I don't speak too much. Lord give me a woman who sings.

Leaving season

Come back to me
My garden
My love
The empty plates
Gather flies like memories
The guitar stands watching
My old cowboy boots
With envy
Come back to me
My sweet sick suffering
You yellow melancholy
mixed with seaside stones
unwashed and well meaning

PCW 2005


Marx was right

the more I think about it
the more I think Marx was right
about religion being an opiate
although I always thought opiates
were the real opiates
and we take ours by the pint

and maybe Pavlov had a point
when he said religion is a defense
against the feelings of insecurity
that have plagued humanity since the first
sunrise, when Neolithic man looked up
to the skies and wondered

what it was all about
and standing on line for cigarettes
I sense the experiment has failed,
that God has taken his eye
off the ball, like a builder
who has got another job on

PCW 2005

Don’t make rain today

they call it a listening session
people whisper behind their drinks
talking about other people
who I don’t know
but who might someday
cross my path and say

my how you’ve grown thin
this evening, drinking your
tall drinks with tired eyes
and yet you still find time to please
me with a smile hotly contested
and coveted by the other boys

who play personality games
across the wet table tops
trying to not to stare
at the figures of beauty
who tempt us with promises
and a strange unfamiliar music

while mayflies hover like old men
looking well placed and well pleased
like the girl in the horn rims
who looks soft and whistles a tune
to her neighbour who puts his ear to water
and listens to what is about to begin

PCW 2005