God’s Anger

 One day my father said to the family

‘I’m finally gonna train that dog!’

and dragged our vibrant little Westie

out into a chill front room.

He batted its backside so hard

the dog skedaddled across the carpet;

a billiard ball bouncing off solid oak,

then turned on its belly, a crocodile.

‘Come here!’ he yelled and the little sod

had to crawl along freezing ground

to be yelped again across the room;

by volcano pulses of angry magma.

Age seven, I sat next door

deep in icy romance wondering,

wondering, wondering what the holy

King of Heaven suggested I should do.

Particle or Wave

An Einstein question.

When I walk towards a big wet puddle

in the road and a lorry heads on

towards me with a smiling driver

do I walk forward to risk a soaking

if he swerves in a chortling whoosh

or hold back in fear and in anguish,

afraid of a smile and a wave?

Gnats

go lively;

dance the riverbank

and two green plastic

chairs. Let’s guess –

several thousand insects? Fuzzy bills

chained by sunlight

into warm vortex

with a top

in the trees

and a sunlit edge

one meter wide (at the most)

where the whirling company is.

Only a few things matter;

to keep inside

this cylinder of warm light,

to mate,

  

the rest is not our business,

except  for Mozart

lilting and lifting,

weaving and intertwining

from my iPhone iTunes

and a glitter of

quickening sun on

myriad wings

and my projection of a dance

orchestrated as

show-time, glitter-time and spiraling jazz.

Mozart and Midges go lively.

Man on a Train

Talk to him? Not really!

That story will inevitably

bore and become a sly window to my

own internal mirror hall – impermanent

as plummeting carriages.

I guess this train has scuttled

North and South a thousand times

and seen a share of drama,

snow and tragedy. But could I simply

be here now and let it flow?

OK, I’ll talk to him, connect our

eyes and hear the story of his love life,

diet, working stresses, strains so we will

curtain with our storybook the foxes,

badgers, beauty flashing by.

Poise

Hey feet!

Two pins!!

What tricks?

Bedrock

the fact

your strong

aplomb

toddles

me on

so long.

Over nine months

from nowhere and nothing,

with my tiny hand I twisted a dial

briskly and it clicked, stopped, turned around

and, imperceptibly, like a pantoum,

gradually drove the pulse of one old base drum

all in motion, deceptively slow

in moment after clicking moment –

until, by autumn, leaves are caught in wind

and days tip forward to December’s end

tumbling, ultimately, nowhere, nothing.

Google

Lit from behind, the keys

on my MacBook spark a room:

simple enough for shadow

in wee black hours – a winter morning.

But what to say of the keys?

A digital schism of light

inviting some sort of story

or mystery from my fingers

leaping for future screens

(black and white like Chaplin)

bridging our banks of time

hoping to light the night

of a future indefinite human

moving their eyes left to right

but looking not so very far

as letters light up on their forehead

projected by backlight shining

and grabbing at irises, brain cells

hurling the past to a future

simply by pushing a key.