WORLD POETS MAGAZINE

  Homage to Kinsale   As nights obsidian curtain lifted, the skylark heralds the dawn chorus in my demesne of duck egg blue. From my balcony, a mirage of matchstick masts navigate the thirsty mouth of the harbour and my skin drinks it all in. Sometimes, when I bury myself in myself, never quite reaching the point when thinking stops, I unlatch the door, drink tea and savour wild berry tart at Poets Corner, or stroll to the Spaniard where the swans dance to Francesca’s mandolin and in my solitude I feel quietly content. I look at life in black and white at The Gallery, buy a chiffon scarf from Stone Mad – peacock feathers with handstitched beads and fly it like a kite on the beach. After sundown you’ll find me in The Black Pig sipping a glass of red, satisfied with the feeling that finally, I have arrived.     The Art of Seeing   There is a place I sit and sketch the still shade before the light fades in and out of restless dusk. There is a place where broken s...

    Requiem for the Afghanistan National Institute of Music   I listened in my hooch to Afghan ghazals On my first visit to the country, waiting For the Ministry of the Interior To return my passport—which had been confiscated At Immigration—so that I could fly Home, leaving the war zone for another day. That music took me to another world.   The special meeting of the Embassy Book club, which drew spies, soldiers, diplomats, An archaeologist, a cook, and a nurse, Featured an expert who examined what Bin Laden’s death the week before might augur For the inchoate Global War on Terror. I could not sleep that night—or any other.   What I remember is the cacophony: More than a dozen students practicing In one small studio, examining Their technique in the mirror—violinists And trumpeters, bass players and bassoonists, A flautist and a French horn player, all Performing with a kind of manic joy.   How cold it was that winter night in Kabul When I joined others f...

  Letter to the Corinthians   I’m not much, just barely these blue days this legion of nobodies and this childhood sun, trace of ruins. The herds break with the silence of the bells. It is Corinth. We walk the town, preaching the pallid hope, the compass rose. We are alone. We erase ourselves into the hidden memory of things. Aimless, with only dogs following us. What does it matter if Daniela and everything else are lost? Night falls on Ephesus. Isn’t that where the apostle wrote that light and passing anguish? I read in everything that surrounds me the signs of downfall. I search again in my pockets. Nothing: wounds, blows, open sores, disjointed words, objects forever detached from their names. There is nothing, there is suspicion of distant lights in the gulf, signs perhaps imperceptible which faintly, gloomily attest to another possible reality yet unlived, foreign, unapproachable just now, one sky passes and beneath the dark thrush the icons gaze at us, indifferent. ...

  Rubbish, A   At least I do remember how cautiously we entered the hotel and afterwards he said to me: “Take off your shirt and let’s start recording.” And as time passed and my voice refused to come out like vomit or consumptive coughing in a handkerchief, like “it is finished” or “better I had died my boy,” we continued recording over and again, until I kept nothing of the keys and cufflinks, but instead went to sleep as I was, without a shirt, next to the microphone and the empty night table, with a pork-fat candle for a cigarette on the ship and our argument over filioque. *   --------- * Filioque:“And from the Son.” The discord that caused a schism between the Eastern and the Western Church.       Rubbishs, B   I think everything was just a flash of images because while the two of us were in the building his head leaning back, he looked more like the fallen god of a betrayed people than a priest and I a sacked commercial traveller than a prod...

on the table an empty plate in the lazy darkness scatters splashes of moonlight beveled by moments and projecting like a sword of fire rolls at the edge of your gaze through the open window you listen to a memory clad in glazed with words gone for such an eternity that you no longer have a name and the grass no longer has one and the color of the trees crumbles into the earth for such an eternity that the gaping words suffocate your speech and drink your loneliness   *   you hope that nothing will change But the rain will wash our faces And slowly make our words disappear You know this and I know it the avalanche of days that you watch like a child hoping to catch the light without seizing the nights *   the acacia tree resembled the breaks in the air of voices pushing splashes on the dawn in clothes of madness cut through the words of black crystal opaque and millimeter-thin shreds of history in the impossible luminescence of a time riddled with flesh disjointed by the...