They said there was a way.

That there was always a way.

If you willed enough the way would come.

I willed and willed.

Lived quietly and nicely.

And still did not find the way.

The way had always been the way.

It was the will that’d been in the way.

 

 

 

They saw so many days.

Go by.

The hours counted themselves and were gone.

The minutes ran.

The seconds sprinted.

Remembered minutes

Clung on in hazy, technicolour dreams.

The dreams were remembered in emotion.

And the minutes were forgotten.

 

 

 

There's a place in provenance.
Heavy with sun beams.
A never ending evening warmth.
Dances in the summer days.
Gaelic sounds and garlicky smells.
The air is thick with harvest.
The roads dusty and rough.
Worn out from long summers and sharp winters.
All you can see for miles is the purple haze of lavender flowers.

Burn's night.
There once was a fire.
It flamed in the grate.
Drying stockings and warming cold plates.
One day with no reason the baby of the house crawled closer and closer.
Mummy was cooking.
And Dad was out back.
He'd not done it before.
Crawled that close.
He'd always watched from a distance.
He crawled closer.
Til he felt the warm firey breath.
Closer until he felt it melting his flesh.
He couldn't stop.
He held his hand to catch the honey dance.
As though in a trance.
The honey tongue leapt and licked the baby's hand.
He forgot the pain
But never the fire.
Thank god for memory.
Thank god for forgetting.

Burns' night.
Two days old.
Still incomprehensible.
Still sewn in a sow's gut.
A tradition.
His granny said to his grandchildren.
'I am your great-grandmother and when he was wee he sat on this very knee.'
And now the grandchild says to his grandchildren.
'There once was a great poet and I sat on the great poet's grandmother's knee'.
Thank god for memory.

Sun

If I were a sun's beam
Or star's light
Would the dark look the same?
If I were a bee's wing
Or gravity's pull
Would air feel the same?
No of course it wouldn't.
Life is never the same.
No one flies or sees the same.
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Fool

An unfelt smile.
Threatening and unfair.
A twitch in the gaze,
Eyes socially glazed
Don't fool me with your waitress ways.
The world's a stage acting out your wily ways.
Why so quick to judge.
and even quicker to hate?

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Choice
Options
Free will
Freedom
Hobson's choice.
Arbitary and fateful.
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Why does it hurt like this?
The pulling.
That queer deep-veined bubble.
And the strange itching brain knitting in a tight skull.
Here a flare.
Then another.
A too strange existence.
Split in two.
Not so strange it hurts.
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Evil toughened and charred.
Burnt rankles.
Pull strangle and strain.
This way. That way.
Twisting knives in swollen guts.
An urgent hateful wish
To kick the window in.
Smash the wall.
Stamp, smash and bash.
Some sense into it all.
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Bosky

Hankered down.
Like a hungry fox,
Hunting lamb.
Nestled in.
Like a night time nightingale.
Smelling rich and mossy.
Velvety dark.
Blackening low boughs and brush.
To pool at the bottom of the bosky.
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Subtle.
As a hammer.
Light.
As a two tonne truck.
Pretty.
As a bulldog chewing a wasp.

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Husky

A man's voice.
Deep and bottomless.
Full of whiskey and smoke.
Thick as the bar's fug.
Sorrowful but strong.
Rising on prairie winds.
And falling like end of day rays of sun.
On worn foreheads and tired, shaky hands.
Voice, sax, drums and piano.
Scatter in a million sounds.
Joining in one bluesy flow.
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Hold it loose

White breeze blocks.
Levels 1-5.
Multi-storey car-pool whirl
Reaching from ground to grey sky.
Zig-zag flat roof dips and skips with the bird high bill boards and neon signs.
Leading to the archetypal springboard to the sky.
The suicides' sidekick.
A slow, velocity sped descent to rivers of blood spent.
Sorrowing souls freed in broken limbs.
Life dimmed by free will.

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Gentle breathing.
Sleepy snuffles.
And the duvet's waking ruffles.
Rising above morning buses and London birds.
The boiler kicks in.
Naked feet pad to the loo.
And run back to the creaking bed.
The sounds of lovemaking.
Humm and ah.
Then the door slams shut.
And the clink of crockery clinks in the sink.
The return.
The door slams shut again.
The electric kettle gurgles and hot water glugs over black aromatic granules.
A sugary stir and settling in.
Newspaper rustles and the silence of reading.
A quiet, mindful silence.
Then running water.
Clicking heels.
The turning of bookshop pages.
And Sunday outside begins.

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Can you bottle it?
It being this.
This is it.
Silvery winter light on glass.
This is it.
Salt and pepper leave stripped trees against blue.
I wanted to feel like this.
Like this is it.
I would like to forever.
Today is it.
Tomorrow, that.
Quieted mind.
Lightened heart.
A clear head and a steady hand.
They tell you to live in the moment.
They tell you to forget the past.
They tell you that what will be will be.
If this is it.
I am here.
This is the moment.
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Love

I hate love.
Not because it doesn't feel good.
It does.
Not because it isn't the best part of being alive.
It is.
But because it makes you wonder what made you worth it.
I hate love.
Because it raises questions that weren't there before.
I hate love.
Because all good things come to an end.
Because without love the world is steady, ploddy and quite sound.
With love the world goes crazy. It goes wildly up and down.
Love is like light.
On one minute, off the next.
And when it's off you are back to night.
Luckily I am not scared of the dark.
At least it isn't so flippin' bright.
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Possession

