It's Twenty Years Since I Dallied with Angus

my Aunty Morgan visits
on her way from her to there
salacious elocution
and a Paddington-type stare

she eats a home-made pastry
with her fingers held just so
I offer rancid butter
but her lips are pursed with 'no'

a single spoon of sugar
serves to sweeten her Darjeeling
but I only wish I had the chance
to sweeten her ill-feeling

she's almost ninety now, she says,
and not long for this earth
if I had Charon's number
I'd be booking her a berth

"Remember Angus Tavish?"
she said. "He wants a bride.
He would have married you and left
a fortune when he died."

at five o'clock she's homeward
and I stoop to kiss her ring
she never will forgive me
for that single Highland fling

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

Blood Eagles of Ancient Days

Blood Eagles of Ancient Days

I see the potential of red –
red poppies are seedlings only an inch high;
the grey skies might be red at sunset, if the clouds shift
and my black lungs might be red if I last
enough for them to shake off twenty years of tar.

I almost bought an apple tree today
a red apple – Braeburn or Gala, I forget –
but last year we failed to use
the apples on the tree we have.
I put it back, trading my dreams for food;
the future for the here and now.

On my desk is a pot of cherry hair dye.
Dare I?
Or should I wait until I am old
and become a woman of scarlet
histories?

prompt: red

Spring Garden, with Clockwork Heads.

In the lull of noise
after the perpetual cadence
of an April shower,
she looks backwards
to see the impossible.
Wicked specimens
of crystalline lunacy
kept in piggybanks
and seeded with potatoes
in the vegetable patch.
Where Hardscrabble the cat
digs through leaves and discarded pages
of a literary magazine
to unearth nascent prototypes
of clockwork people
with crystal skulls
and a streak of Indiana
leaking from their veins.

prompt here

What was Once, Isn't

Inside the prison
of this flesh and blood
and beating heart;

inside the coiled sinew
and bone scraping bone
and metal plates;

inside the cracking joints
and the graying hair
and the wanting to be better

is the part of me
that wants to be
but in reality

is as rusty
as an Anderson shelter.

prompt here

A Time for Talking

What obscurities have brought you knocking at my door?
The afternoon is getting on – a quarter after four
is almost late and yet the is some time to make the tea;
is that why you came like a footpad after me?

Earl Grey today, I think, although the Assam is quite fine
The Xiaguan in its one pound block is better after wine
I’m fonder of the Xizihao though I hesitate to say
it isn’t worth the money when the mottled leaves are grey.

Set the tetsubin on the grate while I prepare the leaves
the bergamot is bracing in the taste buds. When it weaves
its perfumed magic in the nasal cavities
I feel I should atone for all my odd proclivities.

I’ve pestled and I’ve mortared ‘til the leaves are almost dust
now the water’s boiling you must pour it on the must
we’ll give it several minutes while we set out cups of china
Perhaps a slice of Battenberg? I think there’s nothing finer.

Now let us take this half an hour and settle with our brew --
the sun is almost setting and there’s still a lot to do.
I’d like the opportunity to talk of your Jehovah
but my demon’s come as well, would you kindly just budge over?

prompt here

Aural Landscape

In the distance I could hear the traffic
on the Chatsworth Road – the thunder of trucks
and the beep-beep-beep of pedestrian ducks
using the crossing. It was pathetic
how pleased I was to find a calming spot
amidst the houses where for an hour
there were no sounds of traffic to be heard
just the gentle calling of an unknown bird
from the branches of a tree in flower.
An apple, I believe, from some garden
long forgotten when a house pulled down
was left to nature to reclaim a frown
of mother earth just for a year. The hardened
concrete softened by the sun and rain;
allowed to fill with buddleia again.

prompt here

Hireath

It seems too long, my childhood friend,
since you and I stole apples from the overhanging tree
and laughing, made our way along the bend
of crunching towpath to our den – “you and me
against the world,” you always said
though time and social mores took us far
from Callow Hill and saw instead
my first degree in art and your new car
that took you fast through life and love
and mortgages, divorce and kids
and finally an early grave : above
all a settlement that God forbids.
I mourned, but not for you but for
the Hiraeth locked behind a childhood core.

Womanhood

A ritual once lost to time
a celebrated span
a rite of passage for a girl
when she becomes woman.

Forget the modern shame
of menstruation blood
it’s men that cannot stand the birth
of modern womanhood.

No more the furtive purchases
of panty liners, winged
declare it to the rafters
“I have my menses,” sing!

Church Colours

White for the virgins,

cream for divorce;

yellow for the young-at-heart,

red for the whores.

St Mary of Pity’s

catered for all

from High Church and choir

to the lowliest thrall.

