Untold

I saw seven magpies

On a walk

By the ruins of an old fort.

That means luck, I thought.

The fort stares out to sea,

Waiting for invaders who never came.

The birds didn’t stir,

As if they belonged there.

They took off finally, three, then four.

Like omens, I felt.

No five for silver

Or six for gold.

Two should bring joy,

The old rhyme says;

Not sorrow, like one;

But seven’s a secret untold.

Smoke and Mirrors

It’s often like that, don’t you think?
Things don’t turn out as planned,
Unless they’re not:


Those mist-filled moments

Where everything’s clear.

Take your name:
I forgot it the moment you said it,
But still remember.

With dreams,
You don’t need a map.

I’ll meet you here,
At the café
With the faded mirrors,
Wherever you are.

Echoes

The voices aren’t happy today;

The radio’s not tuned

To some antique station;

No one’s whispering rhymes from childhood;

Footsteps shuffling, when they should lie still.

No voices,

So silence must do:

Listening

To sounds unspoken:

The ticking of your brain.




Amnesia helps

Pass the hours, you joke:

The gaps between days.

Soon, the music will start;

Until then, you wait:

Time is a story

Without an ending,

Where strangers rise

From old photographs

To greet you;

And dust reigns

On dance floors,

Where you were once queen.

Old Albert

Not one for idle talk,

Old Albert,

Though silence spoke to him

No doubt.

His wheelbarrow grumbled

With its harvest of apples;

Sparrows heckled

As he passed.

Winds tugged at his cap;

And the sun performed

Cartwheels

Behind his back.

Smoke waivered

In his greenhouse.

His ghost is busy

In the flowerbeds,

Reading weeds their last rites.

It lurks in the orchard

Where we climbed as children;

Waits undiscovered

Like windfalls in grass.

Wrapped in breezes,

He sleeps on,

Ignoring the dark.

Love's Mirror

I have sought eyes that I risked all to find,

Imprisoned in their sight; eyes that I longed to know

Were bright before light cast its antique spell,

Transfiguring love, which first (and last) is blind;

Eyes that held tears from which vast oceans flow,

Stirred secrets only other eyes can tell;

Learning how looks deceive the trust they sow,

Like ghostly mirrors, fated to remind.

Yet your gaze calls me back, dispelling fears

That, out of sight, the heart’s horizon fades:

Absence cannot be loss where we are whole

And moonstruck distance draws our mutual soul.

Recalling these sweet truths, your glance upbraids

This ‘I’ that, lacking you, sheds inky tears.

Et in Dementia Ego

You’re not too old

To fight

At fifty-five,

Lash out at bus stops,

Scream in Sainsbury’s

At the lack of love;

Accost unwilling strangers

With philosophies

That Sartre knew not;

Curse heaven above;

Condemn the play

Or lose the plot.

Be yourself,

Says that wise old elf

You met down the garden path.

If roses prick you,

Kick them back;

When the mower fails,

Tear up the grass.

They can’t ban age

And futile rage.

Ignore those fools.

Dementia rules!

Armageddon

Sirens on song
Proclaim the new coming:
Damnation is waiting for the good and evil.

 
In his limo, Lucifer smiles
On a city’s indiscretions,
And signals his driver on.

Me & You

You wake up

As Anthony or Cleopatra,

But appear quite normal on the bus.

At work, truth is waiting;

You scour emails for love.

Your greatness goes unnoticed

In the canteen at lunch.

In your dreams,

As all of us,

You are the one.

At night, you keep vigil,

Imagining a time,

When magic happened.

Munich

When the fog rolls in,
You can hardly see your feet.
You have to be there to remember.

I think of those kids
Every day of my life.
Heroes can’t atone
For what is  past.
You can’t undo time.


Growing old, I feel
Fate is always there
In the hope of each generation.

Some griefs can’t be shared.
We must bury our own.

Survival is never easy.

Heroes 2

To see him in Sainsbury’s, you wouldn’t think

His forebears sailed with Drake,

Or died for scraps of land

An empire plundered.

