Isn't it Self-Evident?

So now it's August, and what have I got to show for it?
Just a poem? The first of the month?

Precisely. But that's enough.

After these introductory lines, which break the water
like a rough stone, and this short stanza
explaining the first two,

comes this part, in which I explain
why you should not lose heart.

Throughout all this talk
of inner sun and poetry saving lives,
as if poetry could take a pulse reading
or put you in the recovery position,
give mouth to mouth,

there still remains the fact of my writing:
I write not to make incisions, to look deep inside
the flesh, or even to best what I'd previously
beaten out.

No. I write because it reflects
what you've given me.

I lift this poem up like a chalice,
like a drunken madman commandeering a trophy,
shouting,

'Look! Look what she's given me! This poem is her!
It's her flesh! It's her body! She breathes creativity
into me! She puts life, like light, into my cosmos!'

And as I stand there in my loose robes
and sandals, like Nietzsche gone mad
at the flogging of a horse,

you realise now that here comes the bathos.
The part where I let out the wind.
The part where everything unwinds
back down to ugly reality.

But you'd be fooled. You're in your room again, sure
(I don't know if you even left, in flight),
but now you can see the small incandescent core

of metaphor. And it's a simple truth:
I care deeply for you,
as one human being for another.

Care is the core of the human.
And the core of the human is love.

So now, when you exit your room
and you leave your house,
just think,

someone cares for me.

And knowing that you realise that
is enough for me to see
that you too care for me.

And never before
was a person so sure
he should end a poem
with a smiley.

:)

Love Song of the May Bug #1

So here I am, vaulting up into the dusk

of this lovely summered realm, or

rather sitting here in my lonely bedroom, sussed

out by my heart, beating faintly like wings.

I think of you, how I'd like to settle

into your air, down to your wet ringlet rings,

get tangled in you, as if in your hair, sore

to lay this brood, and not be cut down like a nettle.

I don't want to come back yearly

to this same annual point, pinged 

into this blind night abuzz, yet merely

moved on like an unloved pest, and racquet-torn.

I sit here by this window, the hills lovely and vast,

hearing wings buzzing faintly - into your future; into my past.

Let Poetry Save Your Life

Come neglected, come dejected
come lay down your strife.

Lay down
at your mother's feet:
let poetry save your life.

You think it a thing of one dimension
full of words like 'metre' and 'scansion'

but come and feed, 
and satiate your needs;
let poetry save your life.

Your eyes are blue, but full of tears
like a sky anticipating rain;
rain and rain, again and again.

But rush out to your moonlit street;
let poetry save your life.

When you can see they aren't merely words
but glowing hearts, passed on like embers,
blown on like lit feathers of coal,

then poetry will save your life: you'll remember
for ever; you will build yourself whole.

Deep Love, Deep Time

Our love could be deep time, 
glacial time. 
Lodged as a rock. 

We could embed ourselves, 
seamlessly
as kaolinite;

I could hold you through
time's long and
lonely night.

Our love could be deep love,
deep as the speckle
that flecks the above.

A glint of quartz,
a refracted love.

I could hold you -
we could hold each other -
against a vein.

Our love could be infinite,
infinite as the first rocks
of the Earth.

Our love could be
pure presence: present,
but gone unknown;

not a fossil, not a relic,
not calcified bone.

Another Poem

          - for Vladimir Holan


Another poem worth memorising

                for everyday situations,

                          on the train

                                      in an elevator

                         on a plane.

The conductor comes

       Ticketing

           and I’ve glanced

           over

                                    at you

                         several times

thoughts mixed

                between

                           the poetically noble

                           and

                                      lustful

                           infancy.

A fancy, indeed.

                 A moment to me

                            held in the morning

                            sunshine,

                                       perfectly quiet,

                            perfectly abandoned.

But forever there.

Choose a Better God

When amazing’s what you’re after

                But it’s always out of reach

I’ll make amazing second-nature;

                It will be a small feat.

When hope to you is citrus fruit

                Growing on Spanish trees

I’ll claim for you that rugged hue,

                And hope for you shall ripen with ease.

The gods you choose are yours to pick,

                Don’t stay the church out of respect

To childhood, fidelity or candle wick

                When there are gods abroad with love to spend.

Come, choose a better God;

                Take me, my love, for protection.

Come guidance, come now, come good,

                And I’ll take from you sacred direction.

Let me live between your thighs

                Like a hermit struck blind with sense.

Only innocence, love, behind my eyes.

                Behind my eyes, my love, only innocence.

Just Poetry

His life reduced
to the sum of his words:
a febrile patchwork
of repetitions
and revisions:

this, Africa's brow
or I'm more bristled
than a toothbrush tip,
every time she mints
new tender with her lips.

No, his life was never
the brink of breathlessness,
a kitchen sink,
plunged, whirling down
to depthlessness.

His is only poetry.
Just poetry. Merely words.
But you're impressed
with what you've heard, when
it's more what you haven't
that's nearer the truth.

