This is a space for airing and sharing my poetry in two main forms - [edited] are the ones that are closest to a finished state and [notebook] are ones that are in the process of forming. All comments and feedback are welcome!
My sap simmers, leaves for fingers
Furl and unfurl, on the grass of my keyboard.
Milkless tea, Japanese; in delicate bitterness
I wait for the lights to say ‘go’.
My eyes focused, unfocused, focused
Seek out the emergency signs,
The routes out of here
Waiting for you is like
Waiting for paint to dry:
I am child told ‘Don’t Touch!’
All finger itch to be inked in your forbidden colours.
On the canvas of you, I practice this art of love
Sketch conversations, responses pencilled in fine lines
Light as a lovers touch.
You shiver me into an expressionism of want.
I falter. Friend.
Can we blur into a different definition
Or is my hope condemned
Locked in these safe, blank, single sheets?
And you
Framed in another country
It was spring ‘77
I should’ve been in heaven,
Everything in nature was new
But this is country and western
So even the best of them
Find me out here on my knees.
I got four hungry children
And I done cropped me to build them
With my mountain man out in the field.
He’s got a crop that’s a coming
And that keeps him running
But I gotta have me fulfilled.
So I’m in a bar in Toledo
With a man that I don’t know
Just drinking and cussing away
I wonder if this is liberation
That the women of this nation
Have been calling out for, for so long?
With the power of a high thigh
An arched back and a bosom sigh
My transient beauty truck stopped
There was violence in my love-makin’:
In truth I was shaking
I didn’t know yet what there was
Cos I’m hungry for laughter
And here ever after
I’m after whatever another life brings
Yes I’m hungry for laughter
And here ever after
I’m after whatever another life brings.
(inspired by Kenny Rogers number one hit ‘Lucille’ 17/06/77)
She is a day-tripper.
A rainbow kind of girl
sketched in gel pen
ink that smells like strawberry souffle
and shimmers when you tilt the page.
She is a one-way ticket.
Out of the shop where
she buys herself blue dresses
two sizes too large
so the hem trails behind her like a princess or a queen.
She took him half the way there.
Left him to find his own way back
from a muddy farm road in the middle of Kent,
and felt only like blue shifting
into indigo and violet and back to red.
They lived, loving
Easy like the first day
Of summer holidays.
The rippled promise
Of a numberless season.
She danced. Extravagance.
He clapped out the beat
By the record player
Foot tapping. Lips stained
Blue red: Royal blood.
They lived, loving.
Shouting their complaints
To shift the wax that builds
Quotidian. Burning through
To an instant coffee shared.
Silken Sundays, burbled Archers,
Soothing steam of the smoothing iron.
She at the stove, stirring the gravy;
He, slipping his arm around her waist,
Kissed her neck
Sun breasts exhaled sky,
Dark falls back; slipped stars explode
New budded blossoms.
Serenaded by you, my forgotten self
Thrills; you minister tunes once more.
This, after a year on pause.
A scratched autumn. Songs from fields
Ill-fitted the bauble and sparkle. January echoed
Hollowed home. Sold. Nisi. Absolute.
Marching out of the battery job,
The welcomed space between tracks
Shuffled into hospital waiting rooms.
All tested. Only Mum
Diagnosed. Then
The unsequelled breath in July.
But now, you break into me. A smile from one
Secretly loved. I awake, rested;
Dance dawn into a shower of sound.
Openzone heart
Roams unbidden, hidden
Within this portable shell/
Scanning radio frequencies
Sensing connections
Divining signal strength/
Hotspot heart
High mpbs for downloads
Device auto enabled; no esc/
We sit in separate rooms
Invisible air crackles
A white noise/
My dark heart finds comfort
in the semi-shut down of
Sleep
There’s this piece of scragland I’ve been awarded
From which I’ve been hiding:
I want to grow my own poems.
I dream in a bed of seeded potato words
That cluster majestically in the wormy dark
And when cooked, taste fresh, earthy.
This land is new, purveyed rather than allotted.
We are guerrilla in our gardening – at least my neighbours are –
Their plots reveal a succession of delicious views;
Sheila holds five canes of stanzas – an epic display
And just last week Elaine & Tony introduced chickens
Daily laying whole chapters of story.
But my mind is a tangle of grasses and bramble;
A pot of lavender and some heathers huddle
At the kitchen door, awaiting transplantation.
I’d like to espalier an apple to fruit me to the core of ideas -
Crunching through the skin of thought to its very flesh,
Sweet and white, like the page.
The air above shatters into a hundred full stops
Then reforms, an arrowhead in the sky
Chittering – south, south, south. I
Action. First, clearance and double digging.
Then, thin seedling tea, gulped greedily
For fat juicy growth.
I sow small quantities, 1cm deep
Every two weeks for a steady supply of feedback.
As winter approaches, I’m told
I should simply turn the earth,
The frost will break it up.
