Month: Jul 2020

Stories of theft and return,
of ruin and rebuilding;
inkwash and watercolour,
slow dissolves and slower-still
blue-brackish tidelines, inch by
inch across the paling strand.

GOD: This is all true.
You’d better believe it: read
My Apocolypse.

Motionless beaten a heart
with nobody left to support
or an old man pouring out
water with no ice in it

above all else chaos is
the science of no surprises

For David Winzer

Eyes in winter: through a surface
of vainly-branching imagery
(dead leaves, three trees in effigy)
their vision now returns our gaze.

Without hunger, to our surprise,
it is the future, close at hand
untouchable and with no sound
that hovers, daring us to rise.

Skim over shining marbles, face to face
with your too-perfect partner; stand before
the crystalline reflection, their embrace
as near and necessary as the floor.

Within the muscle-theatre, its walls
white, windowless and unforgiving, peers
the eye of Euclid, from which radiant ball
the serve returns to o such raqueteers.

This is the mirror’s kingdom; nimble planes
here catch and multiply, engage our glance
and goings. Hard the silver, cold the panes
where (double, double) all the senses dance.

Enough: roll back the galleries of glass.
As, frame on frame, the images retire
from this and every stage, what darknesses
collect beyond the sightlines, holding fire.

Born to it: no being
without its hunger
and delight

no music without flesh:
alone he saw this
coming, knew

the sweetness of our pain:
his is the idyll
and the pit

O caro, o bello, o fortunate nastro! Io non tel renderò che con la vita.

That voice inhabits your surprise
like yet another change of dress;
the day your cupboard calls, think twice
when answering its loud Unless.

Unaired, the softer fabrics hide
in chambers where the heart wears gloves;
come nightfall, insects, hundred-eyed
and sightless, hunt appointed loves.

When I was twelve I first heard Mozart play
On my crystal set. It was with fear and
Lust beneath my eiderdown that I lay
Feasting with Don Giovanni and his band.
Growing up, I thought I knew it all
About seduction; roses, the big song,
No messing about with feelings; a small
Goat who got just about everything wrong.

Middle-aged, and older now than he was
On his death-bed, at last I know better.
Zerlina has it right; her song of wars
And healing is the truest love-letter:
Rest in peace, your music has found me out,
Taken my hand, and left me room to doubt.

The range runs from contralto to
a thin annihilating shriek;
the sensibilities, though true,
are too extravagant, too Greek.

Her breast (for holding daggers) heaves,
her falling double-trochee sighs;
no matter nobody believes
in La Stupenda’s sacrifice,

And probably they’d not approve
her horror of maternity,
but stamping audiences love
her high-paid, highly strung high C.

Such histrionics always win
the day, as everybody knows;
this silver-rinsed Feld-Marschellin
will somewhere, somehow, get her rose.

If not, then once the curtains fall
and the applauding pittites stand,
she’ll come in spotlights to the hall
the blood of Tristan on her hands.

Good Lord, preserve us from these raging
raucous flower-surrounded queens
who throw their hearts up on the stage
and drive away in limousines.

Ill-met by thunder in the horny air
he used her cab and didn’t pay the fare

He came and went; no mirror
(he was unreflective) but the light itself,
a childish glare unscattered by the beast conscience

bread into stone
the sweet slow flesh
so quickly drawn
beyond all reach
a public bone
a secret dish

Our future awaits:
a Brexitrumpocalypse
or more of the same

Previously published in the Financial Times, 7.01.2018 (Winner of the New Year Haiku Competition)

A suffering plaster Christ
borne again and again, trussed

and bleeding, dead in the road;
a local saint in her shroud

wearing scars of a lost love;
what would it take to remove

this prison of dust, to fly
this coop, this reliquary?

After Stanley Kubrick

The Steadicam is closing
in on shades, the money men
in their long and shining hall

the rivers of blood, the twin
citadels, the regimens
of slaughter. Above it all

the all-seeing eye, keeping
us in check; we are dreaming
of being, and are in hell.

Beauty: nails piercing tattoos

A complicated thing, shame.
Public face of a passion
as the deed acquires a name
and so dies, in a fashion.
A body’s warmth, and the rush
of blood; that perverse ration
of scarlet that is a blush.

A Control-Alt-Delete
a reboot and restart
a wipe clean of the slate

A return to safe-mode
unbreakable source code
true meaning of the Word

An off-and-on-again
a comeback: anything
to gloss over the stain

Horizons
                look to the line
across trackless whites
of porcelain
                the snow
and its hairline cracks
                a craze
and a craquelure
of the body
                let go

With its fruit and wild roses
how the land falls before the lake
and you lovely swans,
and drunk with kisses
as you dip your heads
into the holy sober water.

Ah, but where shall we turn
come winter for the flowers
and for the sunshine
and shadows of earth?
The walls hang speechless, cold;
wind rattles the weathercocks.

after Friedrich Hölderlin