For them, the industrial age

Was the slow turning of a grubby page.

Now, in the information dawn,

His ignorance grows

To meet him.

The ancestors that crowd each face

Mirror his sense of doubt,

Knowing that heroes nowadays

Must wait their turn at the check-out.

Market Day

Fuseta market: old man selling clams

Shovels them nimbly in a plastic sack,

Winkling out stragglers like a pianist seeking notes.

Fish reign on marble slabs;

Dogs hang around and are not cursed,

Tangling with legs and shopping bags.

The blind man in the entrance stares through time and space:

His eyes have lost their memory, but found maybe

A solace that empties to an ocean with each glance,

Startling the tourists and the clouds.

Outside, the Atlantic waits behind the dunes;

A street of stalls festooned with junk

Loses its way among the fishing boats.

Wondering why I came and whether you’ll be back,

I dodge the blind man’s gaze and wander off

To search for love, among the bric-à-brac.

Heroes

 

Hamlet broods at the bus stop;

Cleopatra’s in bed;

Othello cuts himself shaving,

While Macbeth burns the toast.

Caesar’s off to his shed –

Mowing the lawn is easy when you’ve legions lost;

Life could be worse.

And, next door,

Lear is screaming

For his nurse.

Lost Land

It’s no fun living in Atlantis

Despite what poets claim.

Crustacians pick on you constantly

And only sharks smile back.

Mermaids entice you

With dreams of rescue;

Wrecks make you sad.

The Titanic’s a deep-sea disco,

The Marie Celeste is a pub:

You can dance with some starfish forever

Or drown on a pint.

Back home, on my water bed

I lie, counting fish.

Mystery surrounds us,

Submerged in a myth.

I dream of land constantly

But can never go back.

Betrayal

It wasn’t just Ozymandias who despaired,
Gazing at the sand.
The age-old prophet’s cry
That nothing endures
Condemns us all to write
Our epitaphs.

“These empty skies
Seem like an echo of my greatness.

Strength is not what it appears;
Look no farther than here:
Though dead four thousand years
I am younger than the dust
That binds us all:
The emperor and poet.

“The gods, who invented pride,
Betrayed us.
Now they come weeping back
To turn me into verse.

“Immortality should last
Longer than this.
Your words will fade like mine.


"The sole truth is the desert.”

Cybersex

Lost in a real-time rush,

We strut our facebook stuff,
Imagining ourselves unique
Authors of cyberspace.

Like hedonists

Trapped in a sensual web,
Believing no doubt
That we determine love,

When in virtual (and actual) fact

It’s love that determines us.

Past Glories

Your charms once upstaged

A golden age,
Falling prey to the tribute of time.

The muse
That fed you verses
Has turned your allegiance to stone;

Your fame,
Ignored by the pigeons,
Which, like much of this city,
Have more pressing duties in mind.

(Place Vendôme, Paris. Dec. 2010)

Terminus

There are faces you recognize:
That woman in muslin could be your gran,
That young boy your son.

Their past is a world
Where steam began
And journeys unplanned
Spell out the years.

On platforms like this,

The future remains unread.
While off stage and out of reach,
Streets languish like crimes
Ignored by hurrying  feet.

Epitaph

In my mind, you’re still there,
Caught in a backward glance,

You lift the latch gently, as if to say
You’ll be back,
Not taking that final step

Into the night
That was always waiting.

Morning

They woke as foretold

Hearing the rain

That had fallen for millions of years;

And in their hearts

Time wept, a new-born child,

Its first cry unremembered.

Notes from the Underground

Tunnel Vision

Uncertainty doesn’t work in the city;

You know where you’re going,

Not who you are.

That would be too much to ask.

Avoiding your eyes,

I feel I’ve been here before.

In the tunnel, we stop

For an age,

Listening to our heartbeats.

Fair Lady

Somewhere in the tunnel of love

The music stopped

And we touched.

Later, on the ghost train,

You screamed my name

Until the gates opened

And we walked out

Into the arms of the crowd.