Poem: Christmas Eve (For Lizzie Roberts)

There’s this shoeless blues musician
Strumming his acoustic guitar beneath a street lamp,
And the swirling snow is swirling all around him,
When suddenly

Charles Dickens steps out of the fog
And into the lamplight.
He runs his fingers through his damp greying hair,
Looks up at the obscured darkness of the sky,

And smiles.
He asks the guitarist what century he’s from,
And is he familiar with Shakespeare, at all?
The blues musician smiles.

There is ice on his eyelids. He smiles.
A cough as he gathers his thoughts;
You can tell by his eyes he’s seen the Universe.
Well, he says, I’ll tell you a story.

His fingers trace the guitar strings, but
He does not play, he does not sing, he speaks
Instead.
He tells his story.

Once in the twenty-first century, he says,
I met a girl.
(Dickens leans in, taking notes like Shakespeare.)
A girl with words on her skin,

But not just on her skin,
This human had words in her mind.
And she spoke to me, and she said:
“All things sort so well”

And then she smiled, and turned away from me,
And tramped away through the mud
In the swamp of the Festival;
Now that was a Muse.

It is Dickens’ turn to smile;
He almost smirks.
He is an old man, white-bearded,
And still he smiles,

He remembers
The muses of his youth:
He grew up with them and
Watched them growing up;

Watched them flower and sometimes fade,
Saw some rise, saw some fall.
His heart held them all;
In them he was Shakespeare

Probing conditions of the heart:
Dickens has Prince and Hendrix on his iPod.
He thinks he knows it all, until
There is a tap on his shoulder.

The shoeless blues musician smiles beyond Dickens;
A new man has appeared.
He is inappropriately dressed
(As are we all).

Charles turns on the spot, and sees:
A ghostly figure,
Growing stronger,
In the forefront of his mind.

Shakespeare himself:
Shaggy-dog-haired and smelly,
Tight in hose and he’s smiling,
He laughs out loud, then speaks:

“And with a guitar-slinger and a limp-toed pigeon by her side
She stomped the streets of the early 21st century,
Unsure of herself and of
The correct colour and length for her hair.

But she heard
Words in the sky and
Words sprayed on pavements and on crumbled walls.
She saw

Herself, in the future and in the now, as art, as love.

And she inspired me.”

Poem: National Poetry Day

Three counsellors gather around me to say:
          stay on this way
                   and I say
                            what way?

And they say stay on the way you
           are anyway straying along
                    with your words open wide
                               and your eyes confirming
                                         your words’ illusions.

Oh, I see, I say:
         continue with confusions,
         undermine my institutions,
         nurse (not nurse) contusions,
         et my ceteras.

Precisely, they chime imprecisely,
Ambiguous and – perhaps – slightly –
            off-key.

And they turn time sideways and say
A day is a more than as well as an only a day.

10 October 2002

Poem: Late September Morning

One of those fresh cold mornings
With air in the air
And sun on the sky,
Neighbourhood breath breathing through
The slightly-opened window,
And September thinking of sleeping for another
Year.

It’s not as if this day matters more
Than all or any of all the other days
          (any more than a particular kiss
                     or the lack of a particular kiss
                             should become everything that is)
But

Where does this scent of smoke come from?
Why does autumn associate itself with incense?
How does the green grass absorb all that gold?

And what am I doing
Allowing a morning
To remind me of you?

27 September 2002

Poem: Signals

A saltire stitched from contrails
In the sky above Edinburgh Castle:
The mood of the nation.

Such signs are meaningless outside metaphor,
Unlike the signs
That pass between us when we pass.

Our bodies’ signals
Sneak truths out below our voices.
Some confusion ensues.

But the problems in Pakistan
Put our hearts in perspective,
And the negotiations of romance

Are the rose-red of lips not
The rage-red of bloodshed,
And the exchanges of glances,

However painful,
Leave us intact.

8 November 2007

Poem: Glance

She kissed me with her eyes.

