After School

Playing with soldiers,
thumb-nail high,

on the summer spring-green bank.

My mother,
cleaning the faceless classroom below.

Now at the window she,
waving her duster
like a yellow flag,
as another soldier falls.

TASCAM DR-05

after school

The man made everything simple.
The man understood my destiny.
Upon our ancient hidden enemies
he shone the beam of his blue eye.

The man told me we were great.
That we deserved a greater living-room.
He gave me jobs, health, and a sign.
A hooked cross to hang upon.

The man would talk but never listen.
We would listen but fain not talk.
No one asked him a difficult question.
And so our life became a sweet obedience.

a difficult question

blackbird returned
across the years
over soft counties
sings from an aerial	
of a house without a set

light thump on a fence-top
surveys earth where potatoes hid

increasing closeness offered
I know him as before I did
from a shed roof of a once home
now unknown
by stranger ghosts

a very possible bird
sings to me of regaining
the luminous note
falling to return
to fall the most

I miss your shape
this August morning
speak me into song
when the night is dawning

alight

Cataracts and tears,
fountains and weirs,
if they froze would not be,
if they chose to be crystal.

And the sea, lake and river,
whether salt, brackish, clear,
must be water ever,
running far, falling near.

If the freshet would harden
or the blood turn to amber,
the brook could not gladden
the eye of the traveller.

a note to those who always say no

In a postage-stamp garden,
your arm about my waist.

You said: look how I’ve shrunk.

Sad line mouth and smile.
Daily terrors for now denied.

Step out of the photo – won’t you?
Shimmer back to your print-stained chair.

We could play Scrabble till the film begins,
leave the board till morning.

Tell me about your scrumping days,
stale madeleines.

Summer excursions
to the high heath wood.

Once you gripped my hand
at an awkward angle,

said sorry son – sorry
I’m a bloody fool.

an abandoned game

A small tin of condensed milk
rolls away across the carpet.
You have done this.

The tin is red
with a white teddy bear on,
and patterns you will later know
as words.

As you crawl,
your fingers sink in
to the first knuckle.

The tin is far away,
under the table.
The carpet rubs your knees and shins.
The tin is getting bigger.

From another room
comes a voice you recognise.
And a laugh you recognise.
There is a clinking sound.

The room is not dark, not light.
It is changing.
It is good to be alone here,
following the teddy on the tin.

are you a dog

Since she came,
the stock flies off the shelves.
She brings them in
with a twitch of her tail.
They cannot refuse.

Her eye the eye of sun.
She invisibly dances through the long, grey
Portobello afternoon.

A saucer of milk,
half a digestive,
and she knew she was home,
my devouring lady.

The books beneath
her warm body,
she does not need to read.
She knows in her teeth.

In the old days,
a killer of her kind
would face the sword, the noose, 
the crucifixion tree.

I open early,
at her sunrise hour,
when her paws extend.
She yawning, like her sister
Sekhmet, who roars in a cage
in a zoo not far.

Bastet and Sekhmet, 
the dark and the light.
And some of each in each.

I love my moggy goddess. 
My little shop is blessed.
Even her mess 
smells of the lotus.

She brings music and dance
from behind her eyes,
into the semi-silence
of my lukewarm life.

bastet

We are the collage of headshots beneath the picture of Him.
We are the photobooth black-and-whites torn at the edges.
We are the pubic hairs in Reginald’s tobacco tin.
We are a thigh bone sticking out from a ploughed field.
We are human meat packed into a drainage system.
We are ash under the roses, bone fragments in a barn.
We are the desperate fingers under the ligature.
We sighed our last into the sweating face of
Ted, Fred, Jeffrey, Dennis, Peter, John Wayne, and co.

We are our mothers staring into the well of their disbelief.
We are our fathers punching a fist raw against the plaster.
We are the glad hand that reaches for the handle of the car that slowed.
We are the punter’s last trick, and our own.
We are the underpass dripping, the lover’s lane by starlight,
the forgotten lock-up by the alcoholic flats.
We are the stink that rises through a crawl space.
We are the extras to His starring role.

While we molder, He receives the obligatory marriage proposals.
While we feel the knife moving, another website is made in His honour.
While we decompose in binbags across a city, another book sells His face.
We are the '13 prostitutes and two innocent women'.
We are the sophomore boys looking for holiday work before freshman year.
We are the hitchhiking runaway with a childhood teddy in her holdall.
We diminish to a criminologist’s footnote, to a profiler’s wet dream.
We never made it to a speaking part, He had a better agent.
We were the supernumeraries and He is the Star.

bit players and walk-ons

She burned the letters and the stuffed toys.
			She burned the photographs and the silk scarf.

