Flickbook

Begins with you in a corner of a room

Flanked by the detritus of your Twenties.

The old one in the Homerton houseshare

You had when we first met.

The one you found with your friend Claire -

Who hated to administrate -

Who left one day leaving you bereft

Sobbing on the end of my phone.

The remembered music of that room:

Coles’ Corner. Love + Pain.

Dedication handwritten in block caps:

Made with love. December 2007.

That was when I knew I loved you,

Though I always struggled to match your gifts,

Your photographer’s eye, deft crafting fingers.

No Casanova I, and now you’re

Someone else’s.

But there was love there, and lust

When we devoured each other

On fevered evenings.

And here in this flickbook

We are young again -

Young and untroubled.

No mark of the children to come,

Parenthood, the illness of our mothers,

No trace of the arguments waged

As our marriage unravelled,

Secrets but a slip of the tongue.

But they’re there, present and correct

As you disrobe and close in on me,

Fill the frame with your breasts and lips,

And the breath I can still feel on my face.

I play our film in reverse sometimes

The years withdrawing, page by page,

As you move slowly into my past,

Redressing, changing your mind -

First the jeans, then bra and blouse

Covering the knickers you saved for best -

And return to being fully dressed,

Set your hands on your hips

And glower at me

Across the remains of our life,

As if I’ve become someone else.

Birthday

You don’t do birthdays anymore,

Your boys’ perhaps but not your own,

Greetings cards dwindling to none.

Not that you ever did, truly,

Childhood balloons and teenage beers

And dazed maunderings of latter years

Sorrow glooping from you

As marrow from bone.

Be still for a moment

And think of all those days spent.

How last year you took yourself

To the jeweller and had them remove it

After noticing she’d stopped wearing hers.

Took it home in a little square

Envelope. Stared at the crease

On your finger. Spent hours writing

And rewriting the same poem.

Until you got it right.

Until you could feel it.

Until you could say it was no longer there.

Harry’s House

i.

Sad music colours memory

Not his house

Not our house either

But my house though

Not really my house

This house of ghosts

Just a man wandering

From room to room

Considering the vacancy

How did it happen

A man in a room

Considering the vacancy

Taking bread from the bin

Whisky from the bottle

Woke up one morning

With the urge for going

I stay up too late

Writing things like this

Waiting for a knock at the door

ii.

Epidemic of unhappiness

When I wanted to bring

Some joy to your life

I’d bring home pop music

Not flowers flowers die

I’d bring home pop music

We’d play it loud and dance

In the kitchen with the kids

Taylor Swift Harry Styles

Dua Lipa Little Mix

Pop music is evergreen

Now I can’t hear those songs

Sad music colours memory

I mean I can hear them

But I can’t hear them

Just the flowering silence

Distilling karmic rhythms

The sound you make

When you’re not here

Is the universe unravelling

iii.

Just the flowering silence

A lizard licks its eye

In the desert

You had my heart

From the beginning

When a lyric or melody

Returns to you

Like someone breezing back

Into your life

What is the word for this

Epidemic of unhappiness

Car wreck on a grass verge

No more arguments

Or silent treatment

I catch myself talking to myself

I won’t let you talk

To me like that

You had my heart

You have it still

What is the word for this

Littoral

Here is a wall where there was no wall.

And here a face in the faceless sand.

Here was a dune, and here was broom

And gorse and marram grass. And here a storm

Brought water to the tethered land with teeth -

Like love, like laughter - and set about its task.

Here sea met shore and sucked and dragged.

And here is a line, and here a flag.

This is the currency of the sea.

The sea loves the land like a comely neighbour.

Rub shoulders and winks, clinks a glass

On summer evenings and bleak midwinter,

Before the fucking. Before the dance.

Before manic wind gibbers and moans -

Here is the shipwreck and here the bones -

Stirs the waves with renewed hunger,

Brings water with teeth - like anger, like murder.

This is the currency of the sea.

And we will build new walls

To keep us from her water.

And we will build new walls

To keep us from her love.

And we will build new walls

To keep everything in order.

Here is a wall where there was no wall.

And here a face in the faceless sand. 

And here a line, and here a flag.

This is the currency of the sea.