Possession is nine tenths of the law.
This though doesn't work in life.
This is not my air that I breathe.
The water I drink I possess in as much as I gave a company money, I was given by another company, for hours I gave to them, to supply what is the earth's.
The time I gave is the gift of the seasons.
And time itself is a concept I neither own or have any say in.
The same is true for food.
And, well when it comes to shelter, I rent.
In some ways we own ourselves.
It is your body and brain.
But are our thoughts our own.
And do we choose when to be ill or to die?
Non I don't think we do.
We can exert a level of control.
But personally speaking, with my lips, I only hear, with my ears, how little people, with their emotions, feel they have even a modicum of control.
Possession maybe nine tenths of the law. But what does the law say about life?
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Horizon

It is dark here.
And the emptiness screams black.
The enormity is immeasurable.
Though men have tried.
It is the event horizon.
Who's horizon?
The events!
The event can't see, hear or feel.
The event neither knows or cares.
So who's horizon?
Man's!
But man can neither see, hear or feel.
He does mind and he does care and he thinks he knows.
So maybe it is his horizon.
If its to be anyone's.

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Water washes over buoyed, lifted limbs
Lifting liquid wet bed rock
Rising and floating
Cutting stroke after stroke
Repetitive for 45 minutes.
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There are no new ways.
Only old ways.
You can always teach an old dog new tricks.
Except there aren't none.

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Roman

The Roman's liked under floor heating.
Urinals.
And
Mosaics.
Mosaics are made from tiny bits of stone pieced together.
A popular motif was eagles.
But my favourite were the grapes.
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The music tribe.
Respecting each other in the pit.
All aubergine cashmere and scarves.
Lank hair.
And squinting eyes behind big glasses.
Looks of concentration.
Self-conscious throat clearing playing along with tuning up.
Their instruments play.
Drowning out the noise outside.
Their eyes read notes not newspapers.
They bustle with their cases from practice to practice.
Below the radar.
Bach's mass in b minor.
Swelling baroque lifts the cabbage and the polish of this school hall.
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They wrote of love, war and law.
Mathematicians, thinkers and makers.
Warriors, sailors and bakers.
Men and slaves measured and mastered the world.
Told stories of bloody battles and murder.
Of love.
They knew their gods.
And all that they foresaw.
Their stories told tales on the future.
They weren't concerned with trivials only the web and weft of it all.
Of man's quest.
And of the heart of the stricken minotaur.
What Homer wrote, what Plato and Aristotle thought. I draw.
These men saw it all.
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Ra looked down.
Not a single cloud disturbed his crown.
All around was blue,
Above the sand, a burnished yellow.

I looked down at my beautiful hands.
I turned them over, studying the lines and curves of flesh, nail and skin.

My family said they were made for the gods and kings.
Made to render the world they lived in.
I drew what I saw.

I filled the things I drew with colours the palace gave me.
The red of the sinking Ra.
The black of Osiris.
The blues of lucky birds.
And the greens of my papyrus.

Without looking I could see their beautiful eyes lined in kohl.
I lengthened the lines to give them a certain elegance.
I drew them as they'd want to be known.
Dancing. Their fine features drawn as if they were eternal.

Their robes winked at Ra, aflame with gold and precious rocks.
I drew them as they stood amongst their cattle.
Now was the time for the glorification of man, he thought.
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The dancing stone of a dark, flame -flicked cave.
Recalls the magic of a prehistoric age.
Walls awash with leaping bison stock and the fingerprints of unwashed maids.
The carefully remembered, paint -rendered rumps buck and ruck over stone curves.
15,000 years before wooden crosses, ships and lathes.
Before the time of astronomy, though there always were the stars.
Before gastronomy, though all man must eat.
Thirst was quenched with waters which ran across the land and stomachs filled with the flesh of berries, birds and beasts.
Time passes and the rituals remain the same.
The magic hasn't changed.
The dancing, feasting, drinking, creating is the same.
The bison have gone and the girls I know use soap.

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A man chews his mobile.
His large, fatherly hand, a bent vice.
His mouth the organ grinder.
His mind the monkey.

The heath is winter swept.
But his dog laps from side to side
In an erratic, ecstatic zig zag.
His lolloping gait a happy omen
Oblivious to the pained voices rattling back and forth along the line.

Worldy matters moodily burn in the ether.
His accident was 2 years ago now and yet he is still skinny and his body strains to keep energy.
The voice at the end of the line is strained by a different accident of fate.
An accident of faith,
Lost on the vast heath,
Lost in the tails of a tree trapped kite.

The listless winds lift the tails and move the colours to a sort of life.
So that's where the faith is!
In the man's return to health.
In the dog's exercise.
At the back of the caller's voice.
In the blue, the red and the green.
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Long grey coat flapping,
Whipping and tripping around this leg and the next.
Smart coat and high heels a V to January reality.
It is going to be a good year.
Brolly inside out.
Wind gusts like gassy dragons.
Rain mercilessly slating down.
It is going to be a good year!
An urban lemming fighting against the tired tide of returning sad-faced grinders.
Fighting they're own faces.
The heels and coat lasted through the day.
The rain didn't.

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The little boy bowled along
Togged up against the cold
Running for his father's dangling hand
His tiny, perfect hand slipped into the rough warm claw and clasped it's heat to his own.
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Wind rushed leaves
Trickle
Breeze blushed cheeks
Tingle
Frozen day's sun rays
Throb

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