Heart To Heart

HEART TO HEART

Now your time comes
Now you can speak
Be heard
Believed
Unjudged

Now the tears come
So long withheld
Let go
Release
Healing

The P’d-off Princess

THE P’D-OFF PRINCESS

I am the object of their love
Oh yes, they “love” me

With a price they dictate
And in which I had no say

So fuck ‘em all
Because real love is tough

So here comes tough love
Fuck ‘em all

It’s The Wine Talking

IT’S THE WINE TALKING

The scum rises to the top
The dregs sink to the bottom
I’d point this out more pointedly
But my mum always said
It’s rude to stir (or point)

She also said
There are three things you should never discuss
Politics, sex and religion
Unfortunately
Nothing else has ever interested me much

Except
Of course

Writing

… She’d be appalled

Chicken Noise In A Pig Neighbourhood

CHICKEN NOISE IN A PIG NEIGHBOURHOOD*

They tried to close off that shaft
With signs that said “Danger”
But the sign over the entrance read “Mine”
So I went in anyway

You thought those ways I took
Were simply for pleasure or escape
You’d been left knowing no better
I suppose

Lift your eyebrows
And mutter together in corners all you like
The street light is a comfort
But not where you dropped your keys†

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* Refers to a children’s party game. On a slip of paper, write the name of an animal that makes an obvious noise. Create five to ten slips for each animal. Give each participant a slip of paper, but tell them to keep their animal a secret. The participants are to find the rest of their kind, but there is no talking. So how do they find the others? They have to make the noise of the animal. Once two of the same kind have found each other, they stay together to find more. Continue until all of the like animals have created one big group. Fun as a child; as an adult you learn the dangers of making a chicken noise in a pig neighbourhood. Try supporting your team from the wrong end of the stadium …

† Most of us have heard the old story of the drunk who looks under the street light for his lost keys, even though he lost them elsewhere, because the light is better there.

Meeting Point

MEETING POINT

Mythmakers all we are
And so meeting
Compare our mythologies
(Like so many have before)
Inner fire and heirlooms
Bounced cheques and littered highways
Dream rivers that disappear into the sand
Heartflow that stops and starts
And the long work of reconstruction

Artists all we are
And so meeting
Compare our artistry
Plain talk with rich recesses
Nuances to old questions
The curl of the cry
At the wellsprings of voice

Hunter at bay
The poet crawls and capers
Across the carnival and charnel-house of life
Fractious fragment of the Creator
Who hath made all things well
Adolescent loneliness
Adult uncertainty
Menopausal anxiety
And senile decay

Actors all we are
Though no spectator views us
And so meeting
Compare our pasts and futures
As all our heres and nows come down to one

Introducing Yourself Alphabetically

INTRODUCING YOURSELF ALPHABETICALLY

Amused, bemused castaway
Delinquent, evanescent, fugitive

Gabbles heedlessly
Incorrigibly juvenile

Knotty

Loves music

Ne’er-do-well
Occupationally puzzled

Quietly rabid
Silently troubled

Unaccountably vain
Witless Xenaphile

Yea-sayer

Zany!

…..Amused – pleasurably entertained, occupied, or diverted; aroused to mirth.
…..Bemused – bewildered or confused; lost in thought; preoccupied.
…..Castaway – a shipwrecked person; an outcast; anything cast adrift or thrown away.
…..Delinquent – failing in or neglectful of a duty or obligation; a person who is delinquent.
…..Evanescent – vanishing; fading away; fleeting.
…..Fugitive – having taken flight, or run away; fleeting; transitory; elusive; wandering, roving or vagabond.
…..Gabbles – speaks or converses rapidly and unintelligibly; jabbers.
…..Heedlessly – carelessly; thoughtlessly; unmindfully.
…..Incorrigibly – bad beyond correction or reform.
…..Juvenile – of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or suitable or intended for young persons; immature;
……….childish; infantile.
…..Knotty – involved, intricate, or difficult.
…..Ne’er-do-well – useless; worthless; an improvident, irresponsible, or lazy person.
…..Occupationally – of that which chiefly engages one’s time.
…..Puzzled – to be perplexed or confused; to ponder or study over some perplexing problem or matter.
…..Rabid – irrationally extreme in opinion or practice; furious or raging; violently intense.
…..Troubled – concerned, worried; exhibiting emotional or behavioural problems.
…..Unaccountably – incomprehensibly, mysteriously.
…..Vain – excessively proud of or concerned about one’s own appearance, qualities, achievements, etc.;
……….conceited; proceeding from or showing personal vanity; senseless or foolish.
…..Witless – nitwitted, senseless, soft-witted.
…..Xenaphile – No, this is not a typo, nor does it mean that I love foreigners (apart from the Warrior Princess of course)
…..Yea-sayer – a person with an optimistic and confident outlook; a person who habitually agrees with or is submissive to others.
…..Zany – ludicrously or whimsically comical; clownish

Masks Of The Crustacean

MASKS OF THE CRUSTACEAN

I would say the secrets of my soul
Yet trust no one to their hearing
Some keep silence, some keep talking
When they find they have nothing to say
And the fulfilled don’t write

Lame excuses and sprung steel alibis
Meshed fast in the complexities of pain
(Only my pleasures are simple)
Masks of the crustacean
Designed to reveal what they disguise

Playing at love like a game of chess
Not well, not badly, just lazily
Without due regard to the consequences of my moves
Reading too many fairy tales
And kissing far too many frogs

The generous truth is a beggar to find
Buried deep among the unsuspected cruelties of the small print
(When God finished the world
He saw that it was perfect
… And then of course He began wondering what to do next … )

Security in a pound note, safety in a pin
The tired old trumpeting of Church and State
Magic is afoot but the world’s gone metric
(Electric) and Securicor scares
The light fades, the air is flat and stale

The rain beats against the glass
Nights and days an endless tapeloop
Of supermarket muzak
Brush its teeth and put it to bed
The well-oiled programs run

Asleep within the fractured eye of my attention
Life, well-travelled, opens and closes around me
Here and there embroidered with a flower
The footsteps I follow through the blizzard of my memories
Are my own

Love Of My Life

LOVE OF MY LIFE

She watches the idiot boy tinkering.
Muttering, mumbling, worrying at the cud,
stuttering through the fog, clutching at limp scraps,
floundering in discarded redundancies.

She recalls that piece of paper on which he
scrawled “Words are the pegs on which experience
is hung out to dry.” Inconsistent or what?
The image bristles with frustration, contempt.

Is he completely disenchanted by words?
Yet it was words neatly condemning themselves
satisfied him so deeply as he wrote them.
He loves paradox, adores ambivalence.

They’re like two long wedded lovers, him and words.
A profound affection for one another,
but also resenting the chains of habit
and codependence that tie them together.

She is happy to be his occult bedmate;
mistress also of that realm where sounds are born,
she knows how to set them coursing through his veins:
a great deluge; a mighty niagara.

Essence of being and experiencing
thunders through the flume, sparks flecks of vocal spume.
Words once again stand agape, untongued, dumbstruck.
For this is the mistress of his heart, true

love of his life.

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The relationships between the poet, his wife (words) and his mistress (the Muse – gateway to the Essence).