And the ashes of your mind blow away like leaves

Imagine that you’re not there

But on some Caribbean shore

Not the cold surf numbing your grief

As you shuffle across this beach

Barefoot in November

Remembering Sons and Daughters 

Doilies on the sideboard

Sugar cubes in a bowl

A bird on your table

Nipping at crumbs and seeds

Puzzled by the kiss of frost

The way daylight fades and falls

The sage tang of handsoap 

When your father washed out your mouth

For mistaking ‘twit’ for ‘twat’

Shirtsleeves rolled up over the elbow

Arms all skin and sinew

Camera strap around his shoulders

The way your sister used to whimper

By torchlight under the bedclothes

Chewing the corner of a blanket

Or the time you locked yourself

Out of your house

And slept in the garden shed for a week

Until your daughter found you

Malnourished and murmuring

How she used to mispronounce her own name.

Lisbet Lisbet

The final letter from your sister 

Grasped in your fist 

All those tissues twisted

In the depths of your sleeves

Like something obscene

Or your grandfather sent to Burma 

Trailing streamers, handkerchiefs and tears

To meet a lone-wolf U-boat

All those khaki bodies below deck

Clawing their way to a porthole

Tunic buttons flashing in the moonlight

All the things that deposited you there

Walking barefoot on a beach in November

Silk scarf draped over your shoulders

Huddled against the wind

Arms linked in a helix with your companion

A sorrow-harrowed man whose name escapes you 

In bobble hat and week-old stubble

Gripping your wrist as if meaning to harm you

All these things you cannot say for certain 

If they mar or sustain you

And you cannot decide whether to laugh or cry

As you try to remember to remember

Walking barefoot on this beach in November

As the ashes of your mind blow away like leaves

Lonely Men with Dogs

At the going down of the sun
And in the morning
We will encounter them
Parka-clad and porcine
Traipsing the park’s perimeter,
Or threading ancient woodland
Chuffing disposable vapes,
Rooting through hedgerows
For tattered pornography,
Taciturn scarecrows
With interchangeable turnip-heads
Lashed to a dead-eyed terrier,
Last ember of spirit snuffed out.
Yet even the dogs pity them,
Their balding, brooding masters,
One payday loan from the noose,
Plying their restless purpose
In half-arsed livery,
Home more prison than refuge,
An emblem of all they had
And lost, now listless buildings
Reeking of last night’s drink,
Spunk and shame, rank nights
Obsessing over barre chords
And Babestation, the freckles
On their mothers’ arms,
The love that was refused them,
The wars they never fought.

Romance

Remember that rose?

From the Polaroid I took

At the rooftop restaurant

Of the Centre Pompidou?

Soft lobes, single stem,

Dipped in a slim vase,

In a Barbie-pink bar:

A dreamscape for lovers.

What happened to it

After we left, did the

Blush run to brown,

Head wilt and drop

Tear-like petals

Onto the table,

For the wind

To take them?

O rose

Thou art sick

Of being

In love.

On that sacre

Parisian Weekend,

Not like the first,

When I took ill and slept

While you schlepped

Round the 6th, alone.

Fell out on the Metro

And the Eurostar home,

My cheeks aflame,

The honeymoon over.

The next time we came

We fucked on the desk

In our room. Did we

Argue? Possibly.

Though it seems unkind

To say that we did,

That in the old us

There was the new.

The used-up now us

That crawls into bed

And sleeps like death.

This us. That us.

Here we are,

And there we were.

Whatever happened

To that rose?

Whatever happened

To us, for all that?

O rose

Thou art sick

Of being

A rose.

Other Polaroids:

Your shoes and bag

On a black tiled floor,

Clothes just out

Of shot. One of you

Taken prior to dinner

Your face radiant

In the flash,

Around your neck

The scarf you lost

In London. Where?

You can’t remember.

Whatever happened

To that scarf?

Whatever happened

To that rose?

