Poems Page Two

A room

The fire is electric
In a fake brick fireplace
On the mantle is a clock that no longer chimes
Above it is a painting of a man who never lived
Over wallpaper that covers 9000 homes
Up to a ceiling that leaks
Into a bucket made out of plastic
And Joanna will never have children

A moment's grace at the gates of Hell

Home again he sighs
As he sculls a pint
And sits in silence
Red eyes closed

His hands still shake
But all else steadies as

He feels something sink and search
Warm, wide and flowing
Through ivory arteries
And along golden veins
Bouncing off dead skin
And back through a three-legged bag o' bones
Pumping more from memory than desire
To his occasionally opening eyes

It is the glow of God
Ending his nervous holiday

He is his own man again

 

The $2 Man

Every day on the low Anglican wall
I see a sag heavy man
His paunch slipping
  Deeper into ruptured garb
    Cold yellow feet hanging
        From his flyblown jeans
And every night as well.

He enounces
could you please help
with two dollars please
murmurs hasn't had any help
ever
  if you could
    thank you Sir
      for all you have done
and I haven't.

He has been there for many days
Like a well-worded auctioneer's ad
Suffocating in SOLD stickers
Like the dead cat that no one collected
Advertising leaflets rotting in a drain

But he's just a slight sad man
In this realm of dayspring delights
As I weave back from an all-night
Chemicalised nightclub love thing
Singing

To cats who yawn at me
Suicidal snails
And the spritely vicar

Dancing past the old nurse
Tossing stale bread
In the lisping leaves

Almost vaulting
A pallet of dew-covered bricks
Waiting for sea views on Monday I

Swing homewards along
My street with all its weary signs
Tipsy pavement patterns
Being refreshed by men with hoses
The first tram clanging by and
There's my pinball machine
As wide awake as ever
And I think,
  Hmmm yep yeah!
    There is a two-dollar coin
       After all
And I spend it.

---

Bloodied skylights my relief

Previously locked up for going
Slightly mad as the  full moon approached
I now keep myself away

Where a month's repressed strength builds
Until my veins are sure to burst
Blinding myself in starlight I emerge
My teeth crunching down nerves
My hands still in the air
My eyes widening
Until I hear
Until the trigger
It strikes!

And I'm off
Leap-frogging cats
And scratching them back
I switch along possum trails
Stark, strong and invisible to man
Surging down shallow clogged canals
Trawling the mud for broken bottles
Spraying sandpits
Breaking wind in the trees
Eating berries leaves dirt cardboard snacks
Racing maintenance trams
Gargling the frozen ocean
Ripping off roof racks
Swift as shooting stars
Telephones deposited on library roofs
 

 

---

Please don't stand on any creaky floorboards

Please post this letter
But don't look at who it's addressed to
Or whether it has a stamp or is sealed
Don't smell it and don't shake it
Not any old postbox
Take it to the Post Office

Please take the bin out before you go to bed
Make sure someone else has their's out
In case I have the wrong day

Bring in the washing from the line
If it rains
And I don't mean looks like rain
I mean does rain

Please tape the programs I have circled
I think some overlap
But I'm sure you'll work it out

Don't leave the mail in the box
And unplug everything before you go to bed
 

Lard Bard

The bacon butties were too chewy so we installed zips into every pig. They could be recycled and used in trousers but we hadn't planned on the actions of the tailor's union. So we removed the genes that make rind and filled the gaps according to the I Ching. This was about the time our Earth took its last breath due to a lack of worms.

 

 Drift

I dream of us easing a barge along
    the soft canals of Burgundy

As our pole-pusher daydrifts of
    just lazily traipsing along the towpath
           knapsack alone and breathing
                  kicking along the water-worn pebbles

One grey gravel wishes
    just to lie there longer
       and ponder a while
          about the slow rippling river
                reflecting clouds floating

Drifting over France and worlds to where I am
     holding hands, picnic had
         laying on our backs

Just coupled as we always are
        on a kaleidoscope of
            Grandma's quilt,
                  memories in a mosaic with
                             grass feeling through

As lilies give way to our meandering helm
 

Dundee

I've been here since the rainy season came
Since flowers and stars and statuettes went dead
I recall no momentum
Not in my heart
Not in my head

Memories are useless to me
I have no stealth, no persona, no disguise
Concerned strangers soon let me be
When I answer them with my sullen eyes

I watch sleeping trains from across the road
Hunched over amongst real estate displays
The rain pelts down in secretive code
Filtering my loco thoughts and gaze

I read restaurant menus when others can snore
When the sun comes up I study that timetable
Planning a return of vague sorts
One station at a time
When I'm able

I'm colder than the night before we met
Ugly and too tired to weep
Nor even sigh my deep regrets
I may never awake
I cannot sleep

Good Morning

Our cursive limbs languishing
I note the punctuations
Delightfully placed upon your face
Dotted eyes blue

I scroll down your chest and belly
And underneath some scribbled tufts
I find an exclamation

You are like the sonnet I could never write
Each word quoted perfectly
In italics

From the tips of your filed fingers
To your edited and highlighted hair
I view and I grow
With the need to insert a comment
In the same format as last time
With the same macro tool
With you bent over that table by the window
Screaming "Help me, Help me, Oooh!"

Your eyes whisper open and I capitalise
On your hypnagogic state

Before you realise
My arms are tight and tense
And I am a nest of hammers above you
Making a foreword move
Between you and the ink-stained sheets
With a fresh ribbon fitted
Forming new sentences from nothing
Paragraphs and subplots
Dramatic reversals
Flicking through the pages
Numbering off each one
Chapter, chapter, chapter

Embossing your platen with the power of my strokes
And then I hit your caps lock key
OH YES OH YES OH YES YES YES!

0.000000001% probability

There's no-one
No-one smart enough
Cute enough
Bold enough or rare enough to appease me
I murmured to Dave on the steps of the GPO

What about her, I bet you wouldn't say no to her

I couldn't tell who he was nodding at, but it mattered not

Zero point zero zero zero
Zero zero zero
Zero zero one percent possibility
That I could ever love her
I murmured
Or any other girl who isn't
Pre-pubescent, a film star, mad or married

Dave bet me one thousandth of a cent and by Xmas
After several months of arguments over
The definition of love
(as poets love to do)
I capitulated

Thankfully she was rich as well

Existentialismo

If Hell doesn't exist
Explain to me why I'm not a
Twenty stone man full of chocolate coated peanuts
With a dozen little bastards from
A dozen drunken wives
In prison for things to twisted to reveal
In even a poem
Who tells everybody, everywhere
Precisely and succinctly

Exactly what he thinks of them