Splinters

The tindered voices crackled in tentative sparks,
then kindled into smoke and ignition.
They soon were ablaze, infectiously feeding the
four-walled hollow with mirth –
raucous and buoyant.
The room was afloat as comedy-jazz took
hold of the senses, running through ears like a
Munro breeze. Sonorous air it felt like.

Yet against this scene he cut an etched silence:
carved in chalk, white shirt,
the blank epicentre of the flapping flame,
a pale stitching in this quilted vibrancy,
his heart burnt to charcoal and dust –
ground to splinter,
his eyes staring out from phoenix ash.

There was, I thought, a winter’s journey
playing there: homeless-wandering.
His mist-swum face and Heine’s ghost,
for linden tree and blossom
borne along the cinder path.

A single seat lay vacant at his side
as minutes before she had pulled the cord,
the laughter too ringing, the music too careless;
the width of her waist had receded to haze.
And out in the air her sockets bent under
the encumbrance of drowning eyes.
Two hearts asunder like a ship’s
splintered hide.
Sun-sweltered love adrift now in
vapour; the dregs of salt water
stinging their guts,
and two stricken bodies,
wrenched in twain,
left – oceanless – to drown in themselves.

And all the while – face set, frame rigid –
he was drenched in Jazz and laughter,
and the echoes dissolved
and swam to her.

Warmth

Warmth

The shoes are back in their box now.

The best I ever had.

I lifted them off the shelf, and felt them.
Brand new, they shone from within,
And though they pinched at first, each was
The perfect fit (soft like Christmas socks…)
The best I ever knew.

We met when it was cold outside
And we had to run to stay warm;
Fingers linked tentative and rushed –
All at once.

In the early nights I watched her melt – slow –
Into darkness,
Then the timeless hours when she whispered me her dreams
And her passion punctured me like God.

But the fit wasn’t right – not then, not yet –
And it ended in cold, as the chill stole our breath
In night plumes and swirls;
The embers were doused and our newness was stolen.

(How to sum up the word of words?
‘Warmth’ I think does it some justice.
The cold gnaws, claims all,
Lays anchor to living.)

And I lay in frost those next three months,
Watching her float, nestle, soar on the spew;
The frazzled memories clogging my head like
Frayed rolls of cassette film, jarring the blood flow.

Three months I preserved her intact
Till the taste of exotic burst in on new lips.
I thought I’d let her go. I was so sure…
But, against the tide, we fell.

Again, it was cold till we made our own heat
In a moment dazzling and blessed.
And love steamed up our eyes
Like condensation screening us from the world…

There was that rush of childhood, then.
Trying for size, pacing back and forth for as long as you dared,
Glorifying in the newness, and glint, and shine.
Of course they scuffed, they wore away
So gradually you almost couldn’t tell.

The shoes are back in their box.

The best I ever had.

Dorothy Bohm

Dorothy Bohm


We walked from frame to frame,
each a life frozen in time -
a novel to be poured over.
The photograph fulfils
my deep need to stop things
from disappearing.
How apt the statement reads to us,
the hour closing in.

Dorothy Bohm, you enthralled her.
I wish you could watch how rapture grew
on her face with each story she read:
tales your eye may have cunningly spun
out of ripped advertisement hoardings
or in a puddle’s reflection.
These novellas that all lay breathing amongst us,
waiting to be found, to be told.

The fourteen-year-old Jewish girl from East Prussia,
arriving in England in tow with her father’s parting gift -
his Leica camera.
Emerging in Manchester where she began capturing the world:
the war time baby clutching the necklace around her mother’s neck,
the pendant that to her could stave off fire and hunger.

We followed the years around the room
like the turning of the earth,
and smelt the sands of Cairo, and dipped
our toes in the ripples of the Seine,
nursed fragile trees in Andalucia, and I tripped
on a step in Spoleto which made you laugh.

And the world was ours, and we were the world,
and we wanted suddenly to be frozen in love
forever, in the back cafes of Venice, or else
captured in a Provençal garden, or
sitting clutching our knees by a fountain in Spain.
Somewhere in the frozen colours and rushing stills
this fractured world seemed whole,
and I loved you more than I could say.

We later stood in the foyer, and, for
a moment I was lost from myself. There
was some clicking and I turned. You looked wide
eyed, slightly short of breath as a lady
approached you. She was old, eighty-six in
fact, but never frail – strong, a softly etched
face, and kindness in her mouth. She held her
camera as if it grew from her hands
and was attuned to her eyes.

I’ve just taken the loveliest photo of you, she smiled.

Wimpole Deserted

Wimpole Deserted


And suddenly we’re up to our shins;
Sporadic calls from the trees
And ripples on the mirror
Echo our own.

Weeds of the shallows fidget on toes,
Just as they would have done
Centuries gone, here
In the lake of the Wimpole Estate.

Fish rise like bubbles, nudging,
Toying with your fleck of apple offering,
But soon, it too is memory.
And we make for the kissing gate – knowingly.

