Choices

When they took away our choices

and told us “sit”

the sun came out 

like it was finally safe to shine 

on the mess we’d made

Inside with hands clean 

but for a stubborn spot or two 

we took up a communal rhythm

and came together on our balconies to clap;

closer in isolation than in 

the busy gyre of progress,

slapped down for our death defying ways

a bomb of a species temporarily made safe

but capable still of the kind of action 

eras are named from 

When the earth fools itself 

like an indulgent parent into thinking 

we mean our mumbled sorry

we’ll blink in unison 

and retreat to our shared hallucination;

a testament to the cluttered stratum 

we’ll leave to geology,

discarded things in the mess of space 

choosing every time the only path life knows 

And when this experiment in consciousness 
concludes that choices hurt; 

all our urgent endeavour hardened to rock, 

I hope amongst the Kinder toys, and cars,
some art survives

so alien archaeologists may know

how close we came to understanding;

the privilege of our place;
the choice is ours to make. 

The Oldest Song

We were melted guitar parts

With a heavy bass, freaked beats 

And one of those dippy organs 

That signifies hallucinogens 

We’d erupt, like childish bombs

And ricochet our lovely bullets

Tumbling unrehearsed

But tuneful, into anecdote 

Into closer than you dare

A gripped fist, like meditation

You said. I didn’t care 

To spit, the pips,

Or grow them from hand

To heavy, to the imaginary

Reviews we read 

In unpublished papers 

Underneath whose headlines 

Runs a story old as stories 

A song forever sung 

Like a firm grip to a warm gun. 

Beat

This is the only life we know 

we are the sole survivor

Of the disaster that we sow

You and I only know

The secrets we can't show

So hear me when I whisper 

Never listen when i shout

The heart is a brittle organ

But its tune will come out

To a mostly steady beat 

So hold your breathe a little longer 

And when the time comes let it go

Gone

The leaves came out again

Like they always do 

If I could only walk under them 

One more time with you

But that’s not gonna happen 

Because of mortality 

So I sing this song for you 

Like you would have done for me 

I don’t go for superstition 

It only clouds the windows 

That you helped me to keep clear 

I’ll look out of them every day 

And try to feel you near

You

About three month's after Marc Bolan 

got wrapped around a tree, 

and I was busy being two

Along came you.  

Hiding behind the son of god

When radios played Wings

And punks spat seasons greetings

Dressed in Westwood,

As you were the day I married you.

My perfect mix of Indian, Irish Italian 

and little bit of Jew

Who knew, that you being you,

 We'd hold hands and dance 

Down the south bank 

To make you feel my love

Sleeping in a drawer in Brockley 

40 years ago, your parents weren't to

Know the highs and lows of you

But they taught you how to love

And other quantum things

My agape and Eros

My morning coffee and

My Nighttime rest

My friend in fact the best

Of anything a heart can hold

My world less odd for holding you, 

My words were found in the eyes of you

Put down on the page in truth to woo

And keep you as you are

Sometimes the only thing I know that's true.

On free will

In kid days we were always cool

Though waiting to be shot

As if from a bow at history


Old men know the fleeting path of arrows

And how many miss their mark

Advising only to appreciate the arc

And the view from there,

With the harried battle far below.

Arrows that land, impotent in furrows

Or twisted to the back of a horse’s knee

Taking down no kings nor plunder

Had a least their moment there

Between release and fall

To imagine a softening enemy

That they may retire in.

Arrows cannot choose their bow,

It takes a helpful archer to know

The wind, the field and in the letting go

The adamantine nature of the foe.

Finding You

Seven miles out of light,

underneath the scrub,

the dinted moss, the scuffed path hill scars,

weighted ways where Saxon kings

acquiesced to history.

Here on a hot day, you almost feel

the ground sigh,

giving in like a theatre seat

to what must happen next.

In such a place I will find you

just when the weather breaks

to see you stand in grace

where ranged armies laboured

for hope,

and where the cracked back of this ridge

offered up its help

not for faith but for geology

and the indifferent earth broke

against argumentative rock.

Here where countless atoms dance

the picture of you is clear,

marked out against an opening sky

like the sudden image an arbitrary point

gives up on the horizon 

if you only stand and stare.