poems2

SELECTED POEMS

LOVE ISN’T LOVE

Love isn’t love
but the name we give
to the secondhand, second best
we make a mess of
while we wait

love isn’t love
but I still forgive
the tantrums and the broken drums
the bandages and telegrams
that always come too late….

GOD HAS A SENSE OF HUMOUR AFTER ALL…

God has a sense of humour after all –
but it’s based on mine as lowering bass baritone
singing blues historically badly sake make parable
of anything from philosopher’s to adulterers’ stone
as spurious a doxology as Chidiock Tichbourne
claimed for a simpler death. I’ve been satirical
as a dock side bar-room sonnet, been known
sonorous for the sake of Yeats, turned gentle
lyrical dandle children or comfort nun:
an ugly drunk, my voice atoned for all.

Had I created me, how would I best
set out to hurt me? God, my apprentice, guessed.
Morphine kills pain: is now allowable food leaves drink rejoice:
Sardonic god, though, larynx addled, steals my voice.

I NEVER RODE A BIKE OR DROVE A CAR…

I never rode a bike or drove a car,
and seldom felt necessity try dance.
I understood old lies’ political power
but tried avoid inanity’s neutral stance.

Being thus, it’s clear I’ve ended few days sober,
despite the close attentions of the good,
and scarcely been key women’s star disrober
since lust, like love, tends be misunderstood.

Now, down this holiday autumn of my dying,
it gets easier describe my share in varia,
though not immediate relevance this side god.

New loss of voice at least means lack of stammer,
and quieter worlds unroll like planets vying
for position in new cosmogony might survive my faltering plod.

DORSET

Quietly, the boats. And do the gulls
remember railway stops where pseudonymic
got wrong woman anyway?

Coloured feathers parody the coast
of secondhand wrecks. Is it important
that the heroines are longlegged?

Spurious immortalities.
Intermittent policemen age in promenade,
exhibitions are closed.

In a small hotel,
a woman yawns in her undressing,
and a neon sign goes out.

When the machinery runs down
the gulls will die.

ONE

February: misnamed, my birthday calls
for thank-you letters I don’t mean,
though I can feel beneath erratic pulse of rain
sardonic spring beginning flex recurrent muscles.

My father used name the birds and get them wrong,
and christened me as imitation angel
in absence: rain bounce on dustbins: a rusty mangle
in alley parodies hurdy-gurdy song.

2
Thanks for the waterproof notebook, black felt pen,
get well soon card in misaddressed envelope
opened down the road – though gifts get cheaper
as years increase, still spring comes round again.

3
Get out this room: take two-pound taxi into town
where raucous drunks will quell the heartbeat echo
of dead poets. Look at the puddles: less spectacular know
how the burnt and wingless drown alone.

The birds are falling out uncertain sky
in premedical daze, but I can’t afford more than walk back:
birds like burnt angels scrawled in urban bladderwrack:
it’s better write bad poetry than die.

SEVEN

Suddenly, upwards, an involuntary bird
at muffled staccato hiccup of distant gun
divides the sky till flutter smoothes and its curved
superfluousness grows beautiful. I’ve begun
some stammering poem same way, but never
achieved a natural parabola.

Rightly so. Though I wake in jolt of pain
at surge of unrecollected history makes a panic
out of unrelated death, I am a man,
and as such involved beyond the fiddle faddle of picnic
or natural history: I must be rougher
than linguistic mother.

Dead bird next day, though – falling line
make poetry of stone. Dead child next week, then –
wingless heart in greenstick cage. Forget
such smoothness, mother. Given choice of mundane refrain
I won’t shave landscape: there’ll be bloodier stubble yet.