After Industry

Poems written between 2009 and 2011

Destroying the book

A sharp knife completes the job scholars strained at,

A rage in London

A poetic response to last week's riotign in the UK.

August 1914

One fragile moment from a lost summer,

Black Cat.

Familiar in the twilight,

Container

Columbus and his kind Ambition shrunk Like the globe they spanned

Photograph.

Our trinity, drawn By light the summer My life began and yours changed,

Sudden Storm

Coming on suddenly, the storm Changes a dowdy street,

The Closed Line

Under the traffic two threads merge in a memory of speed,

To a discarded plastic bag

Caught amongst branches, A rattling Prisoner of the wind

Light Pollution

The earth’s tight curve wears a neon halo...

Seed

Seeing the flowers in their cracked vase I think suddenly about time,

Intimation

In the silence of the museum the skeleton’s curious jigsaw waits under glass,

Satellite

One light drowning in darkness,

Holiday

Standing in the departure hall I call the tower for clearance, Fly back thirty years to land Running barefoot on wet sand

Ward 71

Close packed like lumber they lie, Each bed a fairground car

Group Photograph

Eight of us stood together In the year’s first sun,

Some thoughts on reincarnation

Were I to come this way again I’d like to return as a pig,

Work in progress

Hands sowed this land with work, Those of peasants bound to sandy soil,

Night Rain

After dark, rain soaks suburbia,

Fishers of Men

Fishers of Men Two evangelists on my bus, Wearing starched shirts, holding Their bibles like shields, asking Can we talk about GOD? Probably not the...
Cherry

Accident

Lights painting a bruised Dusk, We who pause, watching Are shown the only Truth worth knowing, That all lives become Accidents; The issue is when...

Autumn

There’ll be no harvest come August, Bugles called the yeomen To work other fields, At the hiring fair Boys and men, ashen faced; Go to a new service...

A city is a carpet of lights

A city is a carpet of lights, Each one, a sun orbited by a galaxy of lives Unknown; unknowable, events unfolding beyond different horizons May, 2014.

Desire Path

Behind the houses winding; snake-like through forgotten places, The spirit of going, free from taming ideas of arrival A path into haunted woods,...

Like a tide, traffic

Like a tide, traffic brims at the junction, Cars, different as snowflakes Held in fragile unity, At the change; breaking, becoming drops Running,...
1 likes

Visiting

The crowd comes at dusk From places that are known To here that is nowhere, Standing dumbly wondering At an end or beginning, Their lives all hold...
1 likes

Iron Harvest

Under winter skies earth gives up the memory of pain; Who would have thought so little could undo so many; Death in a handful of casings This is how...

Vigil

Hour strung against hour Your life unravelled, Breath became wind, blowing Over deserts fused into glass; Heartbeat turned to Morse Broadcast from...
1 likes

A moment of clarity

A moment of clarity In the bar heads tilt backwards, Skulls grinning laughter at worn out jokes, Relaxing, my face fits back its mask, This is a...

Stump

In green solitude, nature's castle laid open; The end attached to all beginnings; The seed tracks back to zero, Through loam dominion dwindles, First...

Strawberry

Strawberry In the ward garden, one strawberry Red,perfect; picked By a woman life blew asunder, The spoils of the finder, here Quartered between...

Poem for August 6th

Open skies are deceptive, Their bland innocence hides The falling speck; becoming A scar decades raw. Under the same sky A new world slumbers, Blooms...

Solitary

Solitary Waking to darkness, The bridge back from alone Youth used to cross easily Age has washed away Peace grudgingly kept, Between all you never...

The Torturer's Horse

The Torturer's Horse They got me wrong, Those long haired poets hunting Always for tidy metaphors, There was no allegory hiding In the heat making me...

Farming Tomorrow

No fickle sun warms unfurling leaves, A slow ballet danced To the din of tomorrow Coming into its kingdom, On silicone hills under electric skies...

Please Clarify Your Instructions

Please Clarify Your Instructions Please clarify your instructions The system demands answers, Sees only in monochrome Avoiding grey areas, poetry,...

A Murmeration.

A Murmeration. Above stark fields, turning as one small lives in unison, A pattern, wonder enough to see, still more to think on, Surely evidence a...
Cherry

Blast

Blast . Years, the shell slept In earth bought with blood. Long enough to forget Munitions girls, flirting with boys A King Emperor sent to fight His...
1 likes