The Claims You Made
Strange how I never found a way
to make the most of our time
together. Subject to gradual decay,
that withering half-life bereft of rhyme
was filled with wasted hours
searching out a perfect sunset.
When I sent you flowers
you claimed them counterfeit,
said you could divine a petal’s clumsy repair
coloured with impermanent marker pen.
When I said that you were fair
you claimed this as the forever lie of men
who lacked the passion, wit and skill
to understand love - and understanding, then fulfil.
Conversation With My Muse
When you come
is it to rescue me from the desert
of ideas or to remind me of the tomb,
encourage reassembling parts
of history behind myopic eyes?
Inadequate graces
weakly dovetail semi-blatant lies
from reimagined faces
made bankrupt by the trickster Age,
then fail to infuse this tongue
with anything more than clichéd love or rage.
I aspire to be freed by song
as if there might be words to slow down time,
and slowed, for retarded time to then be stopped by rhyme.
Frost & Fog
Surprised by the renegade day
you had expected a temperate
embrace, something more fitting for late May.
This chill has the air of a failed first date.
In the gathering grey nothing shines,
your hopes dimmed
as the sundial’s vague shadow slowly declines.
Like a boat with sails untrimmed
you wallow and fade
becalmed in an all-consuming mist
leaving no trace but the shade
and shape of one hoping to be kissed.
Robbed of straight-edged horizon, what’s left to see
but your blank life, still and frosted and solitary?
Constructive Criticism
Against a scratching post the big cat paws
sharpening its claws ready to protect its brood;
about its savage jaws
dried traces of incriminating blood.
In the back room the Writing Group meets
to discuss their relationship with time,
custodians picking at each other’s work as if sour sweets
or doing so was a newly tolerated crime.
Later, the furrowing of your brow
accompanies the instinct to again take up a pen,
indulge the compulsion of an addict to allow
your whelp to be sacrificed to other less worthy men.
Why is there something that’s always wrong,
your work’s dissection leaving you impotent and unsung?
Compulsion
Abstracted from reality, he painted,
consumed by a passion
with which he had become compulsively acquainted.
A slave to fashion
he blamed heaviness of touch for rolling
inadequately with the punches,
failing to bob and weave and avoid their controlling
and non-instinctive hunches.
“It’s not important what’s created”
he claimed, in part confessing
an expectation to be defeated.
“In the end there is nothing
I can do to deny this shallow pleasure,
made slave to things I doubt anyone will treasure.”