Tangled up in Blue

One night half cut

From too many glasses of red

You’ll go looking for the boy you left

Who loved you

As much as he loved Bob Dylan

And find him

Lurking in a dark corner of the internet

Where he belongs

And happen upon the poems he wrote

After you’d gone

Words that lay waiting

For your ghost to read them

For your voice to say their name

Poems composed in basement flats

Crowded trains

Waiting rooms

Empty parks

Poems about the places you ate and drank

And kissed and danced

Though you didn’t like to dance

Or the places you never did and never would

The room where you lay together

In that student house in New Cross

Breathing in synch

Like step-siblings

Enfolded and craving

All the other poems not yet written

Scrapped, or excised

Poems scratched into napkins

Hammered into keys

Ripped from the typewriter

Torn up and thrown away

Or bundled into carrier bags

To slowly yellow

Poems about all the half smoked cigarettes

Upended bottles of port

And burnt out ends of days

In the city when it was still liveable

And you were lucky to be there and be young and in love

However briefly

And maybe you’ll think the same of those months

As a kind of fever dream

With a narcotised, gin-soaked haze

Days of love and light

And neon nights

Drinking each other in

Before your poet became a drunk

And the words became whimsy

Or maybe you’ll think nothing about them at all

Lifting cold water in your cupped hands

Wearing your hair the same way he remembered it

Dark and long and blonde on blonde

Talking the way you used to talk

About music, books and art

Like any of it mattered

When you were both too busy

Burning a hole in the world

To notice

One Good Year

In between the births and deaths

The comings and goings

Operations and referenda

There was the one good year

When everything seemed

To click into place

When no one got ill

Or died

Or fucked up

Or left

When a house became a home

And money less a worry

Though still we had none

And who we were

Made more sense

Than who we had been

Or who we wanted

To become

Summer Rain

That night in Paris I remember

Being woken by heavy rain

Falling tar-thick onto the street.

And you didn’t stir, but lay there,

Breathing, not breathing, breathing,

Your face turned towards the dark.

The apartment where we stayed

Pre-children, pre-marriage.

You found it on AirBnb.

A little apartment in Bastille

Where we brought home

Poulet roti from the market.

Dressed salad, drank wine.

Read our books. Made love.

Pretended to be in Amelie. (Everyone does.)

That same day, overcast and muggy,

We took a Metro to the Bois de Boulogne

And bickered about hiring bikes.

The heat, the long walk.

Being a couple. Being tourists.

We always went to war over insignificant things.

But I remember being in love with you.

For if you cannot love in Paris where can you love?

If you cannot love in Paris do you even deserve to be loved?

The boating pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg

Where Sartre proposed to de Beauvoir.

Green chairs gathered on the grass to watch.

And the guy downstairs home from work

Playing tragic music at midnight.

MC Solar. Puccini. Megadeth.

A photograph of you

Pinching the roast chicken,

Your pinky cocked comme ça.

Lately you told me of an old diary entry:

I know X hates his job, but I wish

He wouldn’t take it out on me.

I never meant to be unkind.

It just seemed to come naturally.

Both of us felt things too deeply.

Now it’s another summer, our children grown

And I’m lying in bed hearing it pour.

The sky is teeming and you are leaving me.

Another diary entry:

My unhappiness brings her unhappiness.

Sorrow begets sorrow. Sadness brings suffering.

But I do not remember thunder or lightning.

Only the galvanic weight of summer rain

Tumbling into a courtyard like treacle.

You move under the sheets, let slip a slight groan,

I press my face into the softness of your back.

Our bodies zig-zag. Flash, thunder.

The sky is teeming and you are leaving.

The past is rarely as we remember it.

Some rain falls when least expected.

Vena Amoris

The vein that runs

From hand to heart

Is a river that runs

Inside of me.

Is a current that winds

From me to you,

A life that twines

A circle of truth.

Is this little poem

A finger-width wide,

A hand’s breadth

In the delta’s tide,

Is the river of love

That runs inside.

Is a mark that tells

Of a thing removed.

A bloodless scar,

A mute rebuke. 

A band of gold

Set down to rust.

Where a picture hung:

A ribbon of dust.

Is a fledgling bird

Bloodied and stunned,

A boat cast

From sea to ground.

An ear retuned

To a distant sound

Is a river of love

That flows unbound

Ere long as my heart

Beats yet. No regret.

No right or wrong.

A river of love

Flows through us

Like a song.

Slings Issue

Notes pertaining

To my mother’s care.

