Soft-focus

I’ve been thinking of walking

with you to the beach

because it's there I’d like to see you,

I’d weave in and out the waves with you,

And you’d wet your feet

as I laugh like a crashing gul.

and as it began to rain some

soft and easy arpeggio

I’d capture you forever

legendary like the Leitz thamber 90mm

the epitome of soft-focus, before high street

snappers, lost forvever that edge of 30s cool.

And I’d keep you there, in my image,

to look back on after the waves have advanced

higher than nostrils

when all we hear is the

laughing of crashing guls. 

Anenome

Your hand on my lip,

testing the hardening bristle

finding dimly;

baby simplicity nothwithstanding,

your father there sure as any rusk

And he feeling flimsy for you,

not tough enough to take

firm hands to your wavering grasp

like coral, or a polyp

in the terrifying sea, anchored

to it’s maternal unyielding spot

I am the passing diver

or maybe even still 

just a flickering fish 

heading back to shallows

or perhaps I am an anemone

filtering these cold currents

for nourishment,

and my hard worn hand,

flashes with yours, reaching

ever hopeful in the darkness. 

River Stories

You said if the river carries more than mud 

you’ve yet to see it, but I saw a tern take an eel, 

and in the challenge of slower beaks drop it.

And I know that eel wriggles it’s Sargasso desperate dance

into banks where mudlarks take their chance

hoping for storied relics;

the musket ball with tooth attached,

the jawbone of a bronze age girl 

whose mission for mussels ended in a muddy trip

and countless rings thrown in anger 

or lost from fasting fingers 

when the boatman dropped an oar

This river carries more than mud, 
and hides a world besides

Stories folded in the filthy loam 
and sent on a spring tide home. 

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.