From Marital Sanctus

to bound for a day;

“Weddings not Judgement”

the New Catholic Way.

As a Child

I once thought that to be complete then I would be a dancer
a-tramping on a moonlit stage on ballet-points I’d be
aspiring to the dancing lead, like the Russian girls I see,
I’d be content with chorus line in ballet and in opera.
On empty stages I would dance , long after curtain call
and after patrons had gone home to whisky and to wives
that loved their husbands and were blind to double lives
and mistresses in ballet shoes that had no love at all.
Instead I was an artist with a crimson loaded brush
with which to mar a field of Prussian blue. Oils and water-
colours vied for my attention too, though I oughta’
pay my homage to the masters of the gilded blush.
Many years have passed and I write novels for a living
though I never shall forget that dreams forgotten are forgiving.

prompt

Centaur

Translucent hooves
echo through birch and elder
a flash of horse tail
glimpsed through a hollow fog.
Oak leaves brushed aside
in a tincture of shadows
and fabricated memories
of what might have been.

Weathered Footings

When I am gone into those distant lands
will you ever think of me and smile
at the memory of our walking hand-
in-hand into the river? All the while
the suffering we did; the hardships and
the times (though few) of plenty left behind
like slippers on a summer day when bands
of light and dark lie on the grass. But mind
you look and take a careful step or two
into the future we had planned so long
ago when two became a clan and you
were working to a vision; nay, a song
of love in leather. Now that I am gone
who else will be your rock; your number one?

Refresher

I click ‘refresh’ one more time
to see if someone has posted
on my 300 blog daily RSS
and then again on livejournal.
In the e-mail reader
the Outlook is bleak –
just a few dozen surveys
I’ve put off for a few days.
Ten o’clock.
Time to take the dogs
through the fields, the cemetery, the road home
then into the greenhouse
to prick out seedlings,
and check the vegetables
for slug damage;
the seeds for germination.
Back indoors for
laundry, washing up, tea
(refresh, refresh)
and write a demon’s blog, a poem, a Laverstone Tale.
Oh! Is it lunchtime?
I’ll write more of the novel
afterwards.
If I have time.

Conjectured thoughts of a non-mechanic

If I was a car
I’d be a Morris Minor Traveller
the kind with wooden panels
and a door knob for an indicator.
I’d be the kind of car
that you’d be proud of
if someone said how lovely it was
but otherwise you’d keep
under a tarp in the garage.
There would be rust on my sills,
one wonky wheel that no-one could fix
(you can’t get the parts)
dry rot in the wooden struts
and the speedo
would never get past forty-five
without the gasket blowing.
But once in a while
you’d give it a polish
and call it good.

When Number Thirty-Two was Empty

They were jubilant
when the Greens moved,
leaving the Avenue to fester
in the drama of caravans on the street
and new babies visiting Grandma.
There was an acute sense of loss
to the few who had enjoyed
the comings and goings of the lesbian hotel;
the pool of occupants
expanding and contracting,
but always with a core
of leather clad women
who laughed and held parties
and wrote books and poems and sang in the garden
and impugned the prejudices
of the knock-knock-knockers
like a singularity
drawing everything of interest
to the brass plate
of their wooden door.
The Avenue felt empty
without the smiling
of the open house
and the shuttles and whorls
of the women who lived there.

Comfrey

Last year the field
was mown just after
the comfrey flowered.
No seeds were made
and none collected.
This year the patch
is awash with shoots
and I dig a few
and pot them up.

This year
the comfrey will flower and seed
in my garden.

The Hollow Climbing Tree

I remember when my mother died

and I, an honest Catholic, cried

and, running barefoot along the path

that followed the canal , her laugh

was something that called out to me

though blind with impotent rage I see

with benefit of age, the memory

that haunts me still is of the tree

where I played as a child safe from harm

to come home at night to loving arms

that I could never touch again.

My tears hidden in the rain.

Seven with Steven

No more
the bitter taste
of sour grapes and hardened cheese
of “What a waste,”
and “How you please.”

You kept the car,
you kept the house,
you kept the dogs, the art, the friends
I left a mouse
without amends.

And though I miss
the house and hounds
the greenhouse where I spent the hours
I have no grounds
for what was ‘ours’.

No more
the salted cries
of double lives, of truth and lies -
just past regrets
and old goodbyes.

The Problem with Cafés

The Problem with cafés is
they cater to the masses
I want to use a china cup
not stoneware or pint glasses.
When I ask for Breakfast Blend
I don’t expect Typhoo
but one a little more refined:
the Twinings box will do.
Let me choose from Lady Grey,
Darjeeling, Assam, chai;
and serve it in a china pot
with a sliver of a pie.