Delta

And now to fall away
and dream of love:
the type of love that's first
and thirst, and foremost,
and never 
almost.

The type of love that
waits, the pain clothed in 
joy, clothed so long 
that it forgets
it was once pain.

Take me down
to the Delta
where the water's sleep
and the water's deep:

where love's a stair
and not 
a leap.

A Request

And in this
bitter sting of world,
don't leave me
longing
for the sweet kiss of death
but for
the reviving fist
of life.

A Communion

I talked to God
and She was not pleased.
She said,

the crying never stops;
the listening never starts.
And oft too dim's the flame
you carry in your hearts.

Turn human nature on its head
and make of war
a marriage bed.

All You Need to Know

Venom is poisonous only if taken in the vein.
And those who use it publicly don't know your name.

And all you need to know is that a feeling's never feigned:
To not bloody one's hands with one's aching heart is the only shame.

Morning Coffee

The world is falling to shit:
is that what keeps it fertile?
Sitting here drinking coffee
just waiting, waiting
for the next storm that will
clear the air
and burn the tinders 
of the world down,
but what awaits the fire?
And why
is the fire
waiting?

Two Tomes

His was a textbook,
plucked from the shelves of academia.
He savoured it, his exploits purely intellectual,
and the book was like him:
raggedly worn, spine compromised,
but used books have the most character, he thought:
not the smell of tea-stained, dinner-spattered pages
or the spectres of long, lost pauses:
merely the appearance
of experience.

And hers, hers was a novel.
He'd bought her the book she'd wanted
the day after he'd forgotten
about her birthday.
A romantic classic, he recalled.
No doubt fanciful;
yet - Classically inclined - maybe not drawl.

Each alike and yet unalike:
her dottings and jottings were
the evolution
of a long-memoried tradition
of pencilled hearts and cupid darts,
poems, odes and elegies, short sharp soliloquies
scrawled long-hand 
on the blank pages at the back of the book;
now rubbed clean with the gathering
of character, which she'd carefully lifted,
her slow turning, growing fat with words,
her life a bright gathering point of light.

She siphoned substance from thin air,
a shaman, and produced life from out of nowhere,
her body pregnant with the seed of creation.
She did not memorise the words: she felt them.
She held them. Cradled them then let them go,
the feeling never lost, the shape imprinted whitely,
distant growing fainter, a vague recalling of beating
and wings.

He was purely technical: underlining the unfamiliar
or words he hoped to drop in polite conversation,
thinking oneupmanship a courtesy he and only he 
could bestow. He littered the pages with arrows,
demarcations in the margins, lightbulbs
beaming out, signalling the location of his ego
which now claimed territory outside the violence
of his psyche.

When he'd finished and had returned the book,
he briefly considered rubbing clean his pencilled additions,
but thought better of wiping clean all traces
of himself. For here is where he'd been. 
Know them, these places.

But she, she was different.
She left the book unmarred, unmuddied;
each word unmurdered and unbloodied.
She thought, you will never know I've been 
here. If you somehow do,
you have been looking
in all the wrong places.

But then she thought wrong of her former right;
and before she set it free, one summer night,
she took out her pencil and marked the first page,
below where the title suggested the gathering storm
of the passions held therein; a devotional note.
Here's how it begins:

I hope you enjoy this book. I tried not to
cry onto the pages. I read it slowly, too;
it took me ages, months of revelation and pain,
but somehow, at end, I did not heal - never again...

Then she paused and thought of the friend
she'd never meet, who'd read this book; how to lend?
Out of the ether, the shimmering star, she found her end:

I shall close now simply. I wish you well.
May you one day write your own devotion 
in place of this. And may you seal it
in chains of steel, protected
with a kiss...

I hope these pages set you free
and fair you far better
than they ever did 
me.

Resonance

The Poetry in me had all but died;
Palsied hands, a stymied mind.
But underground rivers still wet the tongue,
The husk gone coarse, savannah dry.

Awakened from my ancestral tomb,
I take to She a suited groom.
And out of that ancestral gloom
I take ahold the weaver's loom.

The fruits of labour are often sour
When out of season, don't devour;
Don't sleep on a bed of wilting roses,
But clothe yourself in their fragrant poses.

Secure Against the Night

Can words of love secure the scattering form,
when all one's memories have peeled away from warmth?
When all one's living's lived in feeding scorn,
how can one repeal such acts against one's health?

A mother's words are words of wealth,
and a mother's love speaks for itself.
But a father's words sit 'top the highest shelf,
and glean shows through the dust only in anger, when you spurn it.

Misery loves company, though it doesn't deserve it.
Joy deserves an audience, although it rarely earns it.
Misery's a fossil: you must unearth it
from memory's burial ground, where the haunted past stirs.

Therapy's a good thing, just be firm.
Actions speak just as loudly as words.
The stories we tell should be the ones we deserve
as we pick through the scattered facts of our lives.

For all in all we must survive,
forgetting the when the where and the why.
All that matters is grace, as it yolks the now.
We must carry our truth through the rest of our lives.

