John Steinbeck

Dust! We’ll go pick fruit,

work in Cal aye forn aye ai,

be exploited. Wrath!

Sometines

it’s great to travel by railway carriage

but when - calamity - a train gets filled

by crying children, gypsies, soldiers,

I long for a little room and pillow

to lay down horizontal and silently watch

a forest of dreams, a cloud of stillness

but down from the roof, a ladder drops

and I simply can’t help myself reaching upwards

at first wearily but then with strength

of hands and feet, defying gravity,

and up I climb through a secret portal

(the same old handle) into a carriage

that rattles loudly with gypsies, soldiers

where I long to lay down horizontal.

The Technique

I learnt a trick – my heart got it.

In a dream

when love is pressured, good to go,

a Zeus thunderbolt,

focuses fire on grass and crag,

cracks an iceberg;

opens a heart.

Picasso

I paint cube faces

in 3D 2D 3D

and our four lips meet.

Reality

Reality woke and stretched his claws one night,
ice was melting under a tippling rain.
Long winter darkness rippled into light.

He stamped on a myth, spring-cleaned a brain,
talked to ideal policemen on the beat
but turned away unable to explain.

He dodged around billboards on dancing feet
until he heard an old misleading cry
whistle down the wind from an ancient street

echoing ‘I love you’ and (sigh) ‘goodbye’.
He dropped a fallacy from awesome height,
cracked an egg of honesty, let out joy,

announced that truth is beauty, love delight.
Reality woke and stretched his claws one night.

Empty

We danced like drunks around the mat

singing ‘Lazybones’ bass and falsetto

until our voices were tired and flat

long through the night with nowhere else to go.

But we had to leave the song

and start real dialogue – completely lost,

not knowing what to say next. Outside, rain

washed away the rules, washed away our games.

And now there’s only us, with senses clean

and now there’s only me, perceiving in

time and space these less than empty faces

and from each eyeball I add up the cost

of aging, water, skeleton, brains, rust:

together in flesh, connected by rain.