In the Deep

We were out there in the water

swimming in the deep,

seeing things as they were living.

But where were you

whilst we were swimming?

Were you sitting on the beach?

Whilst we were out there,

swimming: swimming

in the deep.

The phosphorescent blooms

of coral were steep,

as the ocean fell away,

down into the deep.

And where were you

whilst we were swimming,

swimming in the deep?

Were you

in the mountains?

Were you tending

to your sheep?

O! but the things we saw

when we were out there,

swimming in the deep!

Things we could not tell -

things we could not keep.

But where were you

whilst we were swimming?

Were you sitting

on the beach?

Lyrical (untitled)

You consume art
Like a man consuming chicken hearts,

But what's left in your heart
In that afterdark,
When the taste has melted away?

Sensation goes the way
of sensation:
It greys,
Leaving you craving something

Meatier
Far richer,
A treat for yer
To cloak your hurt.

You been craving.

That material
so-real-to-you

craving.

On Christmas Day

He entered the wide-open doors,

open as the arms of God, or

the Mother Superior.

The spires were obnoxious

as the ribbed horns of Satan,

taller than mountains of Gold.

In his rags, he entered this temple,

hungry for a meal, asking

for some small sparing charity,

but those inside turned a blind eye,

the filth and squalor of poverty

something putrid - alien - to them,

as they went about their silent squirming

before God: their, 'I beseech thine grace

and forgiveness; O, Lord! I am couched in sin.'

This man could have been anyone

on Christmas Day: the son of God -

not just some soul to be saved.

                        ***

The babe was born on Christmas Day,

loosed through the doors of

the Heavenly Mother, only

this mother was nineteen and homeless:

Latino, black, white, Chinese - who cares?

All her life she's been climbing stairs.

She hid her swollen stomach well

beneath loose-fitting clothes, the folks

at the soup kitchen had given double helpings.

And now, in the Shelter, in her very own room,

on a bed that is not hers, in the candle-split

gloom, the wonder of God begins to stir

and from somewhere deep inside of her,

her baby decides it's time to join

this world so ruled by crown and coin;

and this baby could be anyone

on Christmas Day: the son of God,

his blue eyes marbled like the Milky Way.

                                 ***

I am walking now down some wide street

and on both sides tramp myriad feet:

so many faces under the sun,

colours and voices all merge into one.

Before me a young man who sells his body

for money, whose name was once David

but now is Honey. And a man in a turban

passes me by: some Muslim man with

a tear in his eye. And down the street

is a man filled with hate, because that's all

that ever filled his plate. And driving by,

a man with no hope, who counts the days

in yards of rope. And above me in

some tenement room, a young woman

putting on the night's perfume.

But they are all the Children of God.

I am no different: we are all one. And so

I sleep on the streets; I am born every day,
Only to remind you you're holy: light the way.

Arrival

I remember the first time

I ever figured out

that coldness

is merely the absence of heat.

I was seventeen.

Now, I have realised

that flesh consumed

is but tarted up murder.

That blame

is but a lack of responsibility.

That anger directed outwards

comes from an inward source.

That biting the tongue

in turn bites down 

on the serpent inside.

And now, I am twenty-four,

and I realise that darkness 

is merely the absence of light.

But light is far hungrier, far more exact,
than the jawless maw of toothless night.

Autumn is on Fire

Autumn is on fire
and now the trees
burn with a slow radiance
crackling like the leaves
of the sun, 

spilling open
like lava nectar
from the core
of an orange,
the wind spiced with bark 
and quiet.

Autumn is on fire
raging against winter's quench.
The paths and endless rows
of park benches, the old
clad walls, the towering

bastions of hills,
the ancient forests on fire,
burning without flame.
A fire swaying, stationary,
curling branches like tongues,
whispering your name.

Autumn is on fire
within you, burning the year
before your renew.

Winter Moon (Three Voices)

Underneath the winter-stricken trees

with their ragged claws

is where I lost my heart,

is where -

Hush, my love. Let me

kiss those words from your lips,

leaving just the bulbs, that spring 
might finger into a promulgation.

Besides, can't you hear

the moon? It says,

Can you hear what I say?

I say nothing. Come be here with me

in this nothing. You can call me skull,

pallid husk, pregnant egg; but I

am just old. I am so old,

and I know that love lives but briefly.