Match to Paper

 - for Simon Armitage

Note: wrote this a couple of months ago but have only published it now (October 20th) for some reason!

Take a book of matches and single out
one single shard, one matchstick.
Take the words you'd said, written in blood,
take the parchment and give it the flame:
it wants the flame; it needs it.
Good - take the fire and feed it.

Feed it all those words; hopeless promises;
take all the purity that your heart conjured,
black shapes on white paper,
imaginary kisses, given to the air as if to real 
blood-flushed flesh.
And feed it to the fire, to its maker:

forged in the fires of the heart,
pinch out its ember.
But remember: the fire is carried somewhere -
but where?
In the heart, here. Feel it.
That's where.

Take the fire my dear, place it in your hearth.
And if my own fire needn't kill it, as the self-same gave it birth,
if our love shrouds the flame, protects it, is new, different and kind,
then let its words flutter, burning page-locked on the bitter wind.
If this love is different, if this love is true,
then let its words be burnt in death; ours alone, by others never viewed.

Breathe

The human heart is a curious thing -
wounds are like tiny palpitations:
they strike deep and swift, 
their shadows lasting weeks, months, even years -
the scars weaken the heart,
embolden our fears.

But experience is like breath -
take it in, hold it
and let it pass through you;
don't fight it: let worry go.
With each moment of existence,
let your feelings flow.

For soon after pain comes beauty,
opportunity, healing, revelation:
damming the heart, blocking the waters,
can only lead to devestation.

An Ethiopian Visits England

Climbing the stairs of the metal vulture
and sitting down, being strapped in,
plastic squares descend down in rows,
a white woman wearing a white hat
making gestures with her arms,
all teeth and eyes.

The metal bird starts to flex its wings
and the whole vessel shakes:
a low rumbling, like a million hungry stomachs,
or the earth making bellows in frustration,
we 'taxi' to the runway, speed
frantically up the tarmac.

My eyes feel pressed against the back of my skull,
I hold onto the plastic rests so hard
it feels like my hands will impress them
like putty. Soon we are rising through the air,
the metal bird flying away from parched aridity,
away from my home, up into the blue.

It is like we are a fish swimming through clear water,
through nothing. I try to sleep but I can't.
I have the 'window seat', which means I can see
everything - but suddenly we are so high
that all I can see is an ochre oneness, and once we get to
the Med, all is highest clouds and sea.

After several hours, a small voice trapped in a speaker
says, 'We are now approaching Gatwick Airport,
please return to your seats, return them to the upright postion
and fasten your seatbelts. Thank you.'
The man next to me fastens the belt around his waist
so I do the same.

Fifteen minutes later we are 'on the ground',
but not in a messy fashion - we have 'landed'!
I look from the window, whilst the stewardess
thanks us and welcomes us to England, though she
has only just arrived herself, and everything is grey,
rain streaks the sky as if it is perpetually crying.

I walk straight through to Arrivals - I've no luggage to collect -
and Mr and Mrs Robinson, and their daughter, Emily,
are there to meet me. They look happy, relieved that I am there.
In the car ride home the rain pelts the windscreen,
they listen to the radio - they have one in their car! - music pumping
softly into me from all directions, the beats less simple, less one.

They ask me where I come from. 'Afar Region,' I say.
'Yes, that is far - Ethiopia,' they say. I think I know what they mean.
My English is not so good. I am here on a scholarship to learn English
at college. Some people look at me funny here, I'm not sure why.
We get in and 'dinner' is soon ready - chicken, potatoes and vegetables.
I am hungry, they look surprised at me, beastly. I go to bed.

The next day they take me to a swimming pool. Now get this, mama!
They have big rooms full of water! It rains all day and all night here,
and yet they have big rooms full of water! I thought of the children dying
in the desert, and the mothers waterless, too weak to breastfeed their babies,
and then I see these people, splashing around as carefree as monkeys!
We go to get something to eat in the café. 'Sandwich?' they say.

But I have lost my appetite. I stare down at an empty plate.

Ballad of a Cloud-Gazer

Last night I went out, the clouds

ostentatious and playful:

one of them got me up dancing,

I bought her a Barcadi and Coke;

she was a mouthful.

Needless to say the time came

when I held her, vaporous in my arms.

Holding a cloud is like catching fireflies

with a broken net.

I said, as soft and light as forceful could be,

'Why don't you come back to mine,

have a drink with me?'

A longing sultry look, vapid sparkling eyes,

a kiss on the lips like a slug,

I knew it was perfect right there:

I knew it was lust.

But fucking a cloud is strange:

it's cold and purchaseless.

And once you're done it breaks apart

and it rains right through your head.

She was gone by morning:

precipitation to evaporation, part of her

smudged rainly on my window pane.

They say clouds are unique:

I'll never see her again.

I look up at the dappled sky:

I thought I'd forgotten her,

but I still recall her name was Heather.