			She burned the leather purse
			and the absurd donkey.

			She burned the chocolates 
			and the amber ring.

			She burned the fact 
			of every material thing.

			She burned the present 
			and she burned the past.

			She burned the sails
			and she burned the mast.

			When all was cinders
			in the grate,
			she found her love 
			for she’d burned her hate.

burning

A faded tiger
stares green fire
down the vanishing road.
In the back seat
I pretend to be asleep.
We’re coming home from the sea.
I stretch out fully
and open my eyes,
see the top of his head,
a loose hand on the wheel.

There is rain on the windows.
Moving jewels thread down glass.
He drives and drives.
A lorry overtakes, throws up spray.

He says a word I do not understand.
I reach to the ledge and stroke the tiger.
Its fur is bleached by the Spanish sun,
but now it is a dark shape only,
a comforting rough-softness dearly.

He drives and drives.
‘Are you alright, son?’
I pretend to be asleep.
It’s fun to do that (sometimes).

So black behind us.
So black to the side.
He drives and drives,
and I know in my blood
all three of us are safe.

catseye

One of your legs
is shorter
than the others.

Your identity rocks
with my shifting need.

Your brother is
a shattered stool
in a halfway house.

At the corner of
your orange seat,
a dog you mildly hated
has torn away the fabric.

There is talk
of your replacement:
some pine-effect smoothie.

You have been stood on
to take down the curtains.

I left you in a bedsit
near the Ladbroke Grove.

I scattered your ashes
beneath two trees
on a darkening heath.

You simply wanted
to sit down
and rest,
all your wooden life.

chair

counting pennies
clerkheart

filing paper
clerkheart

alpha-numeric
clerkheart

column and row
clerkheart

balancing books
clean heart

copy machine
copy heart

cutting a finger
scar heart

page clipping
clipped heart

hole-punching
hole-in-heart

begging minutes
tick heart

almost finished
famished heart

hollow heart 
silent heart

hardly heard
clerkheart

clerkheart

I’ve seen it
rumpled on the floor
of a rented room.

I’ve seen it
flash away
towards the tube.

I’ve seen it
arrive on the rim
of Parliament Hill.

Your coat.
Was it off-white?
cream?
ivory?

It was cut
from an overcast sky,
raven hair
flying above.

In the pockets:
sweet wrappers,
morello-cherry lip salve,
a cinema ticket.

The belt swung
in syncopation
with your hips.

Last year
I saw another woman
wearing it.

colour blind

After so long,
you woke me to tell me 
they had begun.

The forming of sunflowers. 
No trace yet of their future black and gold. 
The I at the green centre.
Radials around the heart.

Stalks will bend in the carrying of the black heart.
They lean on dead wood, are tied to it,
lest they fall to earth.
The canes.

Snail and slug decimate leaves,
leaves like fine-grade sandpaper,
leaving ragged patterns of air
where green was once.

They come at night,
on momentous journeys along a wall,
over stones like sierras.

We find them by torchlight, 
remove them to a place of safety.
Ours.

Some plants grow taller, 
some fail altogether,
in a certain slant of sun,
before the warmed brick
of a cottage under a hill.

colours of the heart

You are plastic fine-tooth
and tissue three-ply,
non-recycled,
wetted with a child’s tongue.

The hooting rasp
of your unexpressed love.
The tooting gentleness
of your awkward hands.

Between the teeth
lie the grit and smear
and hair oil of months.
Tiny young hairs 
turned to fluffy dust.

When a breeze blows,
your possibilities vibrate
into the sunny room,
the room that sees the garden.

The tunes you honk 
are pre and post war,
are dean martin
al martino ballads.

the shadow of your smile
volare
red roses for a blue lady

If I blew you now,
my lips would shiver
like one about to sob.

Separate, your two components
are semi-practical
and temporary.

You fall apart,
and lose your instrument.

comb and paper

he sings a welsh folk song
over the chalice garden

I stare into deep pale sky
watch birds funnel upwards

each higher
on some invisible 
spiral stairway
until the final one
alone
aloft
heavenbound
slips through cloud cover

disappearing act

And suddenly you are young again,
full of elaborate plans, saturated by a tipsy
desire to drown yourself in ideas, 
words and worlds, to someday burst from out 
that infinite ocean like a dolphin of rainbow.

