Ante Post* for Annabelle

When we first saw you blink

taking in your lot 
not seeing us blink back,

only slightly less amazed, saying;

“yes, we are your lot”

And saying too;

“you drew well, we will keep your bets intact

show you the form and do our best to stack 
the odds, to help you judge the going

and to know in knowing
those rare arts of the thoroughbred,

no fence can fell you”

So when you run or jump

to take the bounds 
of every field we show you

beginning to wonder 

what’s in the next

or that one further yonder

for us, you can only win,

All Out for life now,

our bets are in.  

*betting on an event in the future

The Thieves

This was a party stopped by thieves

Who smashed the records in their sleeves

And made the dancers stand in cells

Singing desperately to themselves

This was the way the party stopped

All the frenetic movement blocked

All that culture swept away

Nothing valuable left to say

The thieves look on and measure us

The height the weight the sexual tastes

Selling the chance to sell to me 

For the escalating price of free 

Spring Months

You said April is the cruelest month

but that seems wrong to me

it neither drags nor rushes

and so it's free

of March's wornful torn out torment

holding Spring at the end of a twitching stick

and I always thought May was summer's bitch

April shows us what's to come;

days without jackets, nights without bed

garlands for garrisons sending down their dead.

The Denning Dells

Childhood goes like lost children do;

in a flash,

or a whipcrack like if you pull

back a sapling of ash

to test its supple bones with a finger.

Echoes of ancient bowmen there

and the yelping of kids denning in dells, 

standing sentinels to adulthood, welcoming that

exotic stranger in, not knowing he’ll burn hands, 

and take the gold of innocence.

Childhood goes over the brow of a twilight hill

lungs full of dampening air, the summer of cut grass

and teas and grazed knees gives way to worry and weight.

Even as we hear the gladdening laugh of friends

intent on finding us in the bracken

the thump of heavy boots intrudes

and with hands to creaking backs and eyes low

we take our reluctant route home

to the place we came from, crouched, 

small and though newly born,

already taking on the patina of the worn. 

The Sculptor

I think of you, always at a loss

not for words but for their meanings, stacked
some like skeletons disinterred from catacombs 

others like drunks on  cathedral steps seeking 

the forgiveness of proximity to a fading truth.

You take my words now, scrape them with spurls

you sculptor, removing  lumps and edges 
hiding the animal in your mind,

its appetites and irrepressible id.

At this moment of recollection

finding in our room the smell of old words,

loam on a forest floor fit to nourish new life,

I wonder at the shapes we make between our lips

and at what new meaning lingers there.

The noise

There was an insistent hum in the ear

not the drum, although it was a snare, a kind of repetitive sneer

something you couldn’t quite hear,

but which was surely audible enough to cause a stir in the room,

a shifting from side to side, a redistribution of the weight

we carry daily, and take with us to our beds,

something the springs won’t unload,

and no amount of cotton can swaddle

no bud can unpick or portion out in frequencies

that a human can handle, a sound like pips

squeaking in their pith

or imaginary hooves drumming out the day

for a choir of roosting crows.

Reggie loves reggae

Reggie loves his reggae and stays up all night

With windows open to the rain and the orange light

Reggie loves his reggae, for its crouch hip gait

The tic-toc nod, delaying downbeat and the offbeat wait

Reggie loves his reggae, for the way it makes him feel

Too good for the city in ripped pants and flapping heel

Reggie loves his reggae, says its safer than a bank

As a place to store your dreams, 4/4 swing and skank

Reggie loves that reggae, smiling to think they’ll bury him

To syncopations and vibrations a thick and heavy riddim

He closes his eyes to the reggae, leans back in his chair

All his disappointments just a chord  in the air.