the edge of her bed in the dark
she looks through strong branches
fake tanned by orange lights.
She waits for filmstrip trains to
trail negative framed faces,
some seen before;
and gasps a smile
at the passing profile.
As the lights of the last passenger train
tunnel into the night;
Meg Green stretches her aching back,
slips off her slippers,
and curtains the dark.
Sieving
I know about stars.
They’re far away
have nocturnal habits
and hide from the day,
and when I lie
hair rasping a pillow of sand
fingers sieving cool grains,
shrinking clumps in each hand,
I can watch them for hours.
Those that drop from black cliffs
falling into forever.
Those that glide over our organic blip
and those that sit still
years above the sky.
Fingers sieving cool sand
the insatiable wet of the world close by.
The Immortal Mosquito
When dust first rose to blind the fallow mass,
and Judas followed Jesus, I was there.
They crowned his head with thorns on bloodied hair
and dragged him through the streets beneath a cross.
I tried the blood that bloomed upon his face
and drank a glob of Jesus in despair,
but nothing in its essence could compare
to Judas blood so strong with thick distaste.
Since that time I feast Iscariot lines
their blood bulbs grapes that burst on stony ground
too full of juice to hang upon the vines.
It grows in yards with wire and barbs around
yet through the years they’ve fed me very well.
I dine on wine matured by infidels
Patronage
A man parked his car
at Lidl on the Aeropli road
and filled it with food and wine.
Watched
by a thin man
from Pakistan
with a spray bottle
and a dirty cloth.
Uninvited
he sprayed the screen,
scratched off dried bugs,
scrubbed it clean.
Grateful ( for the opportunity)
the blood faced man
rummaged for a euro,
shook the cleaner’s hand,
smiled and drove off
to his villa in the hills.
Glasgow Girl
Do you know what she said,
that blond young girl from Glasgow?
The moneyless, motherless girl
sitting on the edge of her bed,
looking down to the million-souled city,
belly slopping with cheap soup;
The girl with hungry worry gnawing
the bone at the back of her brain
with ninety eight pence and some
soup to see her through until Friday –
This blond young girl child from Glasgow said:
‘I don’t think about the future
that’s ages away isn’t it?
I worry about money, but everyone worries.
Those with money worry,
just not about money.’
Farmers المزارعين
(We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children. Jimmy Carter)
Arable land blows away in winds
when soil, weighed down with water, dries.
Crust crumbled to dust lifts to blind
eyes, mute suns, stain skies.
Heads taken from necks are cognisant.
Fifteen seconds is long enough to see
the red fountain, freed from resistance,
coagulate the sun with living screed.
Farmers watch plumes trail tyres,
and silent shadows race the air
with cargos that fuel sun sized pyres;
sowing seeds, growing smoke from despair.
A roof rips off and light brandishes death.
A father’s head sees his son’s arm in flight
his girl’s legs wheel, before his final breath;
her intestines trail like the tails of a kite.
(Between the steaming tangle heaven glints.)
Tumours
Hawks and Falcons shit
on high winds.
A boy on a bike squints
at a Colgate glint in the air
*
*
*
*
A pregnant woman sees
apples fall from a market stall
and the slow rotation of a warped wheel
womb on fire.
Apple Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZHD5Rs1nHE
Sitting on a bench beneath the apple tree…
a fresh little apple hanging there for me.
‘Hey little apple how can it be
that something so lovely that the earth conceived
can be plucked and eaten by a man like me.
Because little apple it’s plain to see…
some men on this earth are born ugly
and if you could speak you would agree
some men of this earth are born ugly.
They take you apples from your apple trees…
fresh and round with no disease.
They feed you to the folks and their families
who get you from the market on days like these
days like these where a family flees.
Because little apple it’s plain to see
some men on this earth are born ugly
and if you could speak you would agree
some men on this earth are born ugly.
They take you apples from your apple trees…
and shine you up for us to see.
You’re crunchy, crisp and good for teeth,
behind you little apple there are third degrees
of people burning in the lands they seized.
They took the wealth as their strength decreed
and transfused black blood through their veins to feed
arms, money, power and greed,
and in this way they planted seeds
that grew in hate that was quick to breed.
Because little apple it’s plain to see…
some men on this earth are born ugly
and if you could speak you would agree
some men on this earth are born ugly.
Some men on this earth are born ugly.
Bank Food (for Greece!)
They feed us the banquet of the dead.
Food rotten decades ago,
is fluffed with the downy hairs of mould.
They tell us to eat this shit or die,
so we eat this shit and still we die.
Let’s die with hunger’s rat eating our insides,
not by rotten food wrapped
in the mould of age old lies.
The Blinded
We are the blinded
white eyed in the light.
We are the deafened
mute in a noisy night.
Bombarded by bits of everything
lavished with lots of nothing.
When light leaks in
when voices rise through the din.
Let them in.
Now look.
Now listen.
Now know their lies.
They burst your drums.
They stab you eyes.
A Few Haiku
perspiration from
our cool sweating valley climbs
making mountains float
sunset descriptions
red, blood stained, it’s all been said
kitsch, cliched fictions.
November sun falls
upon drowsy green grasslands
late flies die of cold
sunlight cast
on the belly of leaves
moves with the river
the misted mirror
runs clear as rivulets slide
revealing my age
feeling flattened out
all alone and monotone
waiting for the phone
lost in childish things
her imagination rings
bells of happiness
There Is No Time That Will Not Come Again.
There is no time that will not come again
All ages past on weightless winds have fled
But back to here we come, I know not when.
The child has gone that we have grown from grain
and now we wear the masks of parents dead.
There is no time that will not come again.
I track our years in memories through this pen
and love you more than ever could be said.
But back to here we come, I know not when.
The seasons with their changes come and then
imprint upon the old, genetic treads.
There is no time that will not come again.
Trees in totem beauty time distain
and climb through space to light where they are fed.
But back to here we come, I know not when.
In time the mountains tumble to the plain
And raging floods with human blood run red.
There is no time that will not come again.
But back to here we come, I know not when.
