April 2010
6 posts
SOME NIGHTS WHEN SIDEWALKS
Some nights when sidewalks
show
the world above
as a blur of paint
without fields
without flowers
it seems that this is what
the rain was
for
To offer skies up to themselves
To plant quiet meadows where the sleepless drift through
ghosts of stars
THE GRAFFITTI ALONG THE SHUTTERS AT 24 PRINCE
OOFE!
Before the cops could come
before
the store would open you threw down
this one quick word:
OOFE!
If they forget you now
for everything
you’ve done
the girl in greenpoint
who has every
thing
they say you should hold dear
perhaps they’ll think of you
for this quick scribbled
word
as though in pain
you’d screamed your name into
the night
THE FIRST BUDS
Sprung greenly into life but
lost now
for words
come slowly if
at all
The wind shakes their heads
in disbelief as if
this isn’t what they
had expected
Morning Poem 040710 - Prince St. Cleaners Inc.
Each Morning he stands in
Khaki shorts and flip flops.
With that drag, knowing nod
and sackful
of clothes
is he
Mafia boss, dealer, or dry cleaner?
Morning Poem 040610
At the door, Winter turns for last look at who she’ll leave behind.
Casting eyes greyly upon an empty street she coldly blows us one long last kiss.
Morning Poem 040510
Birdsong from the ghosts of birds
woke us lapping the shore
of tired machines
whose deep crawling breaths made me think of mountains.
And the old nest
The tangle of confetti in branches
reaching skyward
seem as slow motion fireworks
stuck fast mid-flight with
all the promise of celebration
January 2010
1 post
And to the New Year
Turning!
Over the river and into the turning
Night
Turning from lamp lighted streets cool turning
Wind mist blows
Turn!
Over to wiped fresh page
Cleanly clean of all and
Stop sign echoing desire across the wide dry
street and screaming
nothing now more than stop dead or push
on on onward and away on from all and any hope to turn
the dim lighted grey of old roads
flick orange lights...
September 2009
1 post
After a month or so they
have his story pretty straight.
The day job stacking shelves and
the public transport are both
a front. It’s just the plastic bag
he that throws them.
“He must keep a little stash of money close
by ‘im.” They decide.
“Just incase, you never know.”
They start calling him ‘Dickie Mint’
“He’s worth a...
August 2009
6 posts
Without Feet
Three weeks
ago
you tied a thread
to my left wrist which
came I think
from the old towel
we shared
that day when for the first
time
we were alone.
Village Night Song (for Langston Hughes)
The city exhales
and rivers
of light blink into life - trickle
ebb their way across
down
or uptown
through the canyons of shadow
upon which we now stand
the city whispers like a forest -
a thousand
hopes and ideas thrown like so many
fairy
lights into a box piled
one upon the next
each calling to another but
then the horns chime
like a cry -
an engine turns and fades
you feel...
The Other Christiana
On the eve again
of that upon
which so much now
feels hinged
how did he do it?
Franz Kafka, clerk
by day and man
of words by night
is it a switch?
Or compromise of needs?
A mouthless mind to feed
or mindless hands to mindless mouth
for mindless months and years
who wins the tug
of war
is it this and little more than
sitting somewhere half
between
‘success’ and that
...
The Night Before The Wailing Wall
However many thousand years of
hopes
and then me pressed among them.
Cracked gulfs between the stone lie
vacant and waiting.
Are the stones themselves stiff
as parentheses holding
the dreams?
Or the dreams
archers bows pulled
taught and ready to
pounce;
arms to ancient bricks
lest they forget themselves and
crumble into
memory?
July 2009
5 posts
Another draft before I lose the paper
You could see it as a spring clean.
Each building a powerhouse of memory
still stinging with the shock -
it’s newly whitewashed walls standing
too stunned to talk.
The taste of paint thick in your throat -
you glance inside, feel the press of
closed unfamiliar space.
but
someone, here, once carefully overturned
soil, made do, tilled and tidied their
allotted square of land
...
On Lee Smolin's 'Did the universe evolve?'
Somewhere in the cold unfurrowed earth
you imagine something rather
like a mole pushed to the surface
as suddenly as tubed toothpaste
forced into the vastness of
a bathroom sink
Memory of a past breakfast, Monday 9.14am
The clock’s cut
tick - the
old knife through
frozen butter or
bent backed plastic
silvered spoon - stuck
mid fridged Nutella ‘ploof’.
Gone the smooth glide,
gone the dream-draped
silken fold of lain chocolate
gently upon the
blunt knife side.
The distant overspilling
cloud upon
the hill - a half slide,
as if suspended mid reach:
frosted milk drip
Pen's Death
A hand upon life’s young throat, you coursed and swung
through tended streets and planted
boulevards of flowering words
Now the ghosts of valleys, hills and troughs,
stand in their place
A mottled pock-marked page of scars
Dry balls of lines like clumps of hair
become the smoking spiral of your falling plane -
your clutch and gasp for final words.
None will come but this:
An...
Apple Macabre
A day of death
Ringed laptops sing
the tale of how and when
they died
Linked cables like
thin hands
a dance of bits
and pieces of information
June 2009
1 post
Poem Draft - 6/3/09
Largely the product of reading too much Baudelaire recently.
From Parfum exotique
“Quand, les deux yeux fermés, en un soir chaud d’automne, Je respire l’odeur de ton sein chaleureux, Je vois se dérouler des rivages heureux
Qu’éblouissent les feux d’un soleil monotone”
Untitled
The street’s soft breath
a gentle kissed carress
from rising chest...
April 2009
1 post
The Signal House - 1st Draft
Later, they will call it a house and its being set back from the road, half hidden among the bracken and rhododendrons, will make those who stumble upon it imagine hidden romances that must have once played themselves out within its walls. But this is where he had lived at a time when romance had died with the suddenness of smashed glass.
Before the train lines were shut down, before the...