Emerging from the winter
Wakes you up to the cold

He was a good man

Remember him as a good person

Always with a smile that made itself

And a joke tucked safe in his pocket

Next to his battered pack of cigarettes



Remember him as a good person

Just a day away from reaching himself

Trying to find the softer shade

That wraps itself around the next tree along



Remember him as a lost person

When is wallet ran dry to his thirst

That struck deeper than any bar could reach

He would strike up a match and swallow down

Some rich cotton wool smoke

And waited for his patience to fray.



Remember him as a lost person

With boots scuffed from the kick of the earth

And licked over with layers of old dust

With eyes that peered out, wrapped beneath

Layers of worried wrinkling skin

But with hands soft enough to keep his word

And straight teeth that remembered

The taste of unvarnished youth.



Remember him as a good person

Who lost his questions in haystacks

Where they were too safe from answers

And the answers he found, Were distorted in glass

Till he didn't want any around.

I don't know what this says about me but..

I’ve always had a subtle kind of loathing
Held in special reserve for those
Self-promoting reporters
Who on first blush appear simple agents of the daily news
But in reality breathe the stuff of endings.
And feed off our collective emotional conscience.
Always earching for the next tear jerking tear jerker
And the irony is, the more we cry the less we feel
Till our ducts are held hostage by each new day’s
Grander homage to
Some nobody that nobody knew,
And nobody cared about
Who had the good fortune to die in a way that left some shine in his name
To be gobbled up like candy by the ever circling vultures
Who can smell these corpses a mile away
And whose pens cut deeper than any talons or beak that nature ever made

I for one, would care to die in obscurity
Whatever faint glow my passing leaves behind
Gently decaying amongst my dreams
As they too are reborn
Composted into new vitality
Under the fingers of a new mind
One who gives a damn. One who knows
One who cares about
The intangible stuff that fortune tries to pluck away from our names
To be carried aloft like the green olive shoots
Grasped in the delicate claws of Noah’s dove
A messenger, crying in silent voice “New lands ahoy!”

The danger of waking up is forgetting your dreams

There goes my girlfriend
Lady Tuesday
Sun-fruits glitter in her hair
Cannon balls lurk beneath her stare
Her weekend is never far behind

Remember
The nightingale
You eager seek
Lives in the breeze
Of the open wild
Not in the feeble
Cage of your
Calcified imagination.

A poem
Is just a picture
Tied up in strings of words

I chased ghosts all that summer
Between the breaking bars
Carrying the tune to the daily rhythm
They supplied the lyrics
Sometimes
When all the world was in a line
And I was at a loss
They were kindred spirits of a kind
Rich and full of the life they lost
I chased them with the spark of youth
Till I too was lost.

Peter Pan

Today the children dress themselves
I want the swing sets for me alone
Squeezing adult hands into kiddie gloves
To swish and soar and fly off home.

Soldier

Great is the darkness between
That place where the gaps flow smooth
Reaching out to one another
Never quite to touch

Out pours that viscous liquid
Thick with the flows of the ticking clock
Straining to catch the second
In its spinning teeth

Round pools the warmth
Curling at the finger joints
To spew into a sandy maw
As wide as any I've ever known

Long beats the chest straining
To keep each gap from swallowing
Drinking each tick down, down
With a fat, slow, hungering tongue

Sealed are the eyelids
Resigned like gutters to the pavement
Holding the end in shutter-tight
But it stutters in uncaring

In the light greater than any darks
It singes away the shadow's hairs
And leaves... nothing
To drip, congeal, set
Into the final inscription of what was
But has now slipped through desperate fingers
And drunk the dry desert wind.

Don't dream that
Or you'll never wake up.

You'll never know your future
in a bubble of the past

I said sorry to my dad
For the mess I've made
Of the hands that he gave me
Nails rising like driftwood
Chalking above the sands
Fingerprints smudged guilty
On the glasses of now
Fingers scrunched and tossed aside
Into despair's waste bin
Holding desperately onto nothing
Till it bleeds away into the warmth
Of cramp and strain and futility
A mess with the stamp of dead-wood
Jutting from palms that know no peace
Except the comfort of arthritis.

Even puppies have wings

Inception

Some nights
I stay awake and wait
For the bump
The feeling of reality returning
The dream fading fast into the undergrowth
Swallowed by the jungle noise
Of a million eddying lives

Some nights
I lay awake and dream
Of the drop
When the legs fall out from under me
The world rushing past on squeakless shoes
Smoothly like a looming pickup line
A race to the floor

Some nights I think
I'll actually wake up
And remember this
With the forgotten clarity
Of the dream that it isn't.

I told you and told you
But you wouldn't listen
Fickle fickle hands
Catch me if you can

It's funny
Realising you are an idiot
Doesn't actually change anything

When I was a Child I Thought...

How my memory... You are
Everfresh
Growing up like grass-
Stains each time I fall
Knees and warts and all
Angel eyes, angel sighs
That's one way to keep floating.

How you are, the question why
I never cease from asking
Holds my tongue hostage
The rudder in the storm
That sank me in my mind's eye
Where the calm
Stretches
The waves flat, long enough
To catch a breath
To drop a wall
You are ever-fresh
Warts and all.

Questionmark.

Burn you out my blood
Thick as a summer sunset
Seal me under the concrete
Of a thousand blank pages
Till ink flows in black veins
And you and I are safe

Fighting against himself
The enemy never shows
Just who is winning?