Ulysses over the handle bars

Magpieing the colour blue
a seam of sky, in the pocket
of my too worn jeans, where yellow
crabbing days wore through, coins
and threads lost like summer
(I guess) a horse of cloud and air
leapt in a lunge, the trident shape
Poseidon’s scowl in wavelets cast  
against the sleepful gabions
ah, futility, Ulysses thought
the stained glass, of a martyr’s eye
cyclopean in the way it fixed
a furied vein, the bolt-tight
gun-metal jaw, ricochet and
gutter blunt, a crown above the minotaur
with blasphemies and buckled
wheel, half turning seesaw back
in the blind, almost crow-black
breakneck intercession

White feather

Water sheds from each leaf
Something white and feathery, in that susurration
As if the poplar, in bird guise
Was wont to fly away, but shamed
By the brute, demarcating quill
To hold and shiver, await
A falling axe
I think it was a goose, I don’t know why
They once thought a sign suitable for cowardice
A piercing bird, high and far-journeying
With that strange lifelong bonded love
That we wish we had
In the misshape of our victories
Somehow, more important than a war
A feather fallen to the grass
Jewelled with droplets
In the placid, stillness in between
The morning’s chasing rain
An unwanted grace
Gone in the next upswirling breeze

A door to the far side of the world

Sidle through, the door jammed
To that narrowing perspective


Where if you leave or if you stay amounts
To two scraped arcs
Worn into the boards
Never touching but
Almost the same


In a curving universe, the mathematicians say
All parallel lines will eventually meet


But it seems, this exit
Will only ever go one way

Amanuensis in declining summer

We slow, walking into water
Lapping salt, uncertain how to speak
Arched words, in the face
Of an amniotic resistance 
To advancing life

Remember how the Madonna grieved
When her child rose again
Counting days like seagulls
Above a garbage shore
On your holiday towel the stains
Of eggs and leavened bread

Sister what’s-your-name
Can you spare a coin for love?
You have a gravid face
Breaking open sunshine

Just a quiet deception
Something fragrant in your mouth
Crushed sweet seeds, a flower
An azure sea, a breeze below
The moon when summer
Turns, more or less, as the hand
Before your smile
Bent as it repudiates

God does not write home
With platitudes and dreads
Homilies about these dismal
Seaside coloured days
Sandwiches quite stale
How the scavengers are blessed
When they steal and beg
Other frail beatitudes from your disregard 
The deck chairs bellows semaphores 
In candy-coloured cyphers
A breath as light as new-made saints
On convalescent afternoons

A new rough music

Everyone stays home
Catching fishes on TV
Standing solemnly in doorways
Silent, or loudly praising
With voices raised and that tinpot enfilade 
Once saved to condemn


Ringing out  



The birds, in their confusion
After brief reprise
Sing new bolder songs
In the unfamiliar quiet

Castoff people

You scowl, with that wire coat hanger angularity 
At castoff people, cuffs and elbows askew
Hung on racks in rows marked clearance
End of line, stock discontinued, as if 
Evolution had reached a point
Where adaptation were, not now impossible
But moot, it is the phenotype that, so often
Sways the genotype, but now department stores
All look, almost exactly the same


One day, I suppose they will fuse my spine
With robot wires and cyanoacrylate
I will lay, by the crooked looming weight
Of an old ghost gum, who bent to weep
The noon still river, shades all who choose to sleep
But may only ever reach
in reflection


Still, we wait, a long season
To weave new lives and baskets
When with that swelling, whispered voice
The river rushes bloom 

From seed a bird

From the bird seed that I spilled
Grows a bloom with eyes like wheels
That turn the way the sky chases clouds
On spindle legs and crooked wings 
It gathers bottle caps and things
That make a jangle noise
That – though voiceless – breathless sings
The birds all watch with care and chance
As the petals fold and dance
A hunger in their tourmaline misrule
With whetted beaks and silvered claws
In flock and fury pierce the hide
Of the creature that, in obeisance stays
Til leaves rent and eyes sky-blind
Fire yellow from inside
Takes wing and flies into the sun

Quote of the day

I get everything in footnotes –
Second-hand, used up


Meaning depleted
To a dull projectile weight


Damaging in impact
And sinister disreputation


That disguises elaborate architectures
In an image of itself, the ivy swallows
Shivering, in dark green exultation


The way a word evaporates
Spoken too often and too fast 


In that aphasic staccato
Of unceasing railway cars


Crossing points and telegraph lines
In bird-like chitter-chatter


A name murmured on the phone
In  hard magnified breaths


Nevertheless misunderstood 


Irreducible as time-worn stones


With all the bold effacement 
Of that immovable wisdom

Fish-child

I caught a fish as big as a bairn
On my fiercely knotted twine
With a strangely narrow grin
And gold and murrey shingles
On his crooked skin
We named him Wolseley Wollstonecraft 
(Or Little Wol for short)
Mother found a kilt to wrap him in
While he sang of seas like deserts
Shone glamours on the ceiling 
Of the church of Kirkcudbright 
Where we took him to the market
To buy a tansy crown
Arbuthnot offered sixpence
For a half a pound
He’s our bonny skirling lad
A prince of seas renowned
We’ll not be having less than
A mutchkin for a stane 
Mam though in thee I did abide
You’ll not sell my fish-child’s song
We fled all through the lowering town
The crowd an angry gathered throng
And from high the heather and tansy crag
Fell ere far and long
Little Wol away to swim
And I alas the river Dee to drown

A brief survey of certain particulars of the history of the next 100 years

One day all cats will look the same
Cloned and birthed in an immaculate conception
Never realising that Catalan’s constant
Like most scientifically useful irrationalities 
Is only ever a difficult approximation 
Now George Orwell’s copyright has expired
The proliferation of cheaply reproduced copies
Will mean that one day 1984
Through the caterpillar smudges
Of our AI’s astigmatic 
Optical character recognition 
Will become once more 1948; almost none will care
Love will eventually devolve to Hate
Such words will become in sleight and disregard
An episode in the great new patriotic histories
Politicians will declare, from war 
We are making the same cities where you’ve always lived
But now with close and unfamiliar neighbours 
Granting that the square footage is quite small
But the landscapes bleakly generous
A synthetic stone will last two hundred years
Or thereabouts, until rain and moss have left 
All declarations of love and loss and piety effaced
Pi will become 3.1612...recurring 
While we who contemplate perfection
Hoping for a universe in which
The ratio of the diameter
To the circumference of the circle
Always and only ever equals three
Under the spreading chestnut tree
Can, but in our chagrin, only wait