Muse

Silence is golden,

but I still can’t guess.

Tongues tied

beg answers from

a sleeping Muse;

an Oracle whose love

falls like dust

on our ears.

So speak

some nonsense of the heart;

your Midas touch

has dumbed

whatever passed

for language.

Futures

For Norma

Thank you

For sticking around.

It must have cost

A fortune

In time travel.

From stars yet born

Why choose this one?

I sent no signal,

But lived in trust

That telepathy works;

And natures not our own

Can feel.

The crater where you landed

 Seems

Great enough to hide an ocean,

Yet infinitely small;

Foretelling all,

In words

Unknown to language.

Vigil

I count the funerals

One by one,

Waiting for time to end.

The guest list

Shrinks,

While longevity brings

The advantage of repentence.

If you beat me to

The Promised Land,

Save some manna for me.

I loved you,

But you couldn’t stay.

Morituri te salutant

Pater Familias

You keep popping up

In the strangest places.

Walking into a room,

Your face appears,

Smiling the same odd way.

Real or not,

I know you’re there.

My shadow everywhere

Bumps into yours.

I hear your voice

Through doors

Long closed.

Even the dark

Assumes your shape;

You’re here so much,

The monsters under the bed

Have been complaining.

Beneath

In memoriam 11/11/11

These flowering legions

Cannot know

What glory hides:

Fields of the fallen, glimpsed

Along the route to Rheims:

Graveyards of Picardy

Where real poppies grow,

Transforming each minute spent

In recompense

For those

Whose silence is endless.

Joker

You haven’t left,

I know for sure.

I saw you in Sainsbury’s

Only the other day,

Your cart piled high

With goodies.

The dead don’t change;

They carry on,

Playing the same old game.

Shuffling the pack,

I see you again,

Ignoring the rules.

Well past your sell-by date:

Your smile as bright

As a new-minted coin,

Deceiving no one.

Facing Up

Spent the day on Facebook

Checking out the sites.
The past won’t feel the same
Without you.

Each image hides a clue,
Virtual or actual.
False or True,
Fate plays our tune.

I sometimes feel
The dark side
Of the mirror
Is where we live most.

So then, it’s no crime
To be out here again,
Wandering the streets
Of Cyberspace.

Γέρωντος

for my Father

How must it have been for you,

Growing up all those years

When truth made sense,

Despite war, chaos, death,

The stuff you’d read at school;

The turning of the spheres,

Like some vast cinematic reel,

As time swept by;

And, later, love.

Gazing at the screen,

You saw the years implode

Into a storm of doubt,

Obscuring the past;

And soon the walls of certainty

Came tumbling down:

Truth, power, authority, respect.

You took your sword stick from its case

And marched the streets

Scowling at the young.

We scoffed at your vision then,

As you might gaze on ours:

Caught up in novelty, like tourists,

Clicking away at every world of choice,

As if photography

Will save us.



Message from Porlock

In 1797, Coleridge’s great romantic poem “Kubla Khan” is said to have been interrupted for all time  by “a person on business from Porlock”

There never was a Xanadu, as far as I can see,
Despite the great man’s ramblings as he ushered me in;
No explanation or offer of tea.
Poets, you think, would have better manners.


His papers were a mess:

Scribblings about dancing girls and caves of ice.
I inspected them, nonetheless,
A thorough waste of time,
And left without more ado,
Since I had come on business.

On the way home, I felt a lurch.
My horse in fast thick pants was breathing -
On account of a broken shoe -
Nothing more alarming.

Back at Porlock, at my inn,
No damsel with a dulcimer followed me in.
I slept in the same room as always.
No wailing troubled my sleep,
Not to my knowledge, at least.

It isn’t that kind of place.

Life Lines

Great Ormond Street, 1987

You don’t recall, being so young,

The spectre of each cot:

Wires straggling up to screens

That told some secret story;

The hurried smiles,

Eyes grim with care,

In your first moments;

Willing science to mend

What nature had left unfinished.

Technology can’t heal

The hours

That fear for breath.

Pacing that ward,

We listened for the note

Of lives so small,

Now amplified

To fill a room:

The message of each heart

Defining a universe. 

Making Sense

Our ghost liaison lasted seven years.

Luck or damnation, I’m not sure which.

I still find ectoplasm between my toes

And, now and then, sense

Your image in the glass.

Beer glass, you’d probably add.

I can still hear your voice:

Who’d love you,

If they knew you first?

Mistakes do happen,

Of course.

You spooked me out,

While teaching me the secret of the universe

Amnesia prevents

Me from recounting.

No help to alchemists perhaps;

But what makes me glad

Is that, for a moment in time (where else?),

In your ethereal arms,

Mortality made sense. 

Exceptions

For imperfectionists,

If things go right (for once),

You change the locks.

Catastrophe is endless:

There are always new mountains

From which to fall.

Conceived in error,

Life implodes:

A marriage made in hell

And ending in oblivion.

Fate, like a time-bomb, self-destructs;

An own goal,

Waiting to happen, as the cliché goes:

A trophy room full of disasters.

Meeting you now makes no sense.

Dreams of incoherence

Turn Shakespearean,

Disproving life’s equation;

You are the exception to the rule.

Weather Girl

The weather girl

Has a way with warm fronts

And isobars.

Her tropical gaze

Makes storms seem tame

As she tells you it looks like rain.

Oceans rise

And villages are swept away,

While you’re off making tea.

Her thermal smile

Betrays no irony.

Her image reigns

long after the programme fades,

Leaving no choice

But to trust each new forecast.

Camden Queen

for amy winehouse 

She crashed through the bar,

Spilling words like discarded notes.

A star,

Bigger than her hair,

On the rebound from fame:

Fake lashes, fate-weary eyes,

As if they’d asked life for a loan.

Still walking tall

Despite all.

‘She hits people’, you said.

Headlines too.

Most nights.

Bodyguards there

For what she might do,

When love’s not enough
To reason why.

I thought she was going to zap us over the tapas,

But she just whispered “Hi.”

Meltdown

Global warming,  

Can you feel it?

That fire we lit

Is not yet cold.

In cities, passion burns

And temperature is all the rage.

Our nights ablaze,

We dream of yet more suns,

Basking in fire

As oceans rise

And glaciers cry their last.

Vast icebergs melt

As we approach;

And our Titanic sails gently on.

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.

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.