Deceased: the hoove-thuds that
Fell down and through verges,
Ghostly boots that sauntered in
Dappled shade,

Hunting horns, stable straw,
Cigar smoke, damp grass,
Kitchens of steam, the incense of chapel,
Journals of dust and embers of a Brideshead grate.

And what of this bench staring
Up at the house?
Has it always sat here, or only since
The National Trust moved in?

In any case, you at least expect
A plaque to remember the
Ghosts, the Barons, the crests, and
Family china. Perhaps

A year of birth and a year of death…
So much the same,
So much forgotten,
So much now only the gift of imaginations.

Southbank

Southbank by night


Kisses usher them home,
And from the opposite bank the
Narnian lampposts shimmer
Flame and gold shafts
Over the water towards me;
And in these regal columns the
Quivering currents shiver and
Swirl in a nightly dappled-dance.

The daily peopled-mass has
Dissolved with the light, and the
Dusk-breeze asserts again its
Ownership of pavements;
The leaves rekindle their
Gossiping whispers –
And yet wafts of reggae
Distil their chatter. A man:

His guitar, tambourine and mic
Are midnight bound. No song
Played out to the end; each other
line encroached on by passers-by; –
Goodnight sweetheart –
Joy throbbing the cold;
Determined to reach those who cross the grey;
A new mood and key rising out of the smile.

Anchored boats are silently rocking in the
Delicate rolls kissing the shore; music
Sighing back – deep and spontaneous;
A large boat swims south and the waves are alive,
Swelling a passionate chorus themselves,
Heaves lapping over the other,
Then sloshing back to a whispered accompaniment.
Goodnight sweetheart.

Something

Something

There was a buzz about Checkpoint Charley –
A flaunted aura of razzmatazz.
American soldiers – zwei euro a photo – stood
Broad with wandering eyes.
Patience fraying, we crossed the wall - casting to
Echo the American throng and waft of
McDonalds’ juices.

A graffitied canvas of a city cut into blurs

And soon we were rounding a sleeping corner
To the place where Hitler died.
Beige was the ground.
No speak or sight of keychains and t-shirts.
Just a seemingly docile snooze.
But here among the parked cars and raised blocks
Something unspoken was chiselling the gravel
Like colonies of dead fingernails;
The secret guiltily seaming the air,
Loaded like a pistol.

If you didn’t know you’d smell the breeze and guess.
And that is Berlin’s nutshell.

A few tourist books had it earmarked; a single
Plaque, malleted into ground, marked the spot.
But a mere half-dozen drifters were there to
Stop and stand uneasy on the dust, conjuring:

It was here in this car park
That Evil screwed up his eyes,
Clenched his molars,
Thought about… something,
And fired death into his brain.

Baptism

So,
I suppose I'd better actually put some of my poetry up.

Here's one I wrote earlier in the Summer, as the heavens opened as I've never seen them do before.



Baptism

“This water droplet, charity of the air…
Which saw the first and earth-centering jewel
Spark upon darkness…” [Ted Hughes]

This ground – bloodied and died for – was
Wrought from angry spews of liquid magma,
Blistered by shields, nails and knives of ice.

We are all atoms when the rain comes
And chariots of cloud plunder and ransom the sun.
Roofs bend, sea-walls cower, drains glug their last, and
The tindered truth is sparked in us:
We are not here at our own discretion, but
Slaves to the freak voracious maw of the
Elements; forever swaying drunkenly
On the sharp of a canine tooth.

The grass was whimpering-scorched, just
Half a full hour past, when we – across the bench –
Felt the earth turn under us,
And I flicked from your cheek the lonely glinting
Tear:

Once a particle of the first-dawn, a dew-drop on the
Fields of formula-tribes; caught in the roots of
Amazonian weeds; may have ricocheted as
Frenzied rain from the peaked dome of St Peter’s,
Or shivered in deathly brunt of missile and cry
Beneath a ghostly-white Paschendale sky.

Our warning was sent in sudden icicle-winds
Gusting from the nostrils of the steeds of Zeus,
And we heard and saw the rumblings of hooves
And steel-capped chariot wheels pummelling and
Scratching the horizon – so we made ourselves scarce.

And as I stand now, beholding this weeping, cascading
Station frame, your train deep-rumbling above, –
Bent against the storm -
I can’t help but feel, a moment fleeting, that
Nature is living this baptismal act for you and for me.
But of course the atomic fact is merely as before…
Surely.
The thunder hollows my lungs.

Atoms are the both of us, but not our all.

And out in the swell I charge, skin slow-luxuriating
In the drench of millennia:
I, the hunter-gatherer, the eagle,
The first torrential flash of the Sun.
The rains of time are rattling my ankles like the
Rapid uncoilings of snapping snakes bouncing from the
Sweating tarmac; but I out-pace them all,
Knees stretching to the sky, flip-flopped heels
Squelching through torrents, fingers erect,
Slicing the wind, my chest ablaze.