New Poetry - October - November 2004

New poetry Oct-Nov 2004.

Buses

See them gathering,
A bustle of ticket eager fingers prying
Each gritty hidden pocket
For some hope of a return
Whilst conversations, sweet and inviting,
Like a rosy pub upon a bitter winter’s evening,
Pass from head to head in the moments before
Its arrival.

And then there’s the question of where
To sit, not too far from the pretty girl
I hope, with her bags and scarves
Claiming the empty space beside her.
Together we will brace ourselves
Against the familiar turns
Waiting patiently behind endless traffic
With buttocks clinging to the seat

A Lift

I bumped into you by the lift
and you asked me to send you
a poem. Something I liked.
Since listening last week
it's strange how something

I once thought, something
I would like to share,
is now an embarrassment.
I don't know how I didn't see
that it's been about poetry.

Picture this…

Picture this.
Now there’s an emblem badly wrought.
When a face is more than an empty room laid bare, more poem than portrait,
Where each savage line demands its space amongst the silent things, and where
Even we who know better, fail, at times to recognize our own male nakedness.

The idea alone is enough to haunt me,
As if looking at something that might befall us undignified, might somehow contaminate
The gradual reveal of selfhood.
So take you long looks and lingers,
Memorise your social security and pray you don’t meet your Dorian,
I hear he drinks at the Pink Flamingo, eats dates and never cleans his fingers.

A House of Bones

Never could forget the smell of the wet wood
Soured by the winter rains and heavy with a memory
Which hangs close like the dead pools that stand in drains.

Lie softly down to sleep in the house of wood
Where childhood’s rooms sit widowed, sit back,
A Soulless hole made bitter, made black,
By the smoked timbers of fishing boats, wrecked,
Ran a-ground in some forgotten storm,
And left their bones to bleach upon the cobbled shore.

They built a house of the bloodless bones,
Taken from the cruelest harvest of those Gypsy waters,
Worn smooth by the passing of many hands,
Too dumb to see or speak of whispered dreams so seeming,
Where even great lives, in time, lose their meaning
Whilst the ocean groans and grinds her teeth.

Woman washing her hair

Strange now, the things we can’t bring ourselves to surrender
Now that such lives have passed between us
Deft as a shared memory. Strange, that I should wake
This day thinking of a lost morning of light perfection
As I lay gentle, watching her from our bed as she washed her
Woman’s hair. For we knew what was to be happy then
Free to play out our lives amidst those daily gestures
That mark us so hard of habit and left us spent but proudly broken,
Like some beautiful dream half remembered half forgotten
Amongst the blistered sheets of bedded cotton and the knots we tied in sleep.
But fond as I am of these things that pain me so to remember,
I find it strange that it is these things we can’t bring ourselves to surrender.

PW