Two slings,

One black, one grey.

The black

To raise my mother from her bed

With the call of the lark

And convey her

From bedroom to living room

And back.

The living room

Where she sits

Watching ITV 3.

Darling Buds. Heartbeat.

Agatha Christie.

She likes them.

Their twee nostalgia.

My mother

Who would not say

Boo to a goose.

Who bore and breastfed

Two boys.

Who tiptoed through life

Sipping white wine.

Delicate and carefully dressed.

Uncertain and sometimes fearful

Of her friends.

Whose knees

Dislocated in her teens

And had to be pinned.

The scars like ripped tights.

Who could not run

And has not walked

For nine years.

Sits in her chair

With my grandmother

Waiting for The Carers.

My dear, deaf,

Confounded grandmother

Ready to take arms

Over what is

And what is not

Acceptable provision.

Acceptable care.

For my mother

Who has not walked

For nine years.

Who is raised by a hoist

And borne

From room to room

In stoic humiliation.

Her whole body

A wound.

This is how it is.

There is an issue

With the slings.

A stitching issue

Abrading skin.

Black slings 1 of.

Another in 2-3 days.

For getting out of bed.

So will be two black slings.

Grey one

For toileting.

On order from the depot

Expected in 2-3 days.

At best.

Four weeks

At worst.

The OT says.

Problems need to be

Reported sooner.

Problems are not problems

Until reported.

Over bucket.

No commode for now

While waiting for two new grey slings.

Up to four weeks.

My mother

Suspended above the bed

Like an acrobat

Like a magician

Must shit

From height

Into a bucket

Twice a day

For four weeks.

Or if no sling

Let her defecate.

Clean her afterwards.

This is how she lives.

Something misaligned

And this is how she lives.

My mother who would not say

Boo to a goose.

Tiptoed through life.

Bore me and my brother.

Who can no longer frame

The words to complain.

My mother

Hung in her sling.

Neither here

Nor there.

This is how it is.

Samhain

Samhain Sunday. Clocks gone back.

Burn the page. Turn blackest black.

Turn blackest black. Let embers fly.

Banish light from summer’s sky.

The Fallen Tree

Four of us, walking among the pines.

Tracing the forest paths. Killing time

As sunlight spangles the Moray Firth.

The thin trees creak when the east wind stirs.

The thin trees creak when the east wind stirs.

My heart is breaking. The children are bored.

Sunlight spangles. A thumb hits pause.

Everything returns to what it once was.

My wife and I have forgotten how to talk,

But there’s a fallen tree she wants to walk,

Tightrope-style. The children watch her:

Arms outstretched, a penitent martyr

To her Godly self. Careful not to fall.

Leaning into her freedom. Away from us all.

Out with the old, and in with the new.

Tiptoeing towards a harder truth

On the knotty trunk of a toppled conifer.

And I’ve never wanted or loved her more

Than now. But isn’t that always the way?

No more second chances. Too little, too late.

A penitent martyr trying out her new life.

My desolate ruin. My beautiful wife.

The thin trees creak, the east wind stirs.

My heart is breaking. The children are bored.

Journey complete, she springs from the tree.

I lower myself down onto one knee.

The thin trees creak, the gnarled roots groan.

We leave the tree and steer ourselves home.

The children bicker. All’s not lost.

Everything returns to what it once was.

9.42 from Inverness to Glasgow, 28 Jan 2023

i.

The depths of winter and it’s two degrees above.

Alone, writing this on my phone for want of pen and paper, I am wending my way by train to somewhere colder, watching the land change as we rattle on.

From the Highlands down to the Borders.

Everywhere the eye falls, there is water.

ii.

Water coursing out from the earth over rock and stone and taking us to the yawning mouth of a holy river.

Water roiling and rushing in the washed-out mud-bed of a twisting stream.

Water flashing down a rock face, turning over itself in a tumult of peat and slate.

Water tumbling from the sky feathers of snow to settle abundant drifts.

Water driven in wind-flung specks of ice to etch white lines against furrow and ridge.

Promethean lochs, muscled surfaces rippling.

Heather-cupped lochan showing nothing of their secrets.

Sleet stippling the train window, streaking away.

