Homesick
Not in the way that I was as a child - my pillow full of tears for my confusion at these strangers’ kindnesses, not knowing where the pressure points lie, what words might bring an explosion - Not that. Just this weary longing for a city where I know the short cuts. (2008)
Read MoreReaching the River
Reaching the river, we stop To take a second look. Wide-open spaces that plant themselves On the back of the eye; Stark animal images graven Into the horizon like A footprint in wet concrete. Pity the poor dead women of the town, That their eyes are stitched shut By telephone wire. The telegraph poles (which are the stakes where we shall be burnt) Impale the sky as totems would. Fat black crows hustle the vista into order. This landscape of our mothers is brutal - But calm is to be found on the pebbly roads. All we need now is a minister. Shaking off our clothes, we diffuse, we melt Into our...
Read MoreDriving in Fog
In the school hall they are stacking the chairs. Smell of chalk-dust and wood polish comes creeping Like the distillation of a past, although I wonder How many generations, now, will smell those scents, In this age of concrete and plastic? No doubt they use some other surface, now, Than the blackboards I used to love to clean. And having done, would bang the erasers together - Whoof - To show that when you erase something, there is always something left, Even chalk. Nothing is ever utterly destroyed. The sun burns whitely in the roof of the sky, A bright silver penny. The fog reveals, hides,...
Read MoreOpting Out Early
I never heard them before, Birds. Nor cars Three streets away. There is dew on my hair, My face. Six o’clock Saturday morning. There in no-one In my road. In the precinct Saturday workers Looking at me, wondering If I’m one of them, Their kin - The sacred cult of Safeway. I didn’t sleep last night. Got up, drank, wrote letters, Wished I was away from here, A bike, a bus, a car. Thumbing the hedgerows Or riding Some horse, The hair off my face, Eyes streaming. The pounding, rolling body Beneath me.
Read MoreNew Year’s Poem 1990
opening into magnetism you surround whilst pushing me on I often wonder if when I die you’ll see me? when the water opens into when the dark opens to you straighter into it open, you’re open now I often wonder if opening I split your head as you split mine? (1990)
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