51% British:
Writing the troubles out of my head
Inreach
Aghalane bridge
Artemis met Kratos
On the back road to Belturbet.
The consequence of this physics:
A brutal amputation.
The ancient stone limb,
Once stretched across a river,
Is crudely cauterised at either end.
Granite fists still hold fast
To each international bank.
And in between?
A delaying vacancy,
An obstacle course for brown trout,
A collapsed fear,
As horribly off key
As flowers in the mouth of a corpse.
And finally; a way to turn away,
And mind your own bloody business.
There’s no gain in sitting
By a dry Fountain
Purporting love
If the plumbing’s fucked
Or getting a up a warm blaze
In the cold ashes
Of cherished farmsteads
Forgiveness demands
A down payment
Bigger than that.
Washing the feet of those
Not yet able to put them
In your basin of blood
Would be a better start
Or else inclusion
Is just a delusion.
The Gatelodge camera's pitiless eye
Watches the next meal of colour
Slide into this monochrome maw
Another morsel of humanity
Hard humoured, defiantly pliant
Will be processed, digested
Gradually rendered down
Then carried along a barred gullet
Marinated in captivity's reek -
A miasma of old sweat and stale tea
(With odd notes of something worse)
To finally stick in the craw
Of our rancid little history:
The prison visits room -
A cockpit of menace and scabbed cheer
Where anything can happen and often doesn't
Guards and guarded discreetly scrap
For crumbs of power
Each side incessantly off-balance
The weirdly vague attentiveness of staff
Is a half-hearted play on omniscience
Trying to see everything relevant
To getting home safe
Without seeing too bloody much
Everyone is doing time here
Where it is nearly always
Thirteen O'Clock
This is my neighbours field
And, today, my battleground
We take the path of most resistance
Fading into a stand of Hazel
Going to ground in a humid understory
Of bilberry and honeysuckle.
Two white hares dance across my gunsight
Then leap a drainage ditch
Into the safety of the Free State
We've been here too long already
A brattle of thunder gives us cover to move
And sudden wind flattens the meadow
Exposing its pale, thick mane
The grass is good
There'll be a second cut th'year
On my own plot
If I live to see the end of it.
In the maze
Part Timers
Poems 5