JULY

GRIEVANCE

Young life takes leave.

A loved young soul, when loved ones grieve,

Is borne to the Lord

on the wings of their sighs.

Who prays when an old man dies?

Young blood runs cold.

A loved young tale is told & told.

But when a life of time

has frayed love’s ties,

Who tells when an old man dies?

A young life lost.

A loved young pearl is sold at great cost.

But who’s got a copper

for an old man’s eyes?

Who pays when an old man dies?

A young man falls.

Loved young throats fill grand old halls.

I’ll fall to the tune

of a raven’s cries.

Who sings when an old man dies?

Lombardy, June 2020

AUGUST

THE PROPHET & THE GIRL

A bright hot day by a sunburnt sky,

a dust-choked prophet

in a ghost-wracked street

stepped on a soapbox stand & cried:

“The Sun King’s soon to die.”

And as he hollered of the fall of the king,

nobody gathered at his soapbox stand

but the watchmen came

& they clipped his wings

& trussed his beak with a bullring.

They left him bound

in the dust-choked street

muzzled & bound & left to die,

so he scraped in the dust

with his road-wrecked feet:

“It’s the Sun King’s last defeat.”

But the night winds ravaged

the work of his claws

& the dawn dogs hovered

by his death-marked side,

so he sketched his last words

with the last of his force

in the blood that leaked

from his ring-trussed jaws.

The dawn dogs howled

by the blood-soaked ground.

A young girl followed

that ghost-wracked sound

& these are the blood-red words she found:

“The Sun King’s dead, girl

– take his crown.”

So a prophet dies at a watchman’s hand.

The Sun King plummets to the desert sand.

By a sunless sky in a bright hot land,

a young girl takes to the soapbox stand.

Berlin, July 2020

BLESSING

Pain be your daylight

when you walk the sunless valley,

Pain be your mainstay

when your mettle turns to straw,

Pain be your bedrock

when you brave the sands of worry,

Pain be your tailwind

when you sail out from the shore.

Love the pain that chose you

for it knows you like a lover –

Loveless or beloved,

your pain is yours

& yours to keep.

Listen for pain’s whisper,

& the truths it may uncover,

Listen for pain’s cry

& how it echoes in the deep.

Pain be your compass

when there’s rage in all the heavens,

Pain be precious flotsam

in the wake of every storm,

Pain be your beacon

when you delve in lifeless caverns

& find that in the fire long spent

the ashes are still warm.

Berlin, September 2020.

(Translated from Sebastian Bacchus, “Geh’ mit dem Schmerz”)

OCTOBER

ALL EYES OTHER

Now all your childhood castles

are with worries overgrown,

and all your childhood heroes

by new villains overthrown,

and all your dreams imprisoned

in a tower made of stone,

and you wish upon the mirror

any image but your own,

Now you’ve let down your defences,

told me tales of skin & bone,

how through all your years of solitude

you were scared to be alone –

Love, your mirror is a trickster

for you never see what’s shown –

Love, your beauty is a beacon

to all eyes other than your own.

for Louise

Paris, May 2019

THE CORNED-BEEF KEY

The man that checks his weather app

& not whether his window’s wet –

I must confess, through gritted teeth

That I’ve become that man & yet

the child that stole the corned-beef key

& left the meat upon the shelf

& put it in his treasure-tin,

– he lives in me & in rude health,

He tap-dances in my half-drunk skull,

rattling his treasure-tin,

I twist to check if today’ll be cold,

he trampolines on my skeleton.

Go now, child: Write no commands

but songs. Deal in songs, not gold.

Breathe no wind but songs

& take your songