A Goodnight Poem

Across the lake of Pasithea,
On the last breathe before sleep-
I spy a dark shadow nymph,
to take me to a fettered deep.

Indelible

She told me
in dolce voice
of  jungle folks
that peel bananas
with their toes.

Hypocrisy of the critic

I stand
before this
masterpiece.

Numb and
unimpressed.

Street Crimes

She at sixteen
is a queen of rags and red glass rubies.
Tiaras, tassels and tambourines.
beaded waistcoats and tangerine dreams.

Love is

 

love is not

a gentle ride,

on silver sun burnt sand

City Fox

Are you feral still?

Inside, where the light from savage amber eyes glows on dark nights.

Do not plant your roses in this desiccated desert,

Do not plant your roses in this desiccated desert,
they will die of frost and neglect.
Offer the pulsating womb of your garden
to the busy bumblebee, a worker with heavy knees.

Friday writing practice.

I couldn’t conquer straight.
Axis flipped
from dees to pees
on chalk painted lines.

blood and lime

the years fall
to nothing
earth stripped bare
a century and a half before

Days of greyness.

Misery hugs me,
a blanket of such weight
that it bows
my rounded shoulders,

Black Sunday

Sunshine,
a summer Sunday in Stalingrad.
The streets alive,
grids buzz with the drone
of forty thousand doomed ants.

The busy buzz of bumble bees
among the blooms on florist’s stalls
Strollers walk the promenade
along Tsaritsa’s marble wall.

Night falls fast

Night falls fast
as drizzle drains
the last lethargic light
from an ink and marble sky.

A woeful winter waste
of dry electric heat and light,
returns the ragged vision
of a minor moon.

The dread of dim dank
entrapped evenings
haunts the commute
home.

Losing you

I waste
winter’s waning days,
sorting symbols of passing.

Decks of death cards, dealt-
diamonds down
to hide your face.

harbingers

dove rises
across
the expanse
of grey morning sky.

A woodland king lies dead

A woodland king lies dead
this wicked windy day.
His length and width collapsed
in mounds of fraudulent earth

The Crossing (Instant poetry just add water)

Heading set,
going deep between
Howth and Poolbeg
on a path of silver shillings
tossed from a mist crowned sun.

Twisted Miles

I limped the twisted miles,
whistled down the tracks
broken and decayed.

A passing shower

Billowing black Incandescent
cotton cloud. Building fast
between bursts
of brilliant blue,
Wind, a silent shepherd skulks
and brings them home
in breaking bunches
dashing drifts
of wispy wayward sheep.

Selene sings an orphan to sleep (Child’s story)

The moon pulls
the curtains wide,
no place to hide
on such a night.

It will not rain.

It will not rain.
The beech trees sulk,
standing still, silent and sullen,
oxygen withheld
from parched earth.

Stop signs are for tourists

Lank hair, accent thick
as unwashed socks
and a nose,
a metronome
that sniffed every thirty seconds,

Dad (For the weekend that’s in it)

drone of humming bees
song of guitars and violins
hymns of praise
all I wanted to be
in size seven
stitched shoes

Romeo turned to stone

Wind hews deeply,
etching eons and use
into squinting eyes.
Forehead drawn
into a pattern of
waves and lines.

Geology

lair by lair history exposed
in sand and shale,
clay and loam
and rock.

Ballykea

 

 

Flies buzz flicking, flapping

ears and tickle noses,

washed wet with slowly

curling bovine tongues.

the bones of poetry

a mystic spider
Creeps
across a
page
and weaves
silver and gold

summer pariah

dapples of silver
falling on scorched pavement,
silver coins that dance
in the shimmer
of June heat.

if i die

if i die
in May or June
find a branch
of hawthorn bloom