Celestial Mechanics

For Evie, when she holds my hand. Arriving, we expand from the car. And I wait while you collect your stuff, the unfathomable bits of personified fluff that you have trapped in your orbit:  Soft toys; knitted ropes; lipper; crumpled notes.  The accretion disk of your formation. I, your natural…

Let Me See One Last Thing

For Evie When you see what I have seen And see it better When you love what I love, and better, Then let my hand slip from yours Do not grasp And let me fall behind you on the strand And pass Let me see one last thing you have…

Antenatal Classes

[a nativity poem in three trimesters] The First Trimester Miriam’s chromosome in courting spirals Embraces another, such an other — an unfathomable Y. All the junk, viral, evolutionary, specific, sanctified, elected, DNA of humanity in his threadbare pockets. An utterly adopted son. A why of Adam and of Miriam’s…

Elegy to a Beard

The Highwayman lies severed, cut down in the way, shorn from his mount. And the hand that did it rises trembling. And the eyes rise trembling to behold it To meet their accuser’s eyes wide. And trembling. It was a rough deed, done with razorrrs Watched with glass, that…

Thoughts of a Tree in Autumn.

1. Deliberation. With less vigour comes deliberation. Those things done, are hard done. Sitting comes to do. Rooted. Even the dust swirls more slowly in the quiet. Golden in tangibility, in this little room of light with walls and dimensions that has taken space within my room. At my fingers’…

New like New.

For Easter Sunday New, like the second coming To faith of an old man In the love of the plain Faced. Like their autumnal child. Unplanned. New, like a child's crowning, labour's pain. Push, He is coming, Push! As good as like that new.…

For God's Elect in Shopping Malls.

For those who would not choose to grow old before the Son of Man comes. A woman with eyes painted on her boobs. Another reading ‘dodgy’, another inscrutable. Unfailingly matched to personal genre. Thematised Personalities of the latter Capitalism. World writ on the chests of post-Christmas shoppers. On their post-Christmas…

Chasing after the Wind

Chasing after the Wind In the armpit of a tree between striking chords of grass everything chasing nothing everybody chasing breaking wind to interrupt the symphony of airconditioners I think he left a note somewhere Waiting on the obverse of a kite.…