Seeking, yearning, keening.

Water moving, and disappearing. Deepening its mystery.

Everywhere the eye falls.

iii.

Winter in abeyance. Two degrees above and all is water. The sun is low and the light merciless.

For a Saturday the train is quiet. The A9 - our sister route - streams alongside. Solitary cars blip the landscape.

A fleeting sign for 24 Hour Fuel.

It hasn’t snowed for days.

There is still some snow in the hills, in the creases and crags above Drumochter and Dalwhinnie.

Some meaning not as much as you’d expect, meaning barely enough to convey a child’s sled.

Build a snowman. Raise an igloo.

There is snow but the sun is low and the light merciless.

January the new April. The cruellest month.

You don’t need a camera to get the picture.

iv.

Surprising enough to see a lone white giant looming suddenly through the mist.

Grace and danger in these hills yet.

But the dimpled lowland pastures are bare, the ruminative sheep too easy to spot.

And here and there, rust-licked traces of old agriculture, small instances of habitation: a broken bridge, a crumbling cottage.

Places where people lived and worked the land by hand, earned slim livings and dreamed mineral dreams.

From the doors of mud-cracked houses.

A soft twist of smoke, trailing a thought hard-won and unyielding.

Everywhere the eye falls, water. Winter in abeyance.

The sun is low and the light merciless.

Wild terror in such mildness.

The ruddy boy from Paisley with the frizzed red hair, hair the colour of Irn-Bru

Was desperate to fuck her, she told me, in her hotel room, as she laced up her knee-length boots, black to match her mini dress, to match her kohl-rimmed eyes. The vampish riot grrl not yet sixteen, on the bed tending to her laces, me on the dresser stool, in a creased white school shirt and borrowed black tie, sipping room warm Baileys from a cup, trying to be cool, trying to be more than my not yet sixteen self. Last night of the trip. Our respective parents downstairs, in the hotel bar, soaking up Happy Hour, faces scorched by the Alpine sun. Desperate to fuck her, he was, the ruddy boy from Paisley with the frizzed red hair, hair the colour of Irn-Bru, swishing through the late Easter slush, touching her bum on the t-bars, trying to land that first illicit kiss. Her not yet sixteen, him into his twenties, a portly mechanic with porcine hands. He asked me: What do you think your dad would do if he saw me kissing you? Stilled her lacing and looked up at me, knuckled knee flashing in the light. What are you thinking? That her father was an Irishman, known for landing his punches. Just thinking, I said. Thinking that there was a little flame for her flickering inside me. Just thinking, she mimicked and returned to her lacing. Hey, have you heard that song by The Outhere Brothers? Wiggle Wiggle? You know it’s about doing it up the bum, right? Then telling me, with some satisfaction, that she and her boyfriend were sleeping together, had a pregnancy scare earlier that month. I was so fucking late, I was looking at maternity wear in Mothercare. I took another sip of my room warm Baileys. She leaned forward, further this time, and I tried not to look beyond her boots. What are you thinking? That we both knew that all that week, when he was trying to fuck her, the ruddy boy from Paisley with the frizzed red hair, hair the colour of Irn-Bru, it was me would slowly ski up to, slide her skis between mine, rest her body against my back, breathe onto my neck. That if she made a move, I’d have been powerless to prevent it. Powerless to prevent it, and incapable of doing anything. Nothing? Narrowing her kohl-rimmed eyes. Yeah, I replied. Nothing. Shrug of her shoulders, flick of her hair. Fine. Boots laced, we finished the Baileys and went down for dinner. Last night meant gala night. Gala meaning smoked salmon and gravadlax, reblochon and camembert, profiteroles heaped like Ferrero Rocher, unending carafes of box wine. The ruddy boy from Paisley with the frizzed red hair, hair the colour of Irn-Bru, joined us at the table, poured for the parents, swapped jokes and japes and hi-jinks. My father had met him before, on a skiing weekend years prior, when he had seen him, pished as a wet fart and naked as a greased snake, strap himself into a pair of skis to perform his party piece ‘Eddie the Bald Eagle’, atop a high table in a crowded bar, a table from which he was shoved, roughly, by unseen hand, to land arse-first on a stray glass. After which, someone had to pluck the shards from his upturned, bloodied buttocks. But at dinner that night no mentioned. And when all the courses were done, and the parents suitably sozzled, the ruddy boy from Paisley with the frizzed red hair, hair the colour of Irn-Bru, asked the vampish riot grrl, not yet sixteen, if she would come with him for a quick bye-bye drinky. The personal gift he desperately wished to impart. Come with us, she said. We left the hotel, the two of them walking just ahead of me. Her in dress, holding her arms across herself as if cradling something, him in a white t-shirt and stonewashed jeans, one frizzed ginger arm draped proprietorially across her shoulders. Not even a snowflake would slip between them. When they entered a brightly lit bar, she looked back and beckoned. I baulked, and bolted back to the hotel, to the slim single bed beside my sleeping father. Lying in the dark, I pictured them together, pictured her fingers brushing the scars on his buttocks, and felt the little flame flicker out. The next morning, as he loaded up the minibus to take us down the mountain, the ruddy boy from Paisley with the frizzed red hair, hair the colour of Irn-Bru, I asked her, more in hope than good judgment, if she had slept with him, and she said she had. He told me his gran had died and he felt sad. We boarded the minibus and began our descent. At the wheel, the ruddy boy from Paisley with the frizzed red hair, hair the colour of Irn-Bru. On the radio, The Outhere Brothers. No word of a fucking lie. Years later, I heard from my father that he had died, barely out of his mid-twenties, when the car he was working on slipped from its jack and crushed him, and I almost felt sorry for him then, in spite of it all, thinking of a life unfulfilled, all that was and might have been for him, all the little Irn-Bru children he’d never have, never carry onto a nursery slope and gently push off on their skis, launch into the world he knew and loved so much, and who probably died knowing that those days he spent in the mountains were the best of his life, and I wondered if he thought of them then, or the night they pulled the glass from his arse, and his night with her, the vampish riot grrl not yet sixteen, in his final gasping moments, those moments being no more and no less than he deserved, no more and no less, the ruddy boy from Paisley with the frizzed red hair, hair the colour of Irn-Bru.

