Zero-Point

My body is a meaningless zero-point:
fill it with female potential.
Fill my empty cage with 
your female essentials.
Take all my rage and
break its spine,
ask me for my
credentials.
Walk me down
the line.

Nice Guys

Some say
nice guys finish last:
they don't.

The prize my eyes surmise
eludes the finish line,
and elides the present time.

The finish line
is not 
an easy shag

or a victory claim:
to shame you publicly
or brag your name;

to use the crassest metonymy
and refer to you
as an iron sea

to be penetrated
by the ores
of my fleet

would knock the both of us
off our feet.

I play the long game
and I wait
the long wait.

A clear sheet.

Nice guys might finish later
and they might not
finish fast:

but that's because
they're better lovers,
and they never

finish last.

The Perils of Being a Mountain Goat

Fiddling through the fissures,
the bifurcation a foundary of stone,
we roam up crags and rocks,
clinging like bats by bone.

We gorge on leafy moss, 
on tufts of spartan grass.
We cannot help but gloss
how we navigate the pass.

Mother Goat is caring
but she knows to have no hope:
up here there's no knowing;
we live by noose and rope.

And if you are not careful,
the fall will be so great
that Pan will not be playful
and you will not be saved.

I bleat, blow on my ram horn,
the gully deep as stomach's bottom:
chewed cud will come your form,
but kids forget - and are forgotten.

At the bottom of the shaft
two bodies: forms that I have known.
At the bottom, my two calves:
one bloated, one blown.

Stillborn

I

Now he is old, he is close to death.
In the rapt silence of night,
alert as a fox
to the murmuring stirs of the house,
his bed no longer warmed
by his wife,
he thinks of the time
when he was most alive
but at once so dead.

II


Spring is a time for the Lamb:
the land is abuzz: grass senses
the milder air, and all is a slow
heaving from sleep to joyful labour.
The Lamb cares not for the Wolf:
She is busy watching her Babes,
the uterine white of the Ewe;
and the Ram is as proud as punches
watching his first-born stand.
But sickly bleats the last-born;
the song of the Wolf's fast, shorn.

III

So Spring is also the time of the Wolf:
an eye bright, blue to the opalescent Moon,
red as it beams to the blood
of the kill.
It stalks the land, stealthily as death,
and its snap of jaw as eternal
as the wrenching night's maw.
The Wolf bays at the Moon,
begging forgiveness of it.
The Moon is still, silent:
the Wolf, forgiven, joins the pack;
between pasture and mountain,
the darkling stack.

IV

Stories are wondrous things:
the old man tells them to himself,
making sense of his hardships,
all of them docked.
But how to tell this one?
He is close now, he knows it:
he is alone no longer in his room.
The curtains billow coolly
and his mind conjures what he'd
been withholding:

his wife had been sick when she broke
and spilled her waters; 
the doctors had not known:
the baby was a stone, and 
two pounds underweight.
It was born, still as night, and 
on the other side it awoke.
They cradled it; grave and heavy 
was the silence, 
an overflowing groan.
And now, near death, he knows 
why it crept and hid:
the revelation lives as his child, so close now, 
it soaks him in a knowing:

he only knew that life in death, and so 
in death he greets that life:
a child's hand in his, soft and losing warmth.
After years of mourning, he realises 
the Living are ghosts: 
they haunt the Late.
He closes his eyes,
then he latches
the gate.

An Over-Arching Politics

And now
a shameless exercise
in Green Preaching,
a life beseeching
an over-arching
politik:

we are one with the Earth,
with ourselves,
and in this war 
of man against matter
and man against man
and man against life
itself

we are all on the same side.

We might think we're not;
the differently drawn
battle plans.
But we always were.
And we always will be.

As all eyes shift
to our children's gazes,
to our lovers' hands:
can you put a cap
on love?

Now we stare out to sea;
we stand there

pensively, and
hopefully.

The ships on the horizon:
are they coming or going?
Or will we build an Ark,
a life raft,

to rein us in, keep us warm,
whilst the world gets 
quietly snowing?

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.