BEHOLDING THE LONDON GLOOM FROM THE OVERGROUND....(SUNDOWNER)

 

'He triumps now, the dead,

Beholding London's gloom'

(Lionel Johnson)

Beholding the London gloom

 from the overground

                                bound to Gospel Oak. 

There is a beam of fickle sunlight

 that glares onto the buildings plateglass

a succession of drystone walls 

with all the verdigris

of centuries and drizzles.

*

Komorebi

                     -so call the Japanese 

the sunbeams filtered through the trees.

 I want to be called Komorebi, Komorebi,

 even the tender sound of the word

subdues the clicketyclack of the train

alighting on West Hampstead.

Call me Komorebi, Anne, when I be home

with your favourite Jaffa cake and carnations.

Conatus 

               -so called Spinoza the strength

driving each human being to carry on...

Carry on in this gloominess, Jo, 

keep at watching those strands of light 

along the bridges and fences.

But how could I avoid watching all that knackered

people in tracksuits and elegant suits?

How can I get rid of that voices chewing

like cows trite and rain-streaked words?

How can I turn all that mud into light?

I can listen outside the leaves 

of the ash trees hissing in the wind.

I can see a posse of thugs that pull

a mooney to the train passing by.

I can see a pigeon pecking at a dog-end.

Carry on, mental Jo, sing along with the rain

pitter-patter on the cobblestones.

"Something will turn up"

                            -says Wilkins Micawber 

with his eye-glass and walking stick

 waving at me a silk hankie from a park bench.

I smirked him back.

Disabused of reality, down-trodden by hope...

Carry on, mental Jo, ya scum of the earth

enlisted to drink, ya closet poet, dotty low-lifer,

man up and stop nursing the same flummery moans...

*

A smell of deep-fry cast my reveries away.

I still don't know if I got off at Gospel Oak

or at a purple and desolate seaside in Devon.

THE BAREFOOT POET

The barefoot poet walks carelessly

over the last shards of his wisdom:

crimson, green, blue, yellow shards

glinting by the autum gloam.

Far from bleeding his feet sing out

all the paths he never wandered

all the paths he is just traversing

all along the next life.

BAREFOOT

 

The uneventful life of a poet

barefoot in soiled dungarees

deadheading carnations

first thing in the morning

trying to balance the scales

of justice and madness.

Satiated his magpie need

to shiny words

he leaned a ladder

against an invisible wall

to climb for his shadow

stolen by the dimming stars.

He hears goat-bells

from a violet distance,

the rustling of some cipress

that godly seems

to hallow the morning

crowned by a sun

forever in childhood

forever in gold.

PASTORAL

 

An old van rusting away

by an elm-lined footpath,

a cat stares at me bemused

like someone seeing a ghost.

A dray horse weary near

an old stone trough

bites a beam of sunshine,

huffs and puffs at hearing

my sighs.

There is an apple tree nearby

a honeycomb of irate bees

there is a beetle corpse dragged

by ants on a straight line

there is a din of merry birds

circling above

and the sudden sight of a naked

maiden riding a deer

there is the hermit's ramshackle hut

where I'll be kipping for a while

over the dead leaves

a brownish skull as a pillow

a firefly as a lover.

*

Like a salesman 

who sells pure mornings 

never stained by polluted cities

venal glories,

I sat over an oak stump

to bargain with the stars above

my next cloak of invisibility:

there hardly I am but I am

at least bedazzled

by the flying squirrel

about to jump

upward to the moon.

(2007)

LETHOLOGICA*

 

Like a moth buzzing around a flower- her whirr of voice

as she can't alight on a word. 

(Virginia Woolf)

I cannot find the right word

to define my present station of life.

Maybe quietus, maybe oddling.

Oddling crow in the quietus

of a back and forth existence.

The right word is a moth flitting

around the light we'll never see

for good. The right word is

like Democritus in his garden

laughing off for nothing

while tending black roses.

*The inability to remember a particular word or name.

SHADE

 

 

I do well in the shade  near the hydrangeas

and my dreaming cat   without the tyranny of the sun

spotlighting everything I do well.

Only the violet shade can shine

all this black brooding from the spirit,

the wishfulthinkingness of life.

A true poet is a hawker crying out

to sell the goods of his soul knowing

that only the Devil can afford them.

.  

ASHES

 

my own ashes well kept

 in a transparent urn

of heartwood and amber.

Shall I scatter them from a cliff

in Patmos or maybe in Corfu?

perhaps they might turn into a white trireme

 sailing away to the sun. Perhaps

I'll be expecting so long for the arrival

that a war in Troy will break out again; 

this time Priam would be the victorious one

and Ulysses crushed by his own wooden horse.

and Helen up to the creek sick of Paris

would end up jumping on the white trireme

seaworthy for the distant Egypt.

 patiently patiently I'd be expecting: the world

has defeated me but not the freedom

of my wandering ashes.