You are fast and clever
I old and slow, I shiver
The birds sing again
Benji will be chasing
Barking as you sing
Ducks on the river
You are fast and clever You are fast and clever
I old and slow, I shiver The birds sing again Benji will be chasing Barking as you sing Ducks on the river
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Father Christmas Your presents year to year From paradise somewhere Were express guarantees against the shadow. And Now? Oh now, no. "Facts, Watson, facts. He died you know." Gullable poor demented you Bright lights dimmed you The gifts were unreal, for the show. Joy died years and yonks ago And returned to clouds. The face you saw the lines you read Was masks and morbid masquerades The way men see a faded star-after-dying The way men greet the killer in ten who's lying The way men hear the fortune hunters' "marry me I love you" He was like the spy who "talked like one of us" while spying. There spoke echo and deadly show A creeping miming thing Mirroring old ways and Elysium Or maybe something worse. "Leaving a diminished child." Now? Suffer, suffer, suffer But love the utter act Echo, mirror, moonshine Reflect the true and real However the herald cruel, Clownish, smirking, cracked The vision remains my own And draws still and will Recall me dying And then will I see Again you the present, Again you and yes yes I mean A silly-billy evergreen Christmas tree. I dearly know you You are hardly more than the white sail A trick of the sun catching the waves I know a hopeful of words Screened to me and a photograph a shape Are you there? do you be? I mean You are my hope The religious rave I seek I would I had seen The all of you I have Wind and sail What are they crying-white or black? The legend tells of wounded love On a cliff in former Cornwall Is love coming back? Or is dying my track? Will you keep? Or will you turn to "oh no!" "Look what the winds blow!" A promise do you sleep For real or are a trick sleep a turn A treat or "learn!" Forgive me if you hear From laying such Adult flotsam on the shore Of your endearment Of your begun experience A full need must spill Itself not spoil a salt wet Bringing seacup And the sailors crying sail Well Wishing
For Philip Larkin So much is true Who writes in poetry Writes in love you Said many anyway I not, wish I were, well I am the age you were When you showed the quacks up By croaking early promised Complete, or sure, if slow, recovery Time healing, like a doctor's Talked through hat, it hurts A girl who wasn't The boy's head on my shoulder Shan't let them peer at my oesophagus, Another useful tip, or heart, Senility or optimal debility To think you wrote in favour of the Flaubert Parrot shit Depresses me a bit But I live in hope if not in love Poets do and must Be like you I do Live to receive such a letter too You know the one Signed by an entire class Of Welsh schoolgirls Admiring and flirting And fun. Holding on for more years
I would have heard You speak about exits You compassionate Irish English thing you Agatha Christie of the heart But you dissolved Into The undiscovered country Years long before me and before that your Brain folded Under the inveterate disease which you could have called "Bruno hollowed out within" In a novel called "Diminishing echoes". If I try a little harder I hear But faint and fainter, Remember me Giovinezza Springtime in the valleys! They dressed very gravely true Doctrine dogma canon We decide for you Props, curtains inky no Quartering, instrumental questioning Padded rooms and cellar breath Volpine subterfuge But yet but yet but yet Hailing the wind the wolf relaying Ecstatic hope And then again We are Young again! We are Strong again! We are Green again! Giovinezza giovinezza. Primavera di bellezza.. Heard like and Seen like and Felt like this Duty freed of lusting pain The sting drawn We might crave unlearned like again Primal love reborn renewed robust and strong Homeland dizzy with youth's martial song. Cage aux Folles In the cages of single women captive in cities
The aroma of sterility lingers in the air After they leave for offices in banks and stores And I, coffee in hand, stare through the glass onto a world of Cages: London, Paris, Hamburg or Turin And turn the pages of my life's lusting Back to an unmade bed. We are urban nomads, Spengler said We are not triumphant here and never shall be Till the green blade bursts the asphalt's crust And the ceilings crash in the temples built by Pharisees To welcome the winning sky turned virgin blue And sea-winds whistle through conniving office-rooms Where once the circulation of the air was thought-controlled And bare blond children, bald and bold as acorns Thrive in the fields of ever-green grass Thrust their feet through the dust of tumbled temple walls And mock the mortgaged past. First published in Ambit Issue 167, 2002 Gloria Mundi Carrying Friday's spear
A grim fool returning Not of this world say My friend no man spoke of him For fear of... Ssh! You know who..! Hush not here Der Feind hört mit Es gibt nur das harte Entweder/Oder Born again in barn again to save Obscure-the power of his eyes Fly-blown villages in Autumn Forced marches through a night Father! Father! look to the left, look to the right They have dared arrest... East and West lit up Delirious thunder Then on horseback Promising an Empire The second coming They call him the Avatar These spinning crowds Crying hurrah halluliah and Sieg again yes again yes To the half-disdaindful prophet and promiser of paradise Or reed in the wind I don't know The dramatist my friend With a sword as he promised Then again the world falls silent On doubtful graves On disturbed ground He was a man, take him all in all A giant, a hammer, burning fire Spoken in whispers Persecution in his name You were always on my mind And the catacombs of minds Are active again Gathering the mad minding eye Lights and acolytes torches and feasts for the eye And busy again dreaming are the faithful I mean the women I mean the epileptics I mean the disposssed I mean the green, the gravid And the bad and good revenging law First published in Ambit 167, 2002 Alba Her thighs were spilt silk
Her eyes were the blue of the skies Of her Island home Who will take her now? Her mind is mad as sparrows She can make no more When one of the Southern host Pour in: shadow of pitch Over slipping silk Darknening her skies Cracking the eggshell harvest Splitting the white husk To unveil a modern clay For modern potters in irreligious play. All bodies rot, "she must change, must!" Wither away, she will Be no more than the dust Over fields of blood crust Stumps brown with rust A small girl lost and running. |
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