                        ***

Beside the bird-emptied lake,

reflecting the bird-emptied sky,

is where I saw the lone

crane fly, and that was I, and I -

But hush, my love: you're not

bereft of your feathers, you're not

some barren woman. You're a winter bird;

and I? I am just your perch.

And besides, can't you hear

the moon? It says,

Can you not hear what I say?

I say nothing. Come dwell here

in nothing - have everything.

You can call me pale and I won't

blush; or a bird's egg waiting to be crushed.

But I am old; and I know love chiefly.

                        ***

Now, on the cottage bed, I am

spread out like a sacrifice. Come

whittle away your whittling knife.

Unperch me, devour me. Moon and scour me.

Into your life I am come,

but not to bring a hunter's gun;

but I shall bring my whittling knife, and 
lay with you - weave me a sky, be my wife.

But besides, can't you hear

the moon? It says nothing.

                 ***

I am here with you now,

in this nothing, the still

of our breathing.

And we

are everything.

She: a Prayer for the Future

She believes in 
the existence of angels,
and her breasts are soft
as an all-enveloping kiss.

But she is the only angel
in which I believe,

her eyes beaming in modesty,
her beauty both in body and spirit,
her grace as naked
as the day she was born:

I throw this poem up
to the sky,
like an offering of grain -

like a hallowed dove, released
from the quick white
of my bird-like soul.

All I Want is You

With every crisis
there comes an opportunity
to heal.

For every crisis
of maturity,
of love,
of longing,
of resistance - persistence.

The worst would be
to melt into obscurity,
if I were
no longer known
to you
or to myself.

I don't want to be the man
running from the gravity
of a memory -
a vague knowing
that I
could have had it all.

And equally,
I do not want to be the man
who, behind closed doors, evaporates
to his family;
who looks at his own
and thinks,
where am I in all of this?

Sucked in and sucked at
by greater forces
because I refuse to understand
them; the brain lingers there,
its better powers
drawn away by a dim blinking light.

All I want
is to grow into a better man for you.
Better and better, a good man.
All I want is to smile when I'm blue.

With every crisis -
but there is no crisis!
And all I want is you.

This, my earth

This, my earth,

whose waters eddy and fill

the contours of this planet’s surface

and never end, nor begin.

This, my earth,

whose very mineral life

is taken up into the hands

of small men with too-big ambition.

This, my earth,

whose fires burn deep inside

and turn, whose fires spume

and crack the infinite air.

This, my earth,

in spirit only, not

my earth in name – an

elemental has no face.

This, my earth,

that which renders all struggle futile,

that which is only being,

depending not on the borrowed ‘I’.

This, my earth.

This, your earth. This

our earth. This earth is us,

we it, until we move in you once more

and live the fallacy that we call ‘to die’.

Moon Light

I can't help but think

that I've given myself away to you.

And I can't help but feel

that I'm in love with more than just

the idea of you.

I can't help but think 

of Li Bai....

So bright a gleam on the foot of my bed -

Could there have been a frost already?

Lifting myself to look, I found that it was moonlight.

Sinking back again, I thought suddenly of home.

And suddenly

there is a big moon of a mirror

between us

and you are the reflection

of my cold and aching heart,

aching for your warmth.

You are
my home.

The Mermaid's Tale

It is not the sea

that turns inside her

but a poisonous clutch of eggs,

human roe from some disgraced tryst

with a Plymouth merchant man.

Her eyes are pale blue china,

small lunar dishes of pearl-coloured milk,

and her hair is flaming kelp.

But she's given up her throne now,

slipped her gills and tipped the scales.

At dusk, one evening,

she flies through the murk

to where the trawlers have been.

There on the scratched and jagged 
seabed, she unclips from her waist

an oyster, and leaves. Inside, the

brood grows cloudy and dies, empty 
as a dead fish's eye. She says, 
'What will become of me?' Her sea no more, 
queen and heir of a land-locked lie.

Take Me

Take me on your ship,

your ship of the mad,

away from dry land,

away from all these people

so happily lost inside their nothings,

so happily piling their belongings,

gathering in corners like dust and old skin,

a monument to indifference of life's flair.

Take me away into the night's blue horizon

where stars lip the curvature of space,

away from the bottom of this empty ocean

full of hermits in shells of their own making.

Give me a mountain and a doorway

with no hinge; give me fire hot enough to 

transfigure ore, warm enough to keep

this core turning over, and turning over

like a perpetual engine, or a pendulum.... 
Take me from this nonsense, and hand me love.

