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. 

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.