Poems

It’s an early, cold Easter and on Good Friday  Jean Munro and I go to a small Greek restaurant on Charlotte Street for our very first ever lunch together. She eats with messy, dripping gusto,  Ably assisted by two 75 ml carafes of Retsina. Over Turkish coffee and Turkish Delight  I explain that my ambition

When you are sad, and imminently grey, Will you take down my poems and say ‘That bastard took and took and took From me, for the sake of his lousy book’ —And have me, who am truly old and grey Terribly in handcuffs taken away?

scaturiginichthys vermeilipinnis One day do IMeet the Red-finned Blue-eye?Everybody said IMet the White-finned Red-eyeAnd folks say in town IWooed the Blue-finned Brown-eyeBut did I or do IMeet the Red-finned Blue-eye? In another place and time IKnew the Jade-finned Lime-eyeAnd dark rumours hold ISought the Black-finned Gold-eye,I’m willing to suppose ISquired the Green-finned Rose-eye,But, anybody, do

His eyes brim with the patience of his vigil. Time hangs like heavy pendants from his ears. His dewlap spreads like some contorted hill Of larva, frozen for a thousand years.  He will lie here quite motionless until The door is opened, and the man appears. And when the man appears, the waiting dog Will

Beneath the towering oils of holy deaths — Cascading thunderstorms of crucifixion, Hands tortured into final benediction, Forgiveness in so many final breaths — They stand, a little dull, a little pale, A little worn by all the years of prayer, As if the hopes still hanging in the air Had left them strangely tired

not just in the stretched sunsets and ticking clocks of poets but in the microwave – those four insistent bleeps Pachelbel’s Canon the word ‘lachrymose’ having to google the word lachrymose and the breathless stop when you spot                         what could be a new mole on your back or hear the guy who voiced your

Among late summer’s casualties, their dry retreats, their whispering  in falls and drifting piles of leaves, her going went the worst for him with foxgloves where wire fencing sags, a sozzled hollyhock’s nosedive, the foxes’ feast of ripped bin bags anemones somehow survive; entangled heaps of splintered canes, their broken-backed tomato plants and, rattled by

at arm’s reach, side by side, more than twenty-five feet up our treble extension ladders, shuddered by artics and buses thundering up and down Newcastle Street. But Stanway won’t lend me his scraper. It would take seconds, less than a minute, to run it around the window frame where wood meets glass, scrape off the

Low little thick-walled stone cottage  on the dwindling, forest encroached old Usk road.  You’d catch it at your eyeline, squat above the hedgerows,  like a cup on its saucer; whitewashed, dim windowed,  slightly sad outer face. Dad’s last home.  His, more than hers, ‘a refuge place.’ After he’d died, Mum toiled in the garden that

Nice to get rid of yourself in a few words,Not to think any further or say any more.Nice to conceal in a strange town, To say, I am this, I am that, to use wordsThat are fixed and ripe to ignore.Nice to dispose in a few words. Who wants to live in the woods where

heteromirafa sidamoensis Reminds me of a poet I knew, the lye-ben lark. That’s how I said her name at first, with lye-ben lark to rhyme with why-ben, ‘By the way, it’s Libben Lark,’ she told me at the door, ‘it rhymes with ribbon-lark.’ I’d taught her for an hour. I liked the liben lark. ‘You

Grunting, you slipper-creep across the floor slower than a sailboat in a Force 1 breeze. I wonder whether in that ancient circuit board of a head from which so little intelligible has issued for weeks the Beaufort Scale still means anything or whether, if mentioned, you would as usual get totally muddled, mistake Force 1,