Short poems on various subjects—some philosophical, some personal, some formal experiments. I’m sharing these freely here; longer pieces are reserved for external publication.
Public Service
She was always there,
Like the milkman, the gas board,
And the NHS,
Remote, but fixed,
Anchoring a parental world we could rely on.
And now she’s gone.
Like the milkman, the gas board,
And the NHS.
September 2022
In memory of Glyn Hughes
He traced the threads that bind us
Showed how comparison divides us;
He squashed fine fruits to feed us
And made pure flame to warm us.
September 2022
Lockdown
To avoid getting Covid
Stay at home and read Ovid
See what Juno’s mate Jove did
(Once he made himself bovid!).
Sunset
Night sweeps over the century
One war gone, another going;
Memory’s sun sets, leaving us
With history’s flickering candles.
July 2017
Indirect Realism
What do I see
When I look at a tree?
Is it the tree
That I see
Or something in me?
If it’s something in me
That I see
When I look at a tree,
What do I see
When I look into me?
Evitation
They say that death and taxes
Are inevitable,
But you can avoid taxes
By not earning,
And you can avoid death
By not living.
Lines for Emily #1
I built myself a prison cell
With bars I could not pass,
And hired a harsh custodian
(I met him in my glass).
I gave myself a punishment
(Profession, if you see)
And tried to love my fellow crooks,
Whom I called family.
Lines for Emily #2
We think time’s arrow ever points
From past to future clear,
And that what’s done is over now
And never more to fear.
But say we’re living in reverse
From grave to cradle bent,
And time which we anticipate
Already has been spent.
Perhaps our life’s unravelling,
Our living being unmade,
Our savings shrinking day by day,
Our bills returned unpaid.
Perhaps we know what’s coming,
The errors we’ll unmake,
The lessons we must still unlearn,
The hearts we shall unbreak,
Forgetting time and time again
A future that is old,
And rediscovering every day
A past that’s been foretold.
January 2015 / January 2026
Lines for Emily #3
The things you think you’ve left behind
Are really out in front,
And things you fear lie ahead
You never will confront.
For people pick up things we’ve lost
And hand them in, you see,
And our past deeds come back to us
Like mislaid property.
The shapes we fear dissolve away
Under Prediction’s glare,
And other forms assume their place
Of which we’re unaware.
A person cannot jump Time’s queue
We each must each wait our turn;
The ticket that you bought for Life
Is also for Return.
12 January 2015
Mind and Body
The motions of the writer’s mind
Are like those of the gut;
We feel at first an urgent call
To be alone and shut
Ourselves away from others’ eyes;
Then safe in solitude
We let our inner turbulence
Make sounds both loud and crude.
We wait there for the apogee
When things align and move;
A swift euphoric letting go,
Catharsis clean and smooth.
Our turmoil now externalized,
We turn and briefly stay,
Admiring what we have produced,
Then flush it all away.
Epistemology naturalized (A reply to Richard Wilbur)
I.
Deny the world, George Berkeley, play the fool;
But introspection’s evolution’s tool.
II.
We peer inside to find what really true,
But nature whispers back “It is not you”.
June 2015
Death of the Suicide Bomber
From my student digs I fell into God’s state,
Where my anger mattered and I lapped up truth.
Alone in the crowd, primed to perfect my life,
I woke to a silent movie of a shrinking earth.
They found my head upon a supermarket roof.
June 2015
Imagining Sisyphus Happy
Oh I’m rollin’ my boulder up the hill,
Up the hill!
In an exercise of radical free will,
Oh free will!
When it rolls down I’ll roll it up again,
Up again!
I love this life, the boulder is my zen!”
It’s my zen!
Turning Point
Just for a second,
Janus looks you in the face
And asks which way you’re going.
31 December 2014
January 2015
A heavy sky rolls over the vacant houses,
Black branches twitch like dead fingers;
The first new year lumbers in.
Tricks of the Mind
The human mind is but a bag of tricks
That tricks us into thinking we exist.
(You may think that that’s circular, but I
Say by pulling on our bootstraps we can fly.)
December 2014
The Higher Ground
It’s hard to stand up on the higher ground;
The wind is fierce, and the footing’s poor,
And though the view’s amazing, few stay long.
October 2014
Statuesque
My curves invite you
To touch, to lay your hand upon me.
You reach, and I accept
The light abrasion of your fingers.
You find me cool,
Though I’m no colder than the air about us.
I draw your warmth to me
And from your fingers take
A moisture, which darkens imperceptibly
My cold inhuman pallor.
I Like to Publish My Article
A found poem from personal correspondence)
I like to publish my article;
If you kindly suggest me any journal
I can produce my efforts.
With deep regards . . .
Thank you sir for your valuable suggestion
That soothes me in every way.
You possess this strength.
With deep regards . . .
Today I’ve submitted my article.
This feedback is the remembrance of your
Invaluable suggestion and guidance.
With deep regards . . .
Two-Handed Sonnet
Co-written with Carl Gombrich in a series of Twitter exchanges in May 2014.
We each supplied a pair of lines, neither knowing what the other was planning to write.
Lines 1-2, 5-6, 9-10, 13-14 are mine, the others are Carl’s.
As internet collaborations go,
To tweet a sonnet is a modest task.
With rhymesters twain the verse should quickly flow.
‘But what will be the subject?’ you may ask.
When Shakespeare wrote, the subject often was
The works themselves, a reflexivity.
But though such navel-gazing draws applause,
It’s not the poet’s true activity.
What is the poet’s purpose now that minds
Are melding, joined in conjoined hyperspace?
Perhaps in verse we find a thread that binds
Us to a past from which we turn our face?
Perhaps, indeed. My friend, our work’s complete:
The past and future linked in sonnet tweet!
North and South
Another sonnet co-written with Carl Gombrich in May 2014
Lines 1-2, 5-6, 9-10, 13-14 are mine, lines 3-4, 7-8, 11-12 Carl’s.
A fractured poem written by two hands,
One author perched at Europe’s southern edge,
The other flanked by trim, suburban hedge
In Northern Europe’s wet and blust’ry lands.
The continent is fractured too, and stands
As one about to jump upon the ledge.
What happened to our recent filial pledge
That now looks tattered, fraying into strands?
Can we repair the break, reweave the threads,
Repaint the picture of a land at ease?
The task is great, momentum has been lost,
Yet we must work, before contagion spreads.
This poem’s such work; see how, in lines like these,
A union’s formed as our two hands have crossed.
Reading Knut Hamsun
The storm ends. From eaves
A last few heavy drops fall
Intermittently.
Late 1980s
