Morning Mist

Morning mist
slips gentle as a lover
through Lebanese cedars.
I stroll past swings and roundabouts,
sullen in the growing light,
and remember the sky
rotating.

Thoughts upon an Overgrown Grave on a Hillside

If it was left to me to tend a grave

laid within some lonely cemetery

where I, perhaps, walked with my dogs and gave

passing thought to those who died before me;

I would not decorate the weathered stone

with plastic bowls nor acrylic flowers

but instead, secure that I could dig down

to several feet and pass the hours

by constructing dreams of gardens once held

to be so quaint -- an Englishman’s delight

but not of mighty trees that rip and meld

the ancient stone with earth and block the light

of Heaven from your shady six-foot plot

but plant instead violas, ere you rot.

Before the Soldiers Came

Do you remember the city
when it was young?
When factories claimed the suburbs
and the crows wore gasmasks;
grubbing in the trees
for the delicate prize
of a blackbird’s egg
or a piece of road kill.

I remember soot and coal
and father’s rifle on the hearth
and stealing bullets
to lay on the train tracks.
And Robbie Atkinson
coughing up blood
when we left him by the canal.

None so Blind

She had a vulpine set to her features
and a debonair posture as she talked
to the guests. “Are we not all beautiful creatures?”
she enquired as a newcomer walked
to the bar and opened a bottle of gin,
trampling the host’s tourniquet dreams with a twist
of lemon and a discursive argument laid, chin
uppermost, on the parquet floor. Alas, he missed
excising the saturnine smile by a fraction
of a constipated colloquy. “No
problem,” he said. “I’ll schedule a faction
of irritable surgeons to cut and sew
the doldrums in your mother’s soul.” The look
she gave him, priceless; his gift to her: a book.

A Bit of fun

I've not even finished writing it yet!

Lucifer’s Witness

I answered the door before she knocked –
a business suit in blue and grey;
a gay pink scarf carefully selected
to portray friendliness
and her friend,
who nodded and smiled.
I accepted a Watchtower
and a book on the life of David
and asked about Lucifer,
whereupon her friend shook her head
and she said.:
“It’s too late for that.”

the transformation of paradise

in the transformation of paradise,
everything changes.
From the Byzantium splendour of the seven vigils
comes a mosaic
of consumerist eternity.
Sages and singing masters
write of molecular desire
and the penultimate artifice
of the ceaseless spiritual.

''Eternal Transition'
Watercolour and Pencil
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

Cold Tea

He wished for peace
away from his wife’s soap operas,
the neighbourhood gossip,
the constant babysitting for children
who just wanted peace themselves.

He had his greenhouse
and his potting shed
full of cans of kerosene
and petrol for the mower he’d had forty years
and the tools he rubbed with an oily rag
on Sunday afternoons
as he listened to the radio four play.

They found him at six
when he didn’t come in
for his ham sandwich and jam tart.
He was sitting on his compost heap.
Alone with yesterday’s grass clippings
and the warm embrace of nettles.

''Nettle'
Watercolour and Pencil
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

Jasfoup

Demon of terror
has to have a break sometimes:
A pot of Earl Grey

''Jasfoup'
Watercolour and Pencil
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

A Mouthful of Tentacles

Part lobster he stares
from the edge of the Styx.
"What did I do?" he would ask
but for a mouthful
of tentacles

''A Mouthful of Tentacles'
Watercolour and Pencil
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

Senryu

Fortune Teller’s stall -
past and future intertwine
in falling silver

''The Red Door'
Watercolour and Pencil
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

Carol Ann Duffy made me Cry

Carol Ann Duffy made me cry, I swear
she did! (although I doubt she cared
to invoke such pity tears with just a tale
of allotments kept by married men.)
And then, as if such unprovoked assault
was not enough she lifted up my chin
and kissed away the salty brew. It’s true
enough I say to you “What is this stuff
she writes with such finesse? Can I address
these mundane thoughts with her aplomb?
A bomb, I think, would do a better job
with twenty years of lettered scraps
of parchment from the poet’s maps
of language sought and metaphor.
I bore.

''Carol Ann Duffy'
Watercolour and Pencil
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

Moonlit Wonderings

Midnight, the television dies.
I stand at the dark window
about to close velvet curtains
against the coming of the dawn.

