Friday 26 February 2010

Modern Poetry

We’re in the middle
of a poetry reading

almost as if
Milton was there

slight and wan
blind as a mole

lusting for epic
famous as Shakespeare

when Andrew burps

“What do you say?”
a lady whispers

“Oooops!” he answers
“What do you say!!?”

waiting for a “Pardon me”.
He looks around

sweet as a bard
‘A piglet!’ he says

‘I’m a pig!’

Thursday 25 February 2010

Meeting

A flipchart, and marker pen like lipstick;

between its nib and paper – fresher air.


People sit behind a wooden desk

and talk, from plastic chairs.


Aha: the sound-bites of business;

statements, coughs, unlistening


for moments, outside, like a blackbird

expressing his magical being.

Tuesday 23 February 2010

Real Poem

It would be good to stop this train

and lie me down on green grass

ideally near a shady river,

special, like a king and queen

maybe sleeping face-to-face

or hand-in-hand or toe-to-toe.


Changing trains seems risky. It’s winter

now and many leaves have fallen

but I do feel something-like ‘alive’ and

it would be good to jump this train

and stop momentum, all inertia,

long and narrow tracks.

Monday 22 February 2010

31st December 2009

Always there’ll be our story of a light

hovering moon and snowflakes alighting

around our feet. We’ll remember a new year

eclipse, a spotlighted sky and really much more


than turning a decade. Yes, let’s make

words come round to snowfalling dark

and wishing of lanterns, high, lifted in friendship

and spangled by flakes from a blackening pelt


of the whole of the sky. We’ll hope to God

to re-make the silence; transform the land,

occluding the norm. Was that a beam

when our lanterns flew high or a gleam


from a hope of the fabulous? Steady your love

and come to your senses, it’s changing above.