Dead Reckoning

Living near a graveyard

Sounded a good idea:

Not far to walk

If you need fresh air.

Stones don’t depress me;

It’s people that do.

There are far too many

And they look like you.

With the dead,

You know where you are:

They understand

What silence means;

Yet don’t complain

If you hold wild parties,

Or scream in the rain.

The odd ghost you meet

On those cemetery strolls

Where life appears abstract

Is strangely polite.

Even the headless ones

Raise their hats.

Spooks can be obliging

With directions

(Where am I buried?);

And endlessly patient,

Knowing (unlike us)

That time leads nowhere,

And worrying’s no use.

Their jokes aren’t as funny,

But that's no excuse.

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.

Oracle

How many lamp posts are there in China?

Ask Google, you said.

Do you love me? / is sex is any good?/ are the neighbours watching?/ is two a crowd?

Ask Google.

Who’s Google? I said

Ask him!

Can he tell me who I am?

If you get the answer.

Can I Google myself if I don’t have a brain?

Can Google swim the Pacific?

Will Google save the human race?

Ask Google.

What’s a software clone, what’s a search engine, what’s a piece of string?

Do electrons know we exist?

Is the universe insane?

Did God invent sex?

Is Bill Gates a pop-up?

Do farts sound louder at high altitude?

Was the first elephant a mistake?

How many sods does it take to make sod’s law?

How many death squads does it take to change a light bulb?

Do you really want the answer? you shouted. Do you? Do you? Do you?

How should I know?

Then what are you asking me for?

Ask Google.

Out of Order

In the Freud Museum

At Berggasse 19,

The loo (where perhaps the great man had sat)

Was out of order.

What had he thought, I wondered,

As he pondered

On life.

In the consulting room,

A woman was talking loudly;

I studied photographs

Which I no longer remember,

Even under the influence

Of ink.

I thought of das Sofa,

That famous couch,

Far away in Hampstead;

How I'd kept watch

While you took a photo

On the quiet.

It’d felt eerie

Like watching the dead,

Or them watching us,

Which is much the same thing,

I imagine.

Leaving, I felt none the wiser,

Stepping out

Onto a damp Vienna street,

To find life waiting

Almost where I'd left it.

Future Thoughts

My favourite day of the week

Is tomorrow.

And, if I should find myself there,

One day,

Stepping from a time machine,

I won't wake up,

But walk on regardless.

Second Thoughts

Remember that chap

Who fell asleep,
And woke to a world of the blind,
Where Triffids ruled?

This story might never be written
Without him.

A bit like prophecy:
We wake in the dark
To a world only we can see;

And spend the rest of the night
Checking the room
For monsters.

Odyssey

I long for an A-Z of darkness

Reason can’t sense;

Tales not found in brochures;

A land without memory,

Where real shadows meet.

Why wait

In this half-world,

Sifting caution for answers,

Flinging daydreams into a skip?

Let’s jet off to nowhere:

Tour nonsense; try on the hats;

Live as we mean to die, unknowing;

In some resort, where madmen pose as waiters.

Dream the impossible,

And wake up to breakfast,

Knowing love is absurd.

Brotherly Love

Gestingthorpe 2011

I won’t call you eccentric,

Though we are related.

Your house is full of shards

Gathered from feudal fields

Whose names you know:

Cracked pots and cauldrons; rusting scythes

That would have done a revolution proud.

You sit by the window,

Discussing love, divorce,

Beethoven’s debt to Haydn,

And the fusing of plain and mannered style

In Shakespeare’s verse,

As acres turn dark.

I ask what you mean

By filling your garden with rocks,

Glacial erratics:

Remnants of conflicts

That progress ignores.

Feng Shui, you say,

Hand sweeping the night,

As though that were obvious.

Outside, in the moonlight,

A shriek owl responds;

And the long walk home

Appears less travelled

Than before.

Mutations

If you flew through the ceiling,

The world wouldn’t stop;

You could haunt me at leisure

Or we could just chat.

You could tell me about graveyards,

How ghosts really feel;

How useless a heart is

With just time to heal.

We could pull apart logic

And exorcise fate,

Unravel life’s mysteries,

Make light of love’s ways.

If you turned blue and vanished,

It'd be just like old days.