Muddy Brixton Morning
Deep down it hurts,
Bewildering cycles and still
The dreams pulsing with the rain and the people,
Distant utopias mirrored in eyes seeking
Forgiveness and mystery – the best the worst and the treasured
Waiting to continue
Night winding down to
Quick smiles and hanging lights and cigarettes in bloom
With pretty wounds reconciled in hearts and sweeping hopes
And conversations lingering in rain and on we tread,
Morning marching
Hope warriors on the trail
I am amongst them with her at the centre,
Heart string to my chord
Still strumming whilst I pace helpless,
Wanderer of nowhere in twilight of touch
Until the darkness creeps
Bewitching, with echoes of the past embracing madness
At sun’s rise
We must all go to bed with beasts, corrupted;
It is the only way
Down in the dirt scratching for sense amongst the petals,
Hearing the moon cry and tasting her tears with
People and places fading like the bar’s din swallowed by the streets
And the scattered yellow leaves like angels fallen.
Duplicity Shielding The Rain
Duplicity exists in the frames of the windows that shield the rain
And the sound of horns,
Within our human nature of chemical enchantment
And the drunk tramp’s sign requesting food
From so many soapy beseeching eyes.
If you become famous they will sell you and if you don’t
They will never know and they
Will care less.
Serendipity of the vanquished arising from the mud
Like it was written in the stars;
This is no place for fools or madmen or men with dreams
Unless those dreams are green and course in city bars between fine sheets.
Throw me a duvet to embrace the cold,
Erect a monument for the starving,
Ball your graces to the sky
And never forget what it feels like to be defeated.
Hero Trickster Born
The hero trickster died when his infinity shrivelled to a mind.
All our worlds are shackled and oppressed.
Imagination faces a sickle and a sand-worn smile,
Is left pruned to extremities at best
And at worst is left for dead.
Most of you are moribund and sightless.
You nick your flights of fancy from the refuse of swirling nights
As laddered doldrums slop against your polished hulls.
Who is he anyway –
Hero trickster coughed of ale?
The phrase is a blink to a swallowed star,
A nod to the black beyond,
A chewed cudgel of memory
Swollen and flaked like old bread in a pond.
Is this how ghosts see?
Through the murky depths of splintered word and floating weed?
Do things go forward because that is what we see or because
That is what we are?
The old man I met in wales saw leather men and a backwards stream
Within his castle of ghouls.
He and a thousand other moments have taught me
That the world spins, sucks, shakes
At the roots of truth and dust;
That even buried bones are not safe from questions.
That even love is a trick of motion.
That in the stillness creeps a symmetry which would mock our guns
And cries,
Our hero tricksters in their rags and riches.
Horse and things
Amazing that some people
Never think about death and keep their shit so tight.
My mind wanders like a kart pulled by a Donkey
Through thick fog.
Sometimes I drive determined and hunched
But sometimes I like to throw the reins
And wait for the bumps.
Not like some,
Though.
I keep the reins close enough to avoid cliffs and dead ends;
That’s just how I was born or raised.
Take your pick.
Sometimes I find fast roads where the air is clear.
Sometimes I hit deep mud and stop moving at all.
But I never forget
That there will always be potholes and jams,
No matter the lungs or legs of your stallion;
And that’s just how it is.
All Platitudes and analogies and horses.
Wings To Fly
African children load AKs in brief half-lives
As we serenade our whimsies behind walls;
But that is no news.
Whoever looks here for fairness was always doomed to fail.
Poetry has no edge to cut the abyss
Nor might to move earth’s mud in search of diamonds.
So what is it in the face of man’s suffering?
Perhaps just an indulgence of melancholy lines
Or a meek pastime of the privileged few.
But for me it is more than that.
For me poetry is the rapper’s rhythm from the tape
Which makes the child soldier jump up and dance.
It is the phrase which crosses oceans and deserts
To bless a captive ear with a moment’s freedom.
It is the thought which weathers decades to emerge
Unsullied and brilliant in the eye of a raging storm.
For me the meaning of poetry is there.
In the spinning centre of the wind’s might.
In the silence which gives man the wings to fly.
