Botticelli's Dream
For Krysia

Your sidelong glance stares
as though caught in some act
unfreezing flowers from stone
where hairstreaks tumble waves
delineating light from dark,
gold from shade.

The poppies of remembrance forget.
Full in their scarlet they cry bold,
petal-cupped around a dark core
the bittersweet of opium
dreaming the linearity
of repose induced - given.

And through this glancing moment
along the line of shoulder - over mine -
missing or failing to catch my eye
your poppy-patterned azure turns
to the scent of spring
sharp in its instant

in your eyes the blue of silk,
the tenderness of mouth,
your glance its mirror
beyond the dazzling
seal of resemblance
smiling, you come.


These Words
This poem won the David's Bookshop annual Poetry Competition on the 4th October 2007

These words are fighting for their chance to fall
on paper where they tangle, twist and melt
upon the tongue. Too soon they start to pall
and lose their power, only to be felt
by those keen ears that follow line by line
the scansion of the iamb and the beat -
that finger-tapping way of marking time,
policing rhythms, counting metric feet
while watching for the makeweight of the drop;
that fatal bump that breaks the fluid flow
of ordered lines, reducing them to slop.
Should these assembled words stand up or blow
to dust on mental winds, or coalesce
into a poem, only you may guess.


The Boilermakers
This poem came third in the David's Bookshop annual Poetry Competition on the 4th October 2007

Framed in the cylinder, the camera's instant
holds them sharp in their moment, proud
in caps and moleskins; men of hot iron
and firebrick, positioned according to rank.

The bosses in suits stand firmly on top,
swaggering supremacy stating its claim
to say: this is our creation,
yet no more proud than those below
whose hands shaped steel and drove red hot
rivets into place, each one
a weight of conscience and care for if
one should blow, men would die.

Their presence is a statement of being
placed in a circle of forged steel,
surrounded by their own work
and positioned in order in the ring
that circles its disinterested orbit
surrounding the spirits of those that lived
to the hammer's ding, dying in silence.

Now not even the steel remembers.


The Forgotten Village

Time wears each building like a shell
where bucolic darkness descends
in a shroud of autumn leaves
and houses crouch against the chill
of sinking air.

Pass by, it is easy.
The one road in has nowhere else to go
as if this is where it gave up trying
and surrendered to the finality of hills
that would have their way -
would brook no further probe
beyond the wanderings of sheep
clustered amid dreams of grass,
tumbled rocks and the derelict mill
bridling the stream that once turned
its broken wheel.

Pass on by. It's nothing
but a place that fell off time's ladder,
a new home for the city dealer
and the freelance networker.

Soon the artists and the country crafts
will move in,
giving fortune's wheel another spin.


Sanguine

So the third little piggy
built his house of bricks, rejoicing
that the wolf could not blow it down.
A happy colour then, secure if dragged
from damp-cold earth, its tint
not seen till freed and fired
to dried blood - an iron stain
of Conte crayon terracotta,
echoing the rusty nail
spears of flowering docks,
red-brown wind-swayed defiance.
Such florid insistence stands bold
to understate
a kind of permanence
promoted to a shout
of I am the colour
of your beginning
and your end, leased only
to the blood-clay
that subsumes all.
Perhaps that is its way.


This message flies

a paper plane
& as it glides so do
my thoughts as I
wonder how it will be read
or if the words cohere
to stay or lose
themselves in the morass
that is the mind's jumble -
robbed of meaning and power
to sink unheard
in an uncharted
sea

were they to rise
they might soar
& sparkle
across a lucid ocean
to shine their merit
alone
to the world
but then

perhaps not


The Fish Dock
For Tamar Yoseloff

It looked like Cannery Row as seen
by Canaletto. A hard past warmed
to romantic hues, tinting a time
that might have been in the boat-bobbing
reeking dead water dock
where fish traps waited, baited
and ready, their necks and shoulders
nodding like tethered bathers,
all lifelines taut
against the drift.

Today it is gone.
The harbour is now a marina,
the market a wine bar
and the steam plant
a high price chandlery.
The boatmen have departed,
displaced by the fortunes of a world
that pressed too close,
muscled from their moorings
by time's steady crawl,
the call that one day came.


Jazz Riff 2

Cool blown flies out

ready as 1 - 2 - 3 - send

to press that key-surge from within

easy slow to speed again

sounding that rap-rapid finger flip

tumble sequence words as music

like new coin's fresh glitter

pocket jingles in time

of tink-tap notes produced

to fly and die

in the space of one breath

and intake draws the line between

here and a heartbeat's dub that holds

all before to that to come

as sky-swoop swings up

soaring to plucked bass

reed vibrating metal tube

hints promises of sex

seduction power of music comes

over sense and yes

it feels good as it feels for now

and now is all there is

before wind-down descends

to pedal

and coda