News from the Home Front

Under the sun-flecked pines

of Culbin Forest

Mid-October

Mid-autumn

I’m with our children

At the rope swing

Near the shrine

For the 18 year old boy

Who went out one summer

And never came home

We come here 

Once a month

Whenever we can convince the kids 

It’s worth the walk

Not for the shrine

But I always look at it

Rainbow ribbons

And dreamcatchers

Faded photographs

‘Always Be Kind’

My wife is unhappy with me

And I can’t blame her

I’ve been wrong for so long

I can’t remember being right

I think it was Huxley who said

You can’t change the world

But you can change yourself

It’s not for the want of trying

People tell me

I’m difficult

Difficult to get on with

Difficult to like

And that I’m worse

Once they get to know me

My wife would like me to be

More considerate

More caring

More kind

Less angry

I have trouble

Expressing myself

When I am not myself

Though I still do not know

Who or what I am supposed to be

But then

Neither does she

And this is our predicament

Neither recognises the other

Our boys know who they are

Their names

Their friends

Their family

Their home

I am afraid

That one day soon

All this will be theirs

Grown up sorrow

Grown up pain

The feeling that

The fault lies with them

The knowledge that

Things have changed

And will never be

The same again 

It’s hard not to hate

The sense of an ending

We never mean to hurt

But sometimes hurting

Is easier

Than loving

Like that Ozon film

That ends as it begins

And begins as it ends

The couple swimming away

Side by side

Into the dimming light

If you told those two kids

On that beach in Sardinia

Sleepy eyed with lust

Embracing in the surf

Like there was no one watching

That it would end this way

If you’d told them

Would they have believed it?

I want to see Sardinia again

With you

I want to go everywhere

With you

I will go anywhere

With you

But your heart is already 

Somewhere else

Somewhere new

Limerence

You and your sister

Live in a lemonworld

I want to sit in

And die.

You and your sister

Live in a lemonworld

Doo doo doo doo doo

Doo doo doo doo doo

                        Matt Berninger

I’m tearing up old letters

To make a confetti shower

For one. At the bar tonight

There are fairy lights,

Old funk music

And limitless gin.

I am the life and soul.

I am on the outside

Looking in.

I have hit the wall

And can’t get over it.

Sing me a story.

Send me into raptures

That last

All night long.

None of this will matter

In the morning.

All will be forgotten

Or woebegone.

For I am a child of the 80s,

Growing older

By the day.

I know stickle bricks

And fuzzy felt,

Ways to wear

Hats badly,

And dance

Like a chicken

To make

Young women laugh.

But there it ends.

My reflection is no longer

My friend.

You’ll go home

With your sisters,

And take your partner

To parties,

And I’ll lie down

In darkness,

My heart in a twist,

Scouring the web

For a term

To limn

The shape I’m in.

I’ll dream about

Sticking pins

In a pinboard,

Skipping over a dance floor

With barely concealed grin,

Under a mirrorball

Glittering our faces

Like torn confetti.

Evervescence

Quite by surprise

I find myself

In the presence

Of God, or if not

God, Youth.

Not my own,

Nor do I have

Any place in it.

Yet here I am,

Effervescing,

A bottle poised

To pop its cork.

Summer heat

Refusing to fade.

Restive night -

That old foe -

Sour-faced

And anguished,

Walking tonight

In this street

Under lamplight,

Back to a time

When we drank

In dark alleys

Slipped a key

In a lock

And took

What wasn’t ours.

Raised sweet wine

To hungry lips,

Felt the ocean swell

Deep in our lungs,

Dipped the waves

And danced

Late into the night

Together, apart.

Once I thought

I would see

This world

Dreamt of voyages

By river,

Land and sea

Adventures

In the fevered

Grip of love.

And now I see

The impossibility,

The impossible sea

Between the dream

And the reality

Of what is

And what cannot be.

All the places

I have not seen

And never will.

The way of all

Who yearn to sail.

I have nothing

To give,

But these lines

And myself,

Wholly, to you.

Words rising up,

Fizzing briefly

Becoming still.

Tranquillo.

I want to dwell

In the realm

Of you,

Breathe you in

Like a bouquet.

Walk in step

And tarry, hold

And be held

As a child,

Feel the world

Through your

Fingertips.

Just to be

In the presence

Of God.

Your beauty.

Your youth.

Your love.

Winter Moon (Poem for Kate)

it was not a poem 

I meant to write

on the day we went 

to walk

to the old ice house

at Delnies

chasing the arc

of midwinter sun

on that old track

to Whiteness

just gone noon

& barely light

the ground

corpse-stiff

trampled

by Yuletide visitor

happy holidaymakers

Covid refugees

huddled and swaddled

against the frost

playing it safe

we take to the beach

tack into the chill breeze

past rocks

crusted with

sea ice

we cannot decide

if the tide

is coming in 

or going out

we should know

but we don’t

at the spot

where the whale

washed up

& last summer

a dead dolphin

lay rotting

on the breakwater

the freedom

of that season

a lifetime ago

not like this 

strange end

to a strange year

of illness

paranoia

& estrangement

I ask about 

your Christmas

and you ask 

about mine

my boys

& my wife

your son

in Dubai

a thousand miles

from this here

we talk

of the contract 

between art

& commerce

how each conspire

against

that which makes us

who we are

[o]

we reach

the ice house

and bothy

squat cottage

and barrel vault

way stations

on the old 

Golf Links 

a reminder

of a time

when everyone

who lived here

was tied

to land or sea

I reach

into

my pocket

& offer you 

a gift:

Quality Streets

my kids

call them

Infinity Stones

you take one

put it on

your tongue

and it is gone

forever 

we stand there

listening

the stones

on the shore

the sea sucking

at the sand

the frost

in the trees

the breath 

in our lungs

[o]

there is something

i want to say here

about mothers

and motherhood

i always seem to be

fishing for

something

that isn’t truly there

[o]

we’re making our way back

in the creeping murk

when as if by magic 

the moon appears

over the creamy firth

levitating

like a thought

or a moth

trapped in a jar

we walk

towards her

stepping from 

one year

into the next

clouds fussing

the pinked air

words catch

in my. throat

as our mouths

blow out

cast nets

of misting breath

in wonderment

ooooooooo