Oh, nothing deep,
A brief caress,

A passing glance,
A second’s pause.

A pleasing heartbreak,
A heartbeat,

A moment’s movement,
An isolated incident.

An insulated moment
Isolated from incident.

A sliver of sunlight
Piercing the rain of the day.

19 April 2007

Poem: Multi-Storey Car Park

(For Lewis Dryburgh)

After climbing
Step after step after step,
Lewis stands astride the car park,
The grey car park.

He is poised like a surfer
Overlooking the city:
Grey.
He has a grin on his face.

Lewis turns away from the city
To examine the car park,
The beautiful car park,
Grey.

Concrete is a part of our lives.
Sunsets are a part of our lives.
Our lives are a part of our lives:
Orange. Grey.

We are the small joys in all of it;
The flux and ferment of life.
Our hearts are part of it.
Car parks are part of it.

Lewis climbs down from the car park.

1 September 2011

Poem: Startled

Startle me.
Go on, just leap out from behind a wall
And startle me.

I know you can.
I know you’ve got it in you.

A kiss or a kick in the kidneys;
A sunrise.

The small bargains we make –
They’re not the small bargains of
Sisyphus?

You startle me.
You still startle me.

Maybe it’s just what I’m doing with being
Startled.

21 March 2007

Poem: Acceptance

The disappointments of the heart
Come too fully armed
For their everyday occurrences.

The bloom of the bruise that beats the mind
Should not so surely march
Upon the stomach and the soul.

But the standards of hope
In being raised must expect occasionally
To flag.

The body must accept the world;
Green skin clutches no claim on facts.
And a faith in freedom of the self

Must grant equal rights
To others’ choices in their wheeling lives
If love is to ever touch on love.

10 October 2003

Poem: Survival #2

The wounds of joy
Abide with me,
Recollected in tranquillity.

The golden boy
Inside of me
Is connected to agility:

He tightrope walks across the shocks
That shake and shatter the ice blocks
That build around my brains;

His slightest smile remains awhile
To wake and water the stopped clocks
That gild me with their chains.

That horse of Troy
Still glides in me;
It protects my ability.

20 October 2003

Poem: Survival #1

Flat upon my back
The central joy I lack
Need not constrain me.

Still within my point,
But rocking up the joint,
Words but restrain me.

Dancing on my own,
My fearful soul of stone
Does not detain me.

The handmaid of the free
Will never help me see;
Can not unchain me.

That blood of my heart,
Spilled only on my art,
Declines to stain me.

11 October 2003

Poem: To Carol

Slaughter me if you don’t like me,

I don’t mind:

I’ve slaughtered those who’ve liked me
But who have not been
Anyone I’m looking for.

Harsh but fair
Feel free to be, but

This embrace of objectivity comes
With one kick:

Know the value of my devotion.
I’d love you to love me but

If you don’t,
Remember –
I found you worth loving.

15 April 2005

Poem: It’s Easy

I thought growing up was leaving childish things behind,
As if I had somehow changed my mind

From the mind that roamed when I was nine.

Am I looking for a sign?

No, I’m standing at the bus stop,
The beautiful bus stop,
Where people with bodies stand
And demand or countermand

Or just look out for the bus.

So why all this fuss?

It’s not as if it’s easy, but

It’s easy.

3 December 2006

Poem: In Memoriam: Amy Winehouse

The CD player is a high-end CD player:
It doesn’t work.
It has to warm up.

It warms up.

Your Frank CD,
Purchased in Fopp,
Begins to rotate,
Gains speed.

Those fuck-me pumps,
Pumping lungs,
Shrinking lungs,
Shrinking you,

We watched.
Took notes.
Formed opinions.
Listened to the music.

We’ll listen to the music,
Over time,

And you’re over
And out of
Time,

Lying there.

I’m not lying here:
You were with us,
Always will be,
Will be

In the future.

You lost the battle
But the war goes on.

We express ourselves.

23 July 2011