Give me love that is as simple as a carved wooden

figurine, as clear as a glass of spring water

held to the light; as clean as a pre-industrial, plains night,

central time, the backbone of the universe sprawling

above me, the Milky Way streaking through the pines. Give me 
your heart, let me carve my name on it. Give me 

the courage to hand mine to you. Give me a message in rock to be hewn.

Hand me a writ to care for you. Take me, arms wide: let me be true.

Yes

I have just shut the door to this small room,

shutting the cat and his mewing in with me,

the budgerigar next door making mock-human noises,

the Coronation Street omnibus playing away

to my quiet mother.

I have shut the door because

I want to be alone with you, in this thought:

the other night, near sleep, I considered

what it might be like

if you were someone else, and

I did not know you:

what it would be like 

if I saw your small mottled eyes,

that mousy face of yours,

somewhere between peaceful and despondent,

peeping strangely out at me

from a crowd;

if I noticed those filmy, watery globes, that 

gorgeous smile you wear when you're amused,

that gorgeous little smile that hides your quirky teeth,

that gorgeous little smile that caps your silent tongue

which works away wordlessly, but not wordless, behind 

closed doors, producing works of great beauty and great import,

if I saw your eyes, curtained with those long dreamy lashes,

I would want to come over to you and talk to you,

because I have noticed you - unlike how you

do not notice yourself. I would want to comfort you.

I would want to ask you where you come from

and what the weather is like there.

But I do know you, and, as such,

I know what the weather is like where you come from.

It is always sunny. And it is always raining.

And the clouds sweep like cobwebs through the sky.

And you stand there, alone in a field, golden sun like honey on your face,

rain like wool weaving you into the washed landscape.

I could paint you, now, standing there.

But what I would rather do is step into the picture with you,

hold you, sit there with you, drenched and sunned, blown dry

in the gentle wind, lie down with you in the grass,

survey, and say, "Yes, here is where we will build our house. 

Yes, here is where we will make our bed. Yes."

That's Why She's Beautiful

She has the eyelashes of a cow
and the walk of a moose,
and she's more threatening
than a water-going goose.

Some of you might think those metaphors mad
or completely mean - completely spleen.
But cows are most beautiful, in my eyes:
their long lashes frame reflected country scenes,
they seem to smile as they go about
their bovine business, just chewing things.

And moose are more stark
and more sudden
than lightning at a picnic.
See one standing at the side of a road,
pure presence, and you'd swerve to avoid it,
but, panicked, it would flee
into the evergreens.

And geese, swans, other water fowl,
angels of that nature - they deceive with their
peaceful nullity, all feathers and neck
and beak. Don't mess with a goose
if you don't want to be knuckled
with a bite, a father's belt buckle,
wooden spooned by a flustered mother.

But she's a bird that doesn't bite.
And she's a moose that doesn't run.
She's a cow that always smiles - 
the modest cow with the beautiful eyes.
She's a maiden not belied with false compare:
every fiber's her hair, every nail is her own,
every thought is a dandelion scattering seed.

And that's why she's beautiful:
she's a lioness, but not fearful.
And that's why she's beautiful.
She's a hippo and she's cheerful.
And that's why she's beautiful:
because she is perfectly natural,
only natural, nothing concealed.
And that's why she's beautiful.

Posthumous

I sometimes feel I am a ghost

walking inside the bones

of one who is long dead.

Shuffling through white supermarkets

only in body,

my spirit above me

on a higher plane,

or resting quietly

in some pristine glade

where children go to play

with dragonflies,

and lovers laugh,

their eyes tied.

But I am not Keats;

I face twenty-first century feats.

I shall not die

before I am twenty-six,

and there's no time

to live out in the sticks

when the world's encroaching

like a lion's maw

and every wave

of every shore

is pounding roundly at my door.

Yes, I sometimes feel

I am living a posthumous existence.

But there's no time for silence.

We must fight for peace and not accept death:

that's how to stop this endless violence.

                      ***

But maybe I am

      Han Shan

just looking for a doorway

              into the mountain,

or maybe I am Blake

       awaiting

              Heaven’s bubbling fountains.

More likely I’m me

         looking for a way

                into myself

          a way into the world,

                 a way into

         the heart of love,

   whose symbol

                 is a marble dove.