Ordering bread and coffee
Baked by desire
It’s grinding repetition
Skin not an echo
But that glistening same
The bitter Buddha kneaded here
Could not be loved
Without lust
Wisdom’s yeast
Force fatale
Yes Yes
Concentration short
Yes
Pain overwhelms
Yet where no excess and
Eager expectation ends
So ?
It is imagination that arises.
The voice of the stupid poet
Is just that
No idea what they mean
Sitting there on their laurels
Rhyming so high
Charles
There is no time.
There is not enough time
to know what I know I could have known about you.
We all know what we know
and that is today
nothing more than that we love you.
What we wonder is not even where you have gone
but how you can have gone
anywhere
other than here
with us
right now
which you are Charles
standing in a blues club you are right now
or maybe shouting at me for something stupid I’ve done
or asking me to rub your shoulders
I’ll do that. Like I did before.
And you will sleep. Like you did before.
You dropped a tear
and you shook your rattle
like so many before you
and
God willing
so many to come
Sleep well Charles.
The other one smells bad
Breathe
That’s the advice of the sanity chef
But… Don’t forget that you’re cheesed off for a reason
There is so much more to eat and your own
Breathe
Is neither sweet nor sour
I heard a voice say: without the dark you can’t find the light
They spoke of Sibelius
Of Serious
But left a caveat (no one wants war)
(of course)
Breathe
It’s here and always was and it will take the cheese
And I’ve indigestion anyway
And need to clean the kitchen
Ready for the next…
Perhaps the last
Mine
Gone
The way to write when you start being older
Is as if you didn’t feel you had to justify not having lived
that life
but this;
and pen those phrases without apology
as if you had a story that was already told
and this
an addendum
just don’t let it be a postscript
don’t permit it
as a preview
a precusor
and certainly not posthumous
unless you want to go right back to the beginning
If I look at you from afar I can see that you’re quite scruffy
Your paths aren’t made
Your vegetation’s sparse
Rocks pilled up on you like spots
Skin is crinkled on your earth
It’s as if you’re old when you’re young
And I’m measuring being old against you
Well not me, I hope to last longer
but someone will walk past and think
I hope I live to see this all open to walk upon
Parkwood Springs Landfill
We’ve seen it happen before, dirty ground turned verdant
Here it’s the gorse and the broom and lupins that stand out
Later in the spring yellow washes of rape
the lupins stand really strong now
and I am going to measure myself against you
I’ll see you come to life and your fences taken down
I’ll walk over that young face and remember that it was old already before it was young
Very lucky to see such a cycle
If I do
…
What is the point in trying to hold onto the choking of tears
Or trying to just stay choked
Keeping words to that effect alive
It is to address the ghosts of my sister and my father
I waited not long enough for both to be here
I was always in a hurry
And missed them when I was young
Not so much as now though
When they are much closer
Why am I crying when there is nothing else I can do?
Entering a room
two vast wooden chests with clawed feet
painted with scenes of medieval war
castles, nobility, succour
pregnancy
perspective and a little sign saying
Do Not Touch
He should want to climb in there
and return to the place he’s a child again
looking out at himself
with the pathos of his father
God it is some lovely tragedy play here
like a seeping
a wet log pressed hard and weeping
Is it loss? No.
It’s discovery of real feeling
Unavoidable at last released
It’s the First and the Last
The Time is This Time
Away from the automatic desire of lust
A glance through the window framed by the chests
where the gauze makes pointillist figures of two young women
who walk off
pointless and pointed
________________
The name had been lodged in memory with no place attached
A somewhere you might have had to go
if
and when
you needed to know or prove yourself to another
Suddenly there it is and the Courtauld Institute inside it
the vast courtyard framed
All this was mine!
In my childhood as a London boy
It was all a given
names all known
places and palaces never visited
Lincolns Inn Fields
There it is! Next to Covent Garden
and I never knew
Yet it was all mine
and even if I always knew
the barriers of wealth
I believed that culture
stood above this
and was itself a key to something greater
This the curse of religiosity!
That there is an above
a saviour
a state of being aside wealth and pride
The Pride of the Table Turner!
but no
lack of curiosity
and a cleaving tight to tight to beauty
and it’s access through
a love
that plain work might destroy.
____________________
Two days before his son had top surgery
He dreamed he loved a young man
with a flat chest
laced with a vine tattoo
He told his son who smiled sweetly