And now I'm rainless, broken, punctured - British -

and I think I'm obsessed with the weather.

Ignorance

It has been said,
I have heard it said,
that ignorance is bliss,
and it makes me red.

Ignorance is not bliss.
Ignorance is death.
Ignorance is Charles Bukowski if he'd given up living.
Ignorance is Hemingway behind a flower stall.
Ignorance is a shotgun with both barrels loaded
wielded by a madman with no arms.
Ignorance is a dinosaur foaming at the mouth.
Ignorance is a moribund dog with rabies
sicking up scarlet chunks of festering flesh.
Ignorance is two West Indian adolescents
kicking the shit out of a Pakistani and knifing a Filipino student.
Ignorance is a car with no suspension,
the engine long fallen through, 
rusted down into a cracked gasoline canister
poking its orange-dry husk through the sheered cornstalks.
Ignorance is a poet without passion.
Ignorance is a drunk without whiskey.
Ignorance is a scientist given up on dreaming.
Ignorance is an arsonist flameless
or a gambler done with scheming.
Ignorance is prayer deflated and  tortured in anguish.
Ignorance is the Moon, humanless, without a soul to swoon
and a sky starless, a murky gloom.
Ignorance is a priest full of air, hysterical
at his terrified congregation,
promising fire and brimstone, temperance and violence,
and love and redemption. 
Ignorance is cancer wearing a smile,
rickets with a bow-tie, polio
twisted up into a jumbo-size pretzel,
spina bifida in a super-size, 16-oz cup.
Ignorance is wine gone flat, but still being drunk
for no reason apart from indifference to sobriety.
Ignorance is a bag of drowned and murdered cats.
A bear and a horse tethered together,
both dying amongst swarms of flies
as their bones are picked like cartographies 
being scrutinised 
by pale, lymph-less politicians.
Ignorance is a hand grenade with no pin,
a boxer with arthritis,
a virus about to burst into murderous virulence,
a small and pitiful sun that wants to explode.
Ignorance is a raped dead body, two weeks gone
and left at the wayside. 
Ignorance is Dostoevsky and Tolstoy,
peevish clerks, wife-beaten, life-eaten.
Ignorance is Chekhov without a heart.
Ignorance is Eliot laid out before us, like a patient
etherised upon a table, the waste land
creeping up to our ears and nose and into our spines.
Ignorance is an old moth too afraid to approach the flame.
Ignorance is Kafka succumbing to the Golem.
Ignorance is the husks of infected cattle, writhing
and crackling quietly in pits of ash and spoiled flesh.
Ignorance is all-consuming
all-encompassing,
all-destroying,
and if it's bliss you want
then perhaps you ought to hold your breath:

I've heard that if you do it for long enough,
you turn blue, and die
from ignorance. But
I guess you wouldn't 
know 
that.

Solar

There are sunsets I'd like to see,

from southern Australia,

the peaks of Snowdonia,

the heat-shocked depths of Death Valley,

the summit of Mauna Kea,

secluded beaches on Hawaii's Big Island,

villas in the hills of Madrid,

the sun setting behind a tramp's eyes

on Skid Row, Los Angeles,

the Sun from Halkidiki,

the Sun setting from space,

The Earth rising from the Moon.

I would like to see the Sun, playful,

caressing the Earth's back and working

its way down to kiss above the midriff,

the Sun spinning its diurnal magic,

God of light and darkness, Hades

drifting down into deepest night and sleep.

But the Sun is setting on me,

and as it shoulders to the horizon 

I hear it weep;

and as it descends it says,

'I have no choice but to exist alone,

but you do,

so why are you sitting there

on your own?

'I have lived and watched growth and decay

and cycles cycling, the come what may.

And of all the creatures to whom I've given birth

you are the ones that have given most mirth.

'You have known and kissed the font of your own creation,

and yet it is you who threatens your tenure with its cessation.'

And the Truth is...

Turn, turn and

burn and burn.

There is no Hell below us,

no Heaven above - Lennon

had that right.

The only realms about us

are the ones left

in our sight.

Betwixt us only humans.

So turn and turn

and burn and burn.

Need we spurn?

Or will we learn?

When will we learn?

There is no Heaven.

There is no Hell.

The only Hell we need fear

is the one we'll inherit on Earth;
 

and the only Heaven we need savour

is the one that awaits us

inside our flesh,

the one that waxes thickly

on the foliage of trees,

right here

now.

Deep and deep.
Green and green.

And God does not exist.

Tongueless old man.

He could not judge a boxing match

even if He were a pair of fists.

Even if He had the odds and the cash
and was brash and brazen enough
to play the knock-out in the fifth
he'd still lose in the long-run on the fix.

And Jesus is the butter 

to my bread,

not the bread itself.

That stays in my heart,
in my flesh,

right there on the shelf.

I can feel the fear,

feel the flames licking at me.

But I won't fan them.

They say fight fire with fire.

But fuck that for fuel.

I'll use my mind, not coal-oil.

It's a much better tool;
it won't ever expire.