Above the sickly sodium
vapour yellow pools of streetlight
the waxing moon hangs gibbous still;
a rotting mushroom in dirty skies.

On the lawn, where grass is etched
in jagged silver jottings
an urban fox is startled
by the clatter of a cat flap.

My old Jack Russell bumbles out
half blind, half deaf, but catches scent:
the musky odour of the wild
and her tail lifts – remembered joy.

The fox moves on , ignoring her
call of urban desire. She sniffs
where her would-be paramour sat
but he left no gift. She squats, pees.

I watch the fox as he dances
past dustbins and take-out trays
and yip-yip-yips through summer lawns
and melancholy moonlit wonderings.

'Urban Fox'
Watercolour
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

operations manual

I need no operations manual

to find the starter coil

and begin my life afresh.

What I need is the drive shaft

and the engine oil

and the motivational tape

that unwinds inside the player.

I need a roof rack

to shove the baggage I always carry

and a bungee cord

to tie down the boot.

And finally I need a puncture or two

to encourage me to stay.

'The Old Morris Minor'
Watercolour
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

God’s Lore

I remembered what the angel said
and wrote it down,
my eyes upon Heaven.
But when I looked
at the words of prophesy
it was a mass of scribbles
in an unknown tongue.

But made a nice piece of art.

'The Language of Angels'
Watercolour
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

Sing a Song of Piracy

“Sing a song of sixpence,” the nursery rhyme began
the daily rate of Blackbeard’s crew was paid it to a man
“A pocketful of rye” implied a daily whiskey tot
and ‘Four and twenty blackbirds” was the pirate trap they got.
When they lured a ship too close the trap was sprung with shouts -
a dainty dish for Blackbeard the king of pirate boats.

Blackbeard paid wages to his crew, not just the spoils
the image of a counting house was filled with gold and oils.
The Queen, his ship, in harbour, taking on provisions.
The maid implied a target ship, selected by revision
the clothes its sails put to the wind, to take it out to sea
the garden of the Caribbean, where Blackbeard would be.

'Blackbird the Pirate'
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

After the Combines, After the Flames

The chapel fell into ruin
when new combine harvesters
did away with the need for workers.
Ivy climbs through the roof
and only the wind rings the bell
to call the dead to mass.

The village sank into the peat;
moss growing where once
womenfolk shared gossip
over the daily chores.
Dandelion and comfrey flower
where children played in the dirt
crying “Mama! Mama!”
over some imagined injustice.

Crabgrass flourishes over cobbles.
No more songs cheer the air
amidst the stink of sweat and barley
and good, honest toil.

But the chapel is for sale .
Forty thousand euros
for space to park a four-by-four.

'Old Gate Lodge, Clonlara, Co Clare'
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

The Sediment of Willful Sublimation

I excrete prose upon
defenceless students;
and post masticated poems
onto online notice boards
where they drip-drip-drip down the page
leaving slug-trail glazes.

In the morning I guard the jetty
where onomatopoeias crash against a shore
riddled with the bullet holes
of underachieving metaphor;
where adjectives carve a niche among the rocks
and slither into old tombs
from which they refuse to be drawn
into the scorching mosaic
of literary accomplishment.

'Glendalough'
3 ½" x 2 ½"
$25

The Legacy of Old Tom

It's official name
was Hathersedge number five,
but when they pulled his body
from the rich dark, loam
on a wet October morning,
watched by crows and the tufts
of last year’s barley
missed at the side of the field,
they called it Tom’s field.

He played here as a child,
fished in the brook
and caught grasshoppers
in the meadow of the field edge..
As a young man
he layered the hedges;
cut down the old willow
with the tractor-tyre swing
when a February storm
took off its crown.

When he inherited the farm
he left it fallow for a year
and refused to sell it
even at twice the value.
When he got married
they pitched the marquee
at the edge of the brook
and planted new willow trees.

The nursing home was stale
and grey as the old clay pipes
he used to dig up in the field.
he died looking to the skies
holding a photograph
of his mother
in Hathersedge number five.

Watercolour and ink
3 1/2 x 2 1/2
$25

New Battles, Old Scars

She bears battle wounds;
scars of infinite sadness
and amputated love.

What an unkind marriage didn’t do
a protracted divorce did.
Debt and threats invade her life.

Still she remains steadfast
Juno in the praetorium
pleading for her children.

Watercolour and ink
3 1/2 x 2 1/2
$25