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.

Broken Beams

Splinters of light breaking from beams

Outside in the crouched cold an army waits

To pick up it’s feet again 

taking harvests of harm to the chapel.

Calm walls crack under the weight

Of all this expectation,

Men dug in, women aloof

And the shattered sounds of children

Taking violence in echo

"This is how it works" says the priest

Relieved of his duties by shells

Breaking like beams of light.

Proposal

In the piazza Navona we sit and drink the past

we are bees at the flower, the fountain the acquifer

anyway whatever,
there's passable pizza, acqua vitae espresso

courage for the cluster of gems in
my pocket

And bees again buzzing  Barberini, 

patrons, villains, builders and killers, 

in the blood soaked robes of Rome

And laughing again at some joke you've made 

seeing reflected in your sunglasses

the face of your nearly husband scanning the square

for a place without pilgrims 

somewhere to add our history to all this layered meaning,

we're another generation with the unyielding idea of God.

When a Pope dies they melt his ring and leave a vacant throne until white Sistine smoke announces the next of Peter's line. Power and faith holding the masses at bay with love. Fuck knows what they do when one resigns.

I can just make out your eyes under the sunglasses face to the sun that way women do

soaking glamour and cell deep sustenance.

It's March I brought you here to warm you.

Yes your eyes then,

they've got that wide alertness you show when

the cells of you let go their prisoners and anything can happen,

but somehow you don't suspect this even though your Dad knows 

and I'll need a quieter place to do it; 

the only quiet place here when there's a new Pope on the go.

Really I planned this but didn't count on the daisies even 

and the real still heart of this place 

where poor miserable Keats declared to admiring eternity

his name was writ in water.

I'll write my name on you here.

You, still unaware though skipping through the daisies 

and finding Shelley you rest your head a while on my shoulder 

and seem to sigh.

Those Romantics liked a sigh 

and I would make a point of it 

half celebrate and undermine it, 

and we'd have what comics call 

a good 5 minutes of material from it

But this is serious earth now 

Romantics beat the comics. 

Over the wall busy Catholics leave me to my not quite secular promise.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water

The water of me not nervous, not stormy, 

not all waves like the death of Shelley 

more a steady break of wave upon wave 

at the sure shore.

This is roughly how I planned it, the failsafe place of poets. 

So Grecian Urn then mainly from memory and also my iPhone 

while you so happy in this glade 

and taking pictures of the light 

opening those cells that lock you up in winter 

so light-glad I can hear them I think 

crack open with your laughter

Fiddling with the camera you don't notice I'm on my knee

But listening to the ending of you as girlfriend 

beauty is truth, 

you know that don't you, 

your beauty often stops me in my tracks 

sending thoughts off track 

or one track in particular

you have just noticed me

on my knee 

saying "will you marry me?"

When you fire a gun without ear protection

The silence after the bang is surprising.

Your loud dancing YES loud enough 

to wake Keats light bounces off emerald grass 

white diamond daisies 

light through leaves 

and the latest waking bees 

do a dance with us through poet nourished trees 

in the old gold 

Roman sun.