The 9 to 5 is a forgotten grey dream.
Days of telly, sofa and pointless chatter,
have not left you bitter but left a hunger.

This was always where you were
meant to be, were meant to love.
School had somehow scuppered you,
limited your scope and undermined
your passions. There, to be too enthused,
too daring of thought,
had made you an object of scorn,
to pupil and teacher alike. 
You learned that lesson quick enough.

Now, among fellow travellers,
of all stripes and none,
conversations are not limited
to your weight issues, or what Deirdre
said to Ken.
You gorge on books more nutritious than any 
stuffed-crust pizza.

As miraculous apertures appear
in your senses and sensibilities,
you remember what you 
had forgotten you had forgotten:
that the world could be a different place,
and so could you.

eternal student

You trembled by the gate,
Raw from a sorrowful night,
When there was no place to be;
Your body unfitting
Any given circumstance.

Tired ghosts nudged you
Across an insomniac bed.
Today you bled
On my sheet – our separation,
This Good Friday morning.

good friday

His hands held me before I was born,
not the father, but the ghost.

Her hands brought the breast to my hunger,
not the mother, but the ghost.

Our loved ones are slipping further
down a freshet of ice.

Their hands are threaded purple
and their faces are lost.

A hand that strikes with a caress
takes the breath from the chest.

Hospital hands, canularised.
We empty like bags, 
wet falling from us,
drip by drop.

The bones of the hand
indicate a path of intricate loss.

After the chapel and the sung thing
have resolved no thing,
hands reach like history
into our momentary veins.

Into whose hands
may we be safely delivered,
handless wanderers
on dark waters.

That dull day a ring fell from her finger
into a carpet where it drowned
as her mind has since drowned.

Yet see, up she comes,
fresh with spray
of flowers for thoughts,
and words that are not words to own.	

All hands,
all hands,
handing us all.

hold

Who made the pot?
said the idiot.

I did, said the potter.
I am the most respected potter
in the region.
I am a master craftsman.
I am an artist in clay.

Kings, and others almost as important, 
commission me.
I made an urn for the ashes of the Princess,
after her unfortunate accident.

Who made the clay?
said the idiot.

Who made the clay?
What idiotic questions you ask.
It is merely raw material.
It was gathered for me by servants,
said the artist in clay.
It is delivered to the door of my studio.

You did not make the clay?
repeated the idiot, 
sucking on a length of sugar cane.

No, of course not, idiot.
Why am I wasting my time with you?
You should be put away somewhere,
somewhere dark and hidden.

The idiot turned to go,
then turned again,
like a pot upon a slowing wheel,
a little unsteady under
the harsh words of the craftsman.

Now the idiot spoke with a voice that grew in strength:
Nor the water did you make?
Nor the stone of your wheel?
Nor your own hands that shaped the clay?
Nor the metal of your inscribing tools?
Nor the fire in your oven?
Nor the eyes of those who look upon your work?

Nor their hands that feel the curve of that jug,
from the belly to the lip?
Nor your moist breath that keeps you from cracking
like any empty vessel?

By the time the idiot had finished
the craftsman was upon his knees,
weeping into the hardened sand of the street.

idiot at the wheel

I am character
				to kill character.
				What lies in the wreckage?

				It’s not the words,
				not the words you are searching for,
				that elude you,
				that laugh at you
				from the outer skin of the universe.

				It’s not the idea,
				that glass ornament
				dropped down a lift shaft
				to some terrible basement.

				It is the booming anguish
				that blooms in your reach
				for perfect fruit,
				waxing in light another made,
				waning in the closing
				of some humanless eye.

insignificance

Why do you want this job?
Why do you want it now?
Do you fulfil the requirements,
the person specifications?
How do you fulfil them?

What can you offer?
What would you offer?
Why should we choose you
above the other candidates?

Communication skills,
do you have them?
How good are they?
Are you flexible?
How flexible are you?
Flexible under pressure?

Do you have a sense of humour?
Humour under pressure?
Is your humour flexible?
Are you bubbly yet dynamic?

What do you understand by:
customer service,
equal opportunities,
teamwork?

Where do you see yourself
in five years,
in ten years, in fifteen?

Do you have time-management skills?
Can you manage time?
How much time can you manage?
What is time?

In three words,
describe your personality.
In three words,
describe your ideal job.

Is this your ideal job?
If not, why do you want this job?
Why don’t you want your ideal job?
Why aren’t you in your ideal job?	  

This gap
in your CV,
can you explain it?

Why have you applied?
Why do you want this job?

rose quartz star

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