Poems
ARTISTWho is the artist if not the sum of his beliefs and experiences?
What is he, if not the movement of his eye and hand?
And some intangible force.
That waits like a predator and works like a tunneller
Moving towards the light.
CHRISTMAS
First up on christmas morning, turning in the shower, my gaze falls at my feet and registers the last trace of summer sandals left by the distant sun.
ALLOTMENT
After the tarmac and concrete, I peer through railings to glimpse
the remaining treasure,
beneath the new build of expensive apartment blocks
some soul’s little plot of gory blackberries
Ending a day’s labour
he leaves upturned wheelbarrows like beetles on their backs
and the little shed of oddments and sitting and peace.
Under blackberry nets
and blackbirds singing
this handwritten world without right angles, rules and hoardings
lies honest and open and breathing.
PICASSO SHINES
Picasso
Stopped me
With his vivacity,
Virtuoso sagacity
The fire in his belly and
One thousand
RAYS
He abandons MAN’s MADE rules,
Man’s protocols,
Pretensions,
Contrivances and
Formal ideas of judgement and
Man’s obsession with mimesis and finish and
Of what is
QUALITY
Our hero forgets the rules of man
Remembering instead the laws of NATURE
Long forgotten
Known by children
I am swimming in
Warm water
Eddies of lush paint handling, colour and contrast
Blast of orange
Shadow of umbre
Break of white
Opulent viridian scarlet
Black
Picasso’s Spanish palette comforts and
Radiates pleasure and brilliance and love and life and light
I set out onto the February London streets
Bathed in One Thousand Rays
LAST DAYS
We decided to walk through the park on those last
Dull head-ache days
Of winged black ants crawling up cracks
And black railings round nature’s still pools
Where turtles flushed down toilets come to survive.
Past wired and blasted tennis courts where
Gorgeous flower heads smash tarmac.
Here Rothschild’s shimmering orangery was mirrored
And gardeners tended great water-lilies in expansive waters now
Shrivelled and remote.
On these days of thunder and still air,
Corded around these gardens are intestines of highways, jammed and blasting, stinking and rolling.
Roads carrying souls, locked in and blaming behind visors
No one chooses or has the time to cut across this park.
Where the municipal fox trail, grandly announced
Leads me twenty paces to piss, graffiti scars and sticky wrappers.
Dead Victorian dreams, Hansom cabs like coffins
A man hauls up Saturday night’s excesses
The walled rose garden crumbles and someone’s mower whines
Airborn surprisingly quickly are the black ants and we remember that
Our tools are in the garden when the rains start falling.
ANCIENT
Clouds as heavy as seas
Ocean heavy, appearing as spun sugar and spider silk.
Singing on breezes, racing gales.
Being mountains, dogs and clowns
trains, towers, monkeys and monsters.
Make of them what you want.
Children know they hide their secret colours well
of red, green and yellow.
FRAGILE
Will we look back on these days as the good days?
Will one sharp day, all we have be taken?
In one sharp lesson, delivered by nature or men who have less.
Our full stop, the poor fallen man of excess.
On this dark stage, men lie under our feet and at the other end heads
guzzle and gossip.
Men lie under our feet everywhere in fact.
And in the chattering void, we don’t hear the little violinist or see the birds.
Fear, fear is everywhere. Travelling in metal boxes.
When life (in these parts) has never been neater, more anesthetised.
The more we have, the more we clutch and the more strung we are and the more we judge
and we dance faster to the crazy monkey.
So, remember, as the carousel cranks up
and you clench your guts to forget the spinning,
hoping to come out wealthy and unscathed,
this is a fragile craft we choose to take on dark waters.
FEAR CULTURE
Last night
turning in
and settling into our perfect bed
a tiny creature came into the room.
He, above our heads, hovered in a ‘stingy’ way;
we, myopic and suspicious in the dim light
smashed him flat against the wall,
‘blood sucking, mother fucker’.
This morning
making the bed,
a young moth lay pressed for eternity
on magnolia.
WAYS OF RUNNING
Crystalline March day
Breezily opening my mind to the prospect of spring
Reluctantly, leaving the homeliness of S baking bread
I go to run and think
By the Thames towpath, bowling views and wide horizons
The first ‘other runner’
She’s all garb and glasses, an aspirant
Fashionista, controlling, monitored little body
Running to regime and somehow
Missing the notion of beauty
Seizing something sold to her
The second
He’s sixty five
Running for his life, running to a wiry frazzle,
Running to save, make, gain, mark, escape
Time
The fastest by far all day
The third has
Clapped on his ears
He hears nothing but his electronic music world
He’s out, but he isn’t
He’s missing the wind rush, the birds dancing in their little boots
As does
Number four who shoots a glance and goes and goes
In a glade, I glance the close slow curve of the heron
Motionless, being
I stop
His beak the colour of last autumn’s remaining fragments
Waiting for the best, most delicious morsel
He will skilfully take just what he needs
While we
Run and run and run
MOSS
Today
I saw a man
Bleaching and
Scraping
The green moss from his wall
He,
Couldn’t see
The beauty
STORMY CORNWALL
This morning in Cornwall, on the radio
We heard that a US soldier got 100 years for
Raping a fourteen year old and killing her Iraqi family, then shooting her in the head
They say he will be up for parole in 10 years
I thought about her peaceful family life
Before George W Bush unleashed his terror dogs
Oliver James says George's behaviour is typical of a child reared in an overdemanding, overachieving household
You want to hate your parents but you direct your hate somewhere else
So, the little Iraqui family got it
And the rain pours down today in Cornwall
Water on the window bends the light
The world smears and runs
Seabirds fracture and jump, caught in some weird
Stroboscopic situation
Roaring weather
Tap tap tapping on the ceiling like fingers
Screaming overhead while S is on the phone are
Navy Jets
Practising for killing
AMBITION
Losing ambition
Made me rich