The Hunt

Give the bears rifles and ammo,
the elk shafts of tapered bamboo,
the lion a bow and arrow,
the badger a sett trap,
the moose a bear trap,
the cougar an electric prod

and let them go at the humans.

You'd see them drop their weapons,
discard their devices of death,
and pelt full tilt at you,
with the blank madness of animal.

In a malay of claws and teeth, they'd

clamp their slavering jaws: their justice; 
crush bone and skull beneath hoof,
tear skin from limb, and leave 
a writhing pitiful jumble of meat.

Next time, go at them with your fists.

Hang your guns back on your racks:
you'll not be needing them again.
They'll keep it like this.

Birthday Madrigal

This pain is excruciating

and life is very strange.

How to make sense of experience

that shoots in from all sides?

I feel like a foreigner in my own world

and this is my curse - my strength.

These people lost and beautiful

barbarians, and I one of them.

Split from a monkey and a godhead,

the caresses of sex and love and booze,

both a pathogen and a salve,

I blunder through wanderings

and plunder many wonderings.

But don't wait on me if you're waiting,

and don't look to a halo, or a sign of beauty:

you'll not find it above or in or around my head.

For I find my beauty in you.

Don't you ever go hurting yourself.

And she is beautiful, too, in a different way.

But navigating this pain: that's the thing.

That's why I came here. Put here

on this planet, by sheer forces acting through chance

with the blusterings of greater faith and truth,

I must wrestle with the marrow of the creation I am,

eventually coming to terms with it.

And all the while, all I have to grace my life is you.

And her. And friends. The many muses I find,

they each a me, I a them.

We are all the same when it comes to it,

but it's the differences that count:

comparisons and contrasts; cool jets

and hot blasts. I recently thought

of myself as iron filings, and you as a magnet

to straighten out all the confusion that's in me.

But I just need you near me, until I find that thing,

until I'm done with waiting.

I'm not going anywhere soon, so don't go either.

Hold my hand - but hold his, too.

But know that I'll be the one to guide you.

Just look to me when you're unsure

'cause I'm sure that I'm not, either.

But I'll guide you through the ether

and you can guide me through the maze.

Just don't lose me: remember my face.

Waiting on a Happening

When all your plans have fallen through,
when all your men have proved boys
and horses are prone and mute by still water,
not colts bolting out over thunderous plains,
I shall appear, smiling, and you shall know
my name.

For I know you're out there somewhere
and I shall wait for you, the waiting out of mind.
A man for us both to discover, a woman broad as sky,
your stars like fruit to pluck, hot and near;
but now is not the time, and I shall have
no fear.

There is time yet for the both of us,
before buttered toasted teacakes and cups of tea,
and there is much work to be done yet, much finding,
much harrowing: leaving fallow the field for spring.
Through winter's frosts and summer's ceaseless smile, 
one day, to your seeds, I'll sing.

A City Prayer

I live in the city,
full to the brim like
a chalice of wine
with the beautiful people;

far away from the strange
and wretched places of this land,
away from difficulty, regret,
the slow turning hurting, so

as such, I have
faces to forget,
people to write off,
personalities to disregard.

Now, where did I park the car?
Where's the nearest free Wi-Fi?
What's the quicker route: District or Circle?
And when can I roll over and die?

Monday Night Stars

The stars hung limpid-bright,
hot and molten ember-shards
and a planet hung fat up there.
I'm sure a shooter crossed the pitch.

I am but a cog beneath it;
a cog in a wider cognition:
maybe ultimately unknowable,
maybe better off for our not knowing.

But I am tethered to the stars
as we are tethered to each other,
an unsought and unwished for
token of our humanity.

But some are less ties and more chains:
we chain ourselves to our goods,
to our possessions, and our possessions
enchain their makers.

The stars were not born in poverty,
but in grandeur and simplicity.
And out of endless forms, that wheel,
a grander cognition, what will yet come?

What will we yet make?
What will we yet design?
When will the yield finish its yielding?
And when will the present be time?

Restless

Everything you say makes me  

                                    wonder

Fills me with wonder.

And yet in you still I

                                    wander

longing to find a place to sit;

unprickled grass

in your vast 

meadows.

Fishing

Can one turn battering a fish

into an art?

In what time or place?

The trawl of a crowd

standing glee-struck

outside a chip van,

all eyes watching the hands

dip and fry. It's cold;

a passing, aching, hungry sigh.

Sole Mate

Line caught, sea-bed-wracked,
I snagged her on my hook, my worm
a tasty snare in the water's darkness.

I the Captain of this Vessel,
I the one to tussle, wave-wrestle,
in the spume I pulled her in:

a good weight; 10 kilos, a handsome fish.
And that's when she began to swish.

She was flat and long, two eyes,
almost jellified, staring straight up at me numb;
her slimy nibbling gape: that's when I fell in love.

Not from Dover, exactly, and not one to skate,
I placed her in a tank - she skipped my plate.
I keep her now on deck, beside the Captain's Wheel;
we course a straight and steady, long and even keel.

But her honesty's my favorite trait; 
my briny love, my one sole mate.

The Effect

She opened up a rift in me
and the universe poured out violently.

But that will one day heal over
leaving the faintest trace of a scar,

like a caesarean milky way
on the blackness of night.

So now I leave her, gone stray,
still a friend, walking off into new light.

I want my universe to trickle, too big to
birth whole: I too small, too fickle, too much skull.

Truth

2 + 2 = 4: that's a universal
truth, but a metre of empty space
is its own empty face, a non-sequitur
of blank horizon.

Is it a universal fact that life
must consume? The flower needs water
to bloom. But the flower too needs
death, and the worm - to churn

a meal into a graveyard of fertiliser, 
a seal between root and anchor point
and a tenuous joint. But life fattens
on life, grows stronger.

Its rights grow longer, and stronger
and tighter. A man eats a meal alone
of meat cleaved from the bone
thankful for the silence of the plate.

But elsewhere, rocked, is life a-gait,
screaming noiselessly to deaf ears, hungry eyes.
2 + 2 = 4, a metre is a hundred-mate;
a woman eats life, makes life, and feeds. 

And, somewhere else, history dies.

Rainmancer

You capture the thunder
in my heart, conjure a spark,
my Rainmancer
Pain-lancer
Shadow-dancer,

weave me a rain spell,
dig me a deep well;
fill my aquifers
leave open in your way
a shaft of daylight.

A Short Poem

A poet should not smoke:
his tongue his prized organ.
Neither should a poet drink;
maybe brandy, burgundy - absinthe.
But a poet should whet his tongue
on words, fire up his fibres
on the flint of poesy,
drink to outdrinking eternity
and stealing the morning paper
from Death's lawn.

A Moment with a Thief

He stole my wallet,
his hand firmer, colder, harder
than my own.

But I speak the language of eyes:
his were strong and clear
so I let him take it
without thought, without fear.

I know he'll use it; for murder,
for good. For goodness sake,
just be as you should.

The Orphan Seal

Part One

For Ted Hughes

From folds of curling, foaming sea
frothy as laps of whipping cream,
a head pokes out, and then
it's gone - back down
to re-enter the jam
of its missing mum,
from out the pram.

A missing seal, a lonely pup;
no mother's milk to idly sup.
A cow alone, a calf orphaned:
a seal come broken;
bright eyes piercing awful,
wide and wild from freezing water;
a lost child, beloved daughter.

Now searching, eyeless, in the dark,
a blanketed searchlight from afar.
Rolled beneath the beam of the ocean's keel,
now come the calls of the orphan seal.

A Confessional Poem

Her name was Flo.
She died in October, 2010.
We worked together for five months,
and in that five months
I barely grew to know her.
But when I left for uni
she gave me a spider plant.

A ragged little thing, I barely knew
how to look after it,
and that Christmas
I went home for a month.
My housemate neglected it
through my own neglect
and when I came back
it was almost dead:
a spindling of brown shoots,
only hanging on through its roots.

I took it to my neighbour, The Healer,
and she showed me what to do:
it's pot-bound, she'd said,
and she took it from the pot,
de-clumped it, pulling the tangled roots apart.
It nearly broke my heart, the sight,
not knowing enough about growing.
She put the two in their own two pots,
sprinkled them with new soil,
fruits of the loam, and not the loom;
sowing, not sewing: the Sun, not the Moon.

And now, I still have that one original, 
that ember. That ember of Flo,
which I cannot let die. She was only forty,
but I won't pretend I cried
at the telephone call, or the thought of it all.

But now, I have eight plants:
I have given two away:
one to that neighbour, one
to a friend. And I cannot let it end.
I cannot let it end. I must let it flow.
I must let it go. I must see it grow.

The seeds we sow: we must scatter them so.
This one's for you, night-angel,
day-dreaming sun beam,
woman I never knew. This one's for Flo:
the seeds she planted, the things that grew.