Wednesday 11 May 2011

Ball

Here I am now; standing hat-tall
A man, with all a man’s fears
All those crouching gargoyles
Pissing freely into my
Beaver damned stream
Of consciousness

That’s why adults seemed so hard
At times, when as a child
All you wanted to do was play
Have them catch a ball
Which had been hanging impossibly
On the breeze these 30 years.

And the trick of your child’s laugh
Was never quite enough
To crack the surface into a real
Smile, because your innocence
Served always as a tough reminder
Of what was lost
and what will surely come your way

The ball, in mid-air frozen, never
Caught in happy hands but
Hanging impossibly on the breeze
For another 30 years
When foolish fond ideas
Might free it at last into the hands
Of a grandchild. 

Saturday 7 May 2011

Swan

Under the tarpaulin I expect to find
the remains of a battered tractor
three decades in this ditch,
its fucked plow all dints and dirt
rust chewed, almost again
organic, like the jurrasic mulch
refined to feed it.

Instead, on lifting the green grimed edge
and jumping back shouting “bollocks”
as a pool of rusty rain runs 
and ruins my jeans, I find
an almost perfect swan, save for a few
quills stolen perhaps and sharpened
by retrogressive poets,

neck broken in 15 places
leathery black feet dying scraped
deep grooves beneath a king’s belly
and eyes like lead shot dead,
but somehow also winking.


Capture and Release

Who could ask for days like these?
or in receiving believe them?

we’ve shaken leaves from trees
budding and bursting their season

tasted our way through mist
wished in a whirlwind for tethers

to tie down the beast in my chest
to pluck your wings of their feathers


Try catching a tornado on a church spire
holding back  a Tsunami with a spade,
rearranging bits and bones; the shattered escapades
of a terrorist in the crosshairs of an Empire

as frail as the wreaths laid
in the soft solemnity of a fist made
from a handshake at the foot of the rescued tree
whose leaves scatter ashes while architectural dentistry
fills the empty lower gum
and Manhattan bites again.

We are chaos and order
quarks bound together
in the heavy heart of a nucleus 
the indefatigable story of us

fallible too, we cling, two fragile faulty things
blinking, glimpsing,
gently breathing.