Old Eyes

He's in frames big enough for a child to climb

and being long-sighted his eyes loom large

lids like giant moths fan lenses,

cooling perhaps the thoughts

which overheat his mottled corneas,

constricting the pupil who’s learned too much.

What longed for return to easy times,

before lines linked nose and chin?
what devastating dreams of days when skin

less grey stretched taught across that

sacrificial skull?

It’s no secret; time makes an enemy of our cells

and when the dance of summer days is done

we’re left to search the dimming light

for children climbing, 


their sharp eyes not sharp enough see

the place they’re climbing to;

the wise and wizened eyrie of the old.

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. 

Supermoon

I thought I’d never start a poem like this:

the moon…

it seems too cheesy

a bad joke, like that bad joke

but it is the moon seeming

larger looming, slicking

roofs sick of frost on the first night of spring

offering us; the bewildered

                                            answers

not found in rolling coverage of earthquakes,

a shoeless girl weeping the soaked tatami

where isotopes dare her wait a half life for love

or in the cracking of Africa’s burnt crust; 
the sudden end of history 
as we knew it the last time our moon dared so near.

Realpolitik in its ghostly glow breaks

free of the dossier haunting headlines

but doesn’t seem as mad, 
as you and I dear, raving
for nights as bright as this,

feeling wolf hungry, daring the lunatics

to draw their curtains, and set us free.

Your little finger

Your little finger

is a match in my hand

I strike it like a cartoon cowboy

on neglected stubble

to light your cigarette

You’ll need a manicure now,

and the flame surely burns,

But the smoke is consoling

and your eyes reflect fire

like amber in the sand.

Brain Heat

The bed is harder than asphalt

hotter than tar cooked

to a gritty treacle by July

and although it’s March, winter

still grips the roof with killer’s fingers

the heating thuds guilty carbon belches

and I writhe with the brain heat,

cranium cracking like a fault fired pot,

flames finding weakness and licking it.

I made this mind a crematorium

and for assembled family roll us in

corpses on a barge blaring

all the rock songs of summer

and winter’s dreams of heat                      

lost in the absence of consoling sleep