Skip this entry if you hate poems.

Here is a recent batch of new stuff as yet unfiltered by time and the whips and scorns of editors. Any feedback gratefully received -- these mainly written on the train in the last few months. Apart from the last one, which was written about going back to my old university with my old friend Sophie last november.

All the rest are sparked directly or indirectly by my MJ.

Winter Train

The London train
Slinks through snow.
Tired commuters
Settle down; drift
Into themselves.

Face at a window
I hatch these crazy theories:
That the track is a snake totem
A Peruvian spaceship runway.
And all the grey stars
Of these English towns
Were built to summon you.

I print your name
To be read from space
Letter by letter
On each passing
Paperwhite field

For you are the woman
Who would fall to earth
Supergirl, correspondent,
My Aphrodite.

With all your graces
I believe
You’ll bring me something
Like spring
But everlasting.


Annunciation in Manhattan

Fifty stars bleed.
I walk down Broadway
Towards the wound.

New York
You are bandaged with flags
And glory.

Followed by the full moon
I moved across the water
Like the word

Through unburst clouds
For rain falls in its own time
Like hard glass or now

Now that there is you
There is also hope
Of a blessing

To visit us here
To be bigger than
The terrifying sky.

Love, uncover your wounds,
For from this bleeding
Our love was born.

We are naked
Holding like strangers
Looking at an angel.


A sparrow at 30,000 feet

Cattle class, in clear air turbulence,
This shuddering is perfectly normal.
Through the window of a plunging jumbo,
You see the horizon thicken into indigo.
There is something horrific about this
Something about death in the way
Night accelerates to meet us.

Life, you recall, is a sparrow
That darts through the fire-lit mead hall.
On bending wings we swoop
Through the last slantings of the light.

You lurch your return from the musty box
Of the toilet at the back, while
The steward is dreaming in the galley,
And you take your place again
Among the ghost-faced sleepers.
There is nothing to fear
For we share the same journey
And the crew seems certain
We’ll get there.


Ophelia

You write your name on water
And then you sink
A wet halo shrinks
Around your face
And you sink
Lips last.

Ophelia
Why didn’t you float like the others?
Why didn’t you drift downstream with a glut
Of Pre-Raphaelite flowers?

I’m terrified that you’ve stopped breathing
Or that you gulp the dim, death-gladdening murk
Where everything’s refracted
Bending the sticks and searching arms.

For you are not where you seem to be
And your ears are full of sand
And there’s a stone in your soul so big
I’m not sure if you want me
To lift you up or hold you under.


Romantic

We waited till November to walk by the Sound
We slam the car doors and crunch along the shore
Into this remnant of a lost forest.
Strangely, the leaves have not fallen,
They’ve retained their glory for us:
Two people who walk in a poem
Like an ode’s two darklings
Who’ve criss-crossed the sundering sea
With phones and email and aircraft.

We walk deep into the fall
Of gilded foliage flecked with red.
The wind is freshening from the north
But our hands grow warm with walking.
Know this my lover, my promised one, later
I will wrap your body in breath and fire,
And nightingale all my hidden heart
In the hazel forest of your eyes.

The Green King’s Wife

You leave the imprint of a star in the snow
Then lie there, dormant, as the snow falls
You have crawled somewhere between the trees
Into the shallow grave of a lost child.

But one day your fingers will poke like crocuses
Your tongue will unfurl like a fern frond
To rake the fractals of ancient air
And make the Spring speak your phrases.


The King of Starlings

A smudge on the pearl horizon
The starling flock is piloted
Through the clear dusk to Brighton Pier.

Each bird in flight describes a line
That thickens calligraphically
In its flow of curls and swoops

Before it settles by the sea surge
Under the thundering funfair
Under the amusement arcade.

And for one shamanic moment
With a boundless dreamer’s ego
I have made the wild incantation

That draws this cloud; this starling throng
Beneath my blunt, brown-booted feet
So that the cheesy old pier twitters

With ten thousand winter songs
That make me wonder if I stand
Above a cold and raucous heaven.


This is not a love song, it is a true love song

I can write that the streets are sheets of cardiac muscle
That George Bush is really a mermaid
That I can fly just by saying the word “fly”
I can write anything, but it wouldn’t be true.

Instead I attract lies
I coax them like cats from bushes in Brooklyn
I poet them from bridges and sunsets and leaves
Because truth is repulsed by me; truth and me
We slide apart like the wrong ends of magnets.

This morning, I swear blue dogs mounted the sky
Like starlings or angels or passers-by
And on 5th Avenue, Venus stepped from her shell
And left with the fishes still flapping and gaping.

New York? Christ yes! I shouldn’t be here.
They called us inventors, perverters:
This internet boyfriend, your English amour.
Those damned Platos would have poets deported.

So I won’t write that I love you, though you know that I do.
I’ll write about things we know that aren’t true
Like terrorists in teapots, and that genius tosspot
And feeding your kids to the snakes in the zoo.

Let’s talk about clowns that are evil
And sinister wall weasels
Because they’re all porkies, and stories and lies.

And there you’ll be, my spellbinding baby,
Bulls-eye, unscathed in the middle,
All starry and stripy, indescribably lovely
With the truth of your soul and the truth of your heart
Unscarred by the thorns of the things that you aren’t.


Above two cathedrals

for Sophia Toumasiz

Ranks of etched angels scoop the light
In the moon mouths of their trumpets.
Airborne prophets and apostles;
A scrambled Coventry squadron
Above crowds of weekend shoppers
Above the cross of salvaged nails.

With ranks of angels at our feet
In the floor of foot-smoothed marble
Inside the new cathedral
In the city where we studied
I found you were we lived before:
In the dancing thoughts of heaven.