WORLD POETS MAGAZINE

  Streets of the Abandoned City   The Street of the Candlemaker runs slant to the river where time is detained in slight tallow bodies, moored up in ragboats awaiting the tide.   The Street of the Illusionist was never there, or so it would have you believe; an empty black bag in a vat full of pitch.   The Street of the Graveyard is lined with books, with symbols and scorings no one can decipher and carvings of cherubs too weighty to fly.   The Street of the Birds is a vault of locked cages, each inhabitant rendered to feather and bone. Wind blusters through keyholes to parody song.   The Street of the Kings wears a crown of eye teeth plucked from the jaws of anonymous dogs. The Street of the Dogs was scratched from the map.       Sleep   The city is old. It pulls furs about itself, hunkers down and draws archetypes  on the insides of its eyelids with chalk:   a staircase stopping to consider if it is going up or down, a bed em...

  Stones   Stones take to each other naturally, Like a family of sleeping creatures,   The large ones accommodate little ones, To create a colony of hardness;   They rest in centuries of stark stillness; They are elephant-heavy to lush grass.   Their colours employ the afternoon sun; They are as warm as loaves from an oven.   Each one embodies its personal death; They are cobbled memories of the sea;   They are the solid language of labour: Each one weathered to a perfect image.   They rest, innocent of their history, Like a grey display of featureless skulls.   They have tasted our sweat and absorbed our blood. They rise and fall, symbols of man’s conscience.   Their persistence has sculptured their silence; They hint that their souls haunt other planets.   They are magnets for our primitive thoughts; They are the armour of truths beyond us.   They shape our built fears of an afterlife, They could tempt us into acts of worship...

  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...

  The Lost Language of Trains   Those who can hear the lost language of trains, who almost understand it, wake some nights to flooded turntables and torn-up sidings in birch-woods doomed to redevelopment.   But they believe in the smoke in a brasserie mirror reflecting the paintings of Paul Delvaux, in black trains stealing at dusk through abandoned stations where the lately departed drink to the night, to the night.   Have they lingered too long, these believers, an eye on the signals, an ear for the marshalling-yards where trains are rehearsing vast chords of farewell?   Smoke fills the doorway and dissolves, and silence follows where language has gone. Have they listened too long? Does it matter?       Yours in Haste   What time do I call this? Time enough to kill the suitors, hang the housemaids, dig the faithful dog a hole (I didn’t want to wake you)   and make ready to depart.         ...

  After Goya     In Goya’s drawings the line’s frenzied even when the content seems less than disgusting that girl dancing for example    with or without the leering crowd the lightness of her feet                                          and the movement in her shift dress float almost       but in his portraits the face emerges from crosshatching as if the whole image were a rubbing taken of the face in which darker patches emerge                                                under the pencil shading   reg...

  Dark Dawn ①               for Jimmy Chee-Ying Lai   daybreak farther and farther way      as you smile      turn around vanish behind that door      wife sobbing ocean waves sobbing      time’s      anchor chain broken add 20 years to 78 years old      a weightless infinity   this is no final farewell      the deep pit of the years waits always for a live burial      a human sacrifice as neon-lit streets fill with ripples of betrayal and false witness your craggy back view      is carved into the seabed like a reef   back to the home of tribulation      like the road to work every day the word NO trampling an elegy’s last lingering syllable death      incomparably strange incomparably fami...