Absent will, she sucks up dusty juice, 
A something nothing cannot show her, Old Lack.

Lost her name so we can’t ask her how; 
Forged her face—she can’t smile true now, Old Lack.

Old Lack, warming her hands on ice;
Old Lack, racked by the window pane.

Her eyes reflect reflecting cones of light. 
She gulps back black spittle, Old Lack. 

Old Lack, missing a shingle up top; 
Old Lack, minus a tickle below. 

Can’t be helped: her ululating wail
Tonguing night right to the echo’s crack. 

Hunched in her one-room flat, she heard me walk, 
Sensed my casual shadow passing, Old Lack. 

Hates my presence till she’s gagging for it; 
Loathes my voice, rapt like a devotee. 

Sniffing out some telltale whiff, she creeps
Up close and close to nose her old breath, Old Lack. 

Worries words, picking them through and through: 
Shrill lilting wins a shilling, Old Lack. 

Plots my itinerary like a stalker, 
Hugs my image to her like a lover: 
I’m the one she never can get over, 

Old Lack, Old Lack, Old Lack.

The Relics

Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed
two skeletons thought to be 5,000 to 6,000
years old, locked in an embrace. Their sex has
not yet been determined. —BBC

Mother to daughter, softly touching, is it? 
   Sister to sister’s delicate embrace? 
Friend to friend, companions past corruption? 
   Brother to brother, face to well-loved face? 
 
The wheat crop rippled in the heat, the cattle 
   grazed sweet grass, milk splashed in bowls of clay; 
all fell to dust; from dust these rise, recovered 
   as brush and trowel lift slow time away. 
 
Lover to lover, holding all that’s dear, 
   they gaze into each other’s eyes, long blind, 
stripped back to bony gesture: stubborn relics, 
   so much of earth, so much of human kind.

(first published in Poemeleon)

Fettling

Claw out the old dogs from their yielding timber,
wield iron tongs to clench and haul the sleeper
groaning from his ballast-bed of years;
with pick and shovel, clear the narrow plot.
Now four good men to heft and berth the fresh
recumbent, cauled with sap, gravid with dense
hardwood grain; to slide him with a sigh
home; to pack and ram the ballast, force-
pry the steel to true, hammer down hard
the young dogs, that each jaw can grip the shining
path from worker to his daily hire;
from scholar’s quest to archives; lovers’ one-
way journeys down dead-gauged tracks, from shy
first touch, towards the day’s dark terminus.

 (first published in Shit Creek Review)

 

New World

I came from out the dry land, the bare land,
the bone land, where they lived back way past antiquity,
back past time, back in the Dreaming—that mob
left no erected monuments, only the crafted
Bunggul under the watchful stars. I came
to the new world of tor and henge, wick and Tesco:
landscaped by men—terraced crescents, ordered streets,
cathedrals, power pylons lifting their skirts
to step delicately over the rain-slick hills.
I came to Aquae Sulis where the Mendip
waters swim back up from their own deep fugue,
their warm liquid trickling a spritzig roil
of libation spilt from Minerva-Sulis’ bowl
to greet this traveller, home from the first eternity.

(first published in WORM 38)

The Green Inn

(Rimbaud:Au Cabaret-Vert, cinq heures du soir)

For eight days straight I battered my boots about
On the stony roads. I strolled into Charleroi,
—Into the Green Inn: ordered slices of bread
And butter, with half-cooled ham. Happy, I sprawled
My legs right out, under the green table:
I contemplated the rather naive designs
On the wallpaper—and it was sweet as, when
The girl with enormous titties and lively eyes,
—There’s no kiss known could give that one a fright!—
Smiling, served me rounds of buttered bread
And lukewarm ham piled on a coloured plate—
Rosy and white ham, fragrant with garlic—and filled
My huge mug up with beer, whose foamy head
Was shot to gold by a ray of late sunshine.

(first published in Snakeskin)

Evening Prayer

(Rimbaud:Oraison du soir)

I live sat on my arse, like an angel at the barber’s,
Great pint pot clamped firmly in my paw,
Belly and neck bulging, good old pipe
Clenched in my teeth, wreathed in fat veils of smoke.
Thousands of dreams smoulder softly inside me
Like steaming shit on the floor of some aviary:
Sometimes my dismal heart is sapwood, catching
The gloomy gold of its own drip-dripping sweat.
At last, after carefully swallowing all my dreams,
I regroup (having sculled thirty or forty pints)
And shape up for a sharp call of nature:
Sweet as the Lord of cedar and hyssop, I piss
Up at the morose sky—so high, so far—
Sunflowers nod their giant heads in assent.

(first published in The Centrifugal Eye)