GREAT

You can do great good
Or great evil
With a mattress
A headboard, your ego
And a knife and fork

CHESHIRE CAT

Check it out
A shaggy
Podgy splodgy
Fat cat's story

Aluminium shares
Dissapear into HA ha h a

COMPLEXITIES II

The complex human heart
Isolates or expands
Mine has two rooms;
Cathedral and a potting shed
 
Daily I feed my heart a piece of
Red meat with straw
Read the gilt history
Of buttercup pulled apart

I sit in the sitting room
You bang the door
A photo jumps on the wall
All the Royal family are
Gone - mown down.

BAD HUMANS...

Their smiles are wide
They have excellent
Dentistry; their guns
Are long
They do excellent trade

There are no investigations
Into their numerous crimes

They tell you exactly
How they did it,
Which 'big idea' they
Helped popularise,
When the books out,

And why they must
Continue doing it to others

BREATH AND TOUCH

You are dust
I am ash
Just ash
Breathe on me

I am ash
You are a spark
Land on me
Touch me

Your
Promise of hands
Builds this bonfire.

Breath fans light
To a crescendo

Breath on me, touch me

UNTITLED

A miracle happened today;
I found a moth in
My tea cup,
Left over from
Last night's excesses -

I opened a window
And threw it away.

And the slates
Ran silver for a while,
Then the sun dried it up
And the moth flew.

A miracle like this should
Happen every day.

COCOONED

When the 'Heavens Open'
It's a release - a catch thrown.
Earth is washed
Of all it's bad memories.
The clouds lose their negative ions
I 'bubble up' more,
Feel emotion close under skin.

The green glow afterwards in Nature
In leaves, is of a true forgiveness -
Old ladies at the bus stop seem more amiable -
Talk is swilled with hope
As bird song signals a fresh start;
A brace of notes re-wired in trees.

EARLY MORNING WALK IN MIRFIELD

In the quiet hour
Poised between sleep and work
I wander among automobiles
Whose roofs are
Machined with perfect frost,
Listen to the waterfall of song
Tumbling from a hollybush.

Further into the web of streets
A score of arias
Overlaps the ugly square
Of the Methodist chapel.

Your near,
But where? The dog on the street
Asks with bloodshot eyes.
No luck. I walk into Knowle park
Where trees cower like o.a.p's
And a spine of crocusses is
Trying to find light…

ELEMENT-SYNTHESIS

Cadmium/Radium/Bromide
We are made of rare things.
- But its not merely chemical.

When there are meetings
- Love can enter.
When there is conversation
- Love might enter.
When we take down barricades
- Love will enter.

HELGA

To Andrew Wyeth)

I pass over the peach melba of her body
Observe the caves of light
Craftily spilled, placed linen…
This scene could as readily switch
To penitential dark.

But wading in the storeys
Of her arms, I know delight,
Communion again...
Manchester, Ancoats, '83.

I abandon chiselled words
For the tongue. My one finger
Like a searchlight,
Brings my sensibility close
Like a leaf through the window.

God preserve this dream -
This artifice - stretched on a pine bed
A pulsing soul, braided, asleep,
Brushed into me…

NIGHT-TIME

The things of the night are out;

Spiders, hanging heavy like
Jet necklaces.
The spawn of woodlice like
Scaled down versions of tanks,
Practising eccentric Sandhurst manouveres;

Next door's over familiar cat,
Sitting outside our kitchen window,
Wearing its dissolvable grin,
(Steel whiskered, halogen-eyed)

And myself at 4a.m in badly tied pyjamas
Clutching my ice cool pint of milk
Caught in the fridge's crack of light,
Feeling uncertain at tomorrow,
Feeling the pull
Of the ovoid moon.

RIDDLE -A DATED POEM
(PREPARATION FOR WAR)

Ballerina roller-skaters,
Internal ecstasies in the U.S of R,
Play and rotate,
Towards the resolution
Of the high state's impediment.

Fractural in thought,
The state car,
Like a globe colossus,
Conceals the stinging pride -
Sharpening nails men can't hide

ALLOTTED TIME

…Dear Reader
Would you be surprised
If the deaths-head painted cylinder
Landed in your garden
While you were digging up your potatoes?
Would you raise a surprised eyebrow
At the moment both you, your eyebrow,
And allotment disappeared?

Well I would…

CONSTRUCTION

My words are the tool
My tongue is the lathe
On which I spin my
Thoughts.
This construction here
Is a cast from my mind -

But as the thoughts do change
Variously
From day to day,
I frequently have to change gear -
Shed beliefs.

Like an anarchist or luddite
Screw up tight in this deeply veined hand
This blue-print for
An old-fashioned way…

I LIVE IN A WORLD

I live in a world
Where mighty feats of engineering are produced
But no-one shares a car…

Where children learn to love competitive games
But few learn the value of co-operation
POEM CONSTRUCTED FROM FRAGMENTS OF A DIARY
(buried in Nova Scotia, 1938)

SPRING

Oh Lord, the ticking. To escape it
I would live in a low-impact dwelling
With straw bales and cardboard sides,
Frost-bound
With awry tin chimney
Where kettles defiantly croon
for an age
Singing above the mud.

And our faces grow old slowly there
Drinking in the glade,
Adding the 'x factor' to our patina.

…But the dream could not last.
The awning always goes
Plop, plop, plop, and
Scwish, scwish, scwish our ulcered feet,
The clearing pricked with rain…

Little things unsettle us -
I noticed a chaffinch huddling
Dismal, fluffed, getting colder,
Under our chestnut's wing.
Though all the candles were lit in its branches
I found it by the bole, its eyes pecked away.

WINTER

The screws, the screws
Once on the margin of the archipelago
Now scratch with outboard motor
The bare plate of the forest we hide within.
Hard fruit.
Unable to sit around we hoe in earnest.

Only two of us left, Tommy and Simeon
(With Clancy and John we killed
As one person
Until the rules came back)
I note, no room to weave here.
Food low.

…So I pluck up courage, dive down
To the wreck where it happened
Where we burst to freedom,
Where brave men
Lost their fight…
Five metres down I find it,
The funnel explored by eels
Two lifeboats
Loose. Bobbing.
Later I eat
From tins, stabbing,
Boring, until the juice runs out;

But it was a prison ship we holed that day
And all I can think of
Are my motley collection of mates, ribboned by fish.
Handcuffed to guards
They still congregate to escape
By the hatch at the top of the steps.

We will eat this fruit until the warders come.

We will eat all this food until the warders come again.
Where words frequently don't mirror actions
And the moon is mapped and analysed
(Its poor scarred face is laid bare).

Dreaming is undervalued he

SORRY

You are the wronged
And I am the wronger
You are the horizon,
The lightning and thunder

You are the flower
The root of the soul
Everything has turned out
Wrong - new growth
(However twisted) must come
From deep in the soil

DOMINOES

Your nightmares
Are six millimetres deep
You brush against them
With steel comb
Teasing
Out the memory
We go to sleep

My nightmares
Become
Six
Miles
deep

Meaning
The rope
snapped -
My vertebrae

Topple like dominoes

A game no-one makes sense of