HOPEFUL MONSTER

 

1.

 

Watching a podcast with Nick Lane

Biologist on the origin of life, threw

Up this memory. I’m taking a tablet

Called brain boost that helps focus.

 

Kent, England. Five years old in the back 

garden with Mum, playing with muck, she 

always let me be a child and get my hands dirty.

 

I cut up a worm with a lollypop stick 

on a saucer-like a gift to mum on a silver platter.

 The head was wiggling, and the torso.

Was this like a deep mind syndrome  

symmetry, the pattern of dark poetic beauty.

 

2.

Like that wriggling earth worm

In a disabled bed. My sinew was torn in stroke.

 I live with Cancer, Stroke, Heart attack.

 It’s all in my blood

Morphogenetic.

 

The binmen and road sweepers

Are out today after

Weeks of strikes.

 

WAR it seems the way forward. Swept up into

The bins. my old man is a dustman

Killer.

 

Are going down that road sweeping?

Are we just the refuse waste who can't find

A peace settlement.

 

  I know I am rewriting this magic moment 

over and over in a different form but

this is all I have.

EVERY TIME I REMEMBER

A LITTLE MORE 

The house fell into the night’s silence, the grieving

family slept like innocent children with the aid of

the day's alcohol and fatigue from the stream of friends

calling throughout the day.

You had to go

and leave us

with a door

into the dark.

 

Sad but you had

to go to that better

place where poets

live in poetry.

I woke with enriching darkness

Within my heart, knowing

I had shared with you my tears of joy.

Freedom of choice was out there

I could feel it driving by.

 

I had to cry myself into this sorrow-

Full state to find the essence of true

Poetry.

My life and my poems have been about seeking

Feeling not meaning, we have been searching

For metre rhyme and meaning but the Portuguese

Poet Fernando Pessoa said ‘it is not necessary just

                                   to live but to feel’.

The portal of poetry waits

Outside my door, I see it

Looking on, ready, bag packed

Hanging from the door, not

That I’ll need anything just

A Basho gaze. 

Without the bond of life:

Emotional memory.

A painting of my father

Draws me in.  He back-

fired into me like shrapnel

from an armalite rifle

a spent shell.

‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it’

                                                        Anon

My life is the light of wonder

An eternal spark of negativity

That came from re-birth

A stroke, a sunder.

Are we just the refuse waste who can't find

A peace settlement.

WAR it seems the way forward. Swept up into

The bins. my old man is a dustman

Killer.

I woke up this morning with the stroke down blues

A formless form without a clue

I woke up this morning without life’s inclination

Without memory, dreams or imagination.

A double bass sounds a twelve-bar blues

The saxophone splashes on the waves

A true sympoetry can you hear it?

 

The violin comes rolling in and the flute

lifts it upon a single note, the drum rolls

and bounds symphony in my heart.

Return to the uncarved block, infancy.

My words are easy to understand

It acts without a name, flowing like

Water, following its own nature

Deep, deep, deep to the gateway

Of subtle illumination. 

All these people live in me:

Carver, Keats, Ted Hughes

And Sylvia Plath, Stevens

Lowell and James Simmons

And my mucker Kavanagh.

Black was within his waking eye

Black to, was the stippled sky.

Death from a bird’s eye tomb-

Vision.