Sometimes
in the crushing solitude of night
as I lie in bed
I will close my eyes
and
When Winter knocks
upon my door
and asks me what I know
I'll say-
Hope is just a child's
I saw Hell once.
And you might think
that it's a fiery pit
seething with the damned
consigned to
I know the secrets of the wind
for what it aches
its origins
for I have glimpsed inside
its
Beneath the dark shade
Cast by pine and beech
A rotting tree-trunk lies
Black at heart.
It
When I depart from the realm of the terrestrial,
for the splendour of the celestial,
do not bury
She's anonymous, irrelevant,
and it's made her malevolent.
She tries and tries to make them
She asked me, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it happen?"
Her life collapsed
To a last exquisite
Expansion of lungs
Drawing in a scent:
It led her
(Cogitation on corrosion in a car breaker’s yard).
Grotesque beauty
blossoming in fields of
It requires faith
to believe in
a virgin birth,
in resurrection,
in borrowed stories
with
In Asembo,
When you think of beauty,
She was the only reference
When you, think of style,
She
There is sun after rain,
dazzling the washed-out
muted colours of memory.
A skinned-knee
You are a cockroach
you are a big cockroach crawling up a pegboard
the kitchen light suddenly
This boy was born
to parents who knew
he wouldn't live two hours,
so cuddled him, and
told
A low winter sun
Kisses grassy mounds
And casts their feet
Into pools of purple shadow.
Alone
It lies open
A wooden door that never shuts
So we can watch matter decay
Through technology we've
We met late in life you and I.
Late in yours.
Early in mine.
I was young, newly qualified.
You
He lies
Flat quiet
In ice
Cooled calm.
They go
Off into
The world
Without him.
The clock stopped dead when that grey, waxy head
hit the cold stone floor.
A chill draft shot me
Decades and years it took
A pile of cash I gathered
From the lives that I once shook
To the
My old father’s bald summer head is French-polished
by slick sun, brilliant oil.
A glossy
The gallant youth
Paid in advance
For all the letters
After his name.
Unstintingly he
Perhaps you were a good person,
Perhaps you were not;
Perhaps you were an interesting
Vauxhall Vectra
breaking free
from the perfect
vector of the motorway
strikes its curve
You were here right beside me,
Suddenly,in a breath you were gone,
We were together, so very
Today I buried my friend,
As someone else did theirs,
Today their pain has found its end,
I sent
There’s too much noise
For Darwinian comfort:
As the robins bring grubs
To the bushes beneath