A Poem for Auden

When I am older and my body's withered
and in the cold I shall tend to shiver,
will I sweat with the scratch of a woollen jumper?
Will I roam the landing with a swollen bladder?
Will I still feel as spritely as I did at twenty?

And to have loved just once, would that be plenty?
Or is it number that counts, and how frequently?
And will my face be wrinkled as a giant ear
from all the listening that I've done, from all I hear?
Will I still be as gay as I was at twenty-one?

And will I look back on all the things that I've done
and say, Now that was a life - I sure lived the one!
Or will I be an embittered old man, looking to my first-born:
Son, don't follow in my path. Catch the sun. Keep it warm.
I shall be different. I shall remain the same. I'll not dither.

I shall not be hard as a consonant, the typewriter's mechanical
sounds. I shall be soft as sibilance. No tyrannical rounds shall
boom and blast and blast and boom; I'll be hush as noon.
I will gander with whimsy and with each glance look anew.
I shall wonder serenely as a river that carries the view.

Wedding Song

Originally written on January 30th, 2013

On our wedding day
I would let you dance
with your ex,
and I wouldn't bite my lip.

You're the one for me,
free bird, no leash
for you, no cage -
to not put all Heaven in a rage.

I love you:
here's to safety, and a latch key;
here's to radiator bleeding, child
feeding, and a love never to go 

unfeeling.

Get Your Bite

You blinkard fool,
no bloody God made you;
your body's there to find you.
You swim out to your body's truth.

You do not own yourself:
your self is lost, most
never find theirs;
children swell with pain, nerves flare.

That's how you know you're real:
the pain, the heal. Your self
is floating out there, buoyed in infinite ocean. 
Your spirit is your compass. Love the potion.

So fix your fickle fragments to your frame:
your body yours to discover, yours to tame.
Tigers stroll gallantly in your soul's night.
Find your stripes, light your eye. Get your bite.

Deepest Shade of Green (500th poem!)

the days are long and clean

                    and hot.

they skip a bright blue plane.

the evenings unfurl for hours

with tongue of lavender flame.

     and after this is said

                                                    and done

 would I repeat it again?

to simply have been here with you

is the volta, the refrain.

but that is not enough for me,

and, baby, it never will be;

for how can I possibly go on

                                                   without you

                                            here with me?

I want to fold you up in me

                             and give you time to sleep.

I want to be your sun, your moon,

                    your deepest shade of green.

My Friend Mohammed

My friend Mohammed
is the loveliest guy:
he once told me that Bambi
always makes him cry.

He works at a fruit stand
in the market, the palaver's
one he really enjoys. It's just off the Strand.
And every Sunday he helps out his father.

My friend Mohammed follows
the Five Pillars: faith, dedication,
charity, fasting - a pilgrim; he knows
he'd always be happy, even on a ration.

He often makes jokes, his keen sense
of humour: at the market, he says,
'What will it be? Two pannets for
a pound? Don't Mecca fool outta me...'

But his Uncles in Luton
are very unhappy: they don't
speak good English, and
the whole town's quite crappy.

He says, 'They'd leave if they could
but everyone's there: their wives,
their daughters, their friends. They would,
but try moving on forty years - their heavy lives.'

My friend Mohammed likes to pray
at the Mosque, whenever he's not busy.
He says, 'Come see for yourself, come lay
your assumptions before God - or is that too easy?

'Allah is all mighty and all good -
it's just a few morons left in the Dark Ages.
Your people had their crusades, this
is the same. Nothing bad lasts. But I'm no sage.'

My friend Mohammed has lovely parents:
they're not Pakis or towel-heads or niggers or blacks.
But they cook for me no longer. They're holding remembrance:
their boy died last week in an arson attack.

British Columbia, 2006

I remember it,
luminous as yesterday.
We'd seen the Buick
in the garage
and then we sat outside.

Total darkness.
The fire pit was kicking out its heat,
the eight of us
painted by the fluid glow
of warm orange flame.

The stars were beating down
so gently, beaming down
from history. A coyote sang 
from somewhere in the distance,
the firs were watching us, silent.

In the darkness
of a moment's light,
in the lightness
of a moment's dark,
this memory's inside my heart.

This memory's inside my bones,
distilled to marrow, in my rings.
The starlight, the fire; time zones
melt away: just one patch of the earth.
I sing, take it under my wings. Soar the surf.

Social Network

Note: I wrote this poem almost exactly two years ago, but I found it randomly today!

I don't want to 'like' your comments,
witticisms, tweets, et cetera:

heartstrings are not digital,
hands are not
digital; mouths 
are not digital.

I'd rather not view 
your photos of Alaska -

but tell me how you imagined
being down there
in the water
amongst the whales;

tell me about the peaks, the caps
the bears, the beauty,
the waste...

Or don't tell me
at all.

I don't want to make a connection;
I want to feel it.

I could sit with you all day,
and we could do nothing
but feel everything,
and chuck
our computer screens

into the deep
blue
ocean.

Modern Shakespeare

I'm a
Renaissance man:

I'll be
at the Renaissance Fayre

getting
pissed as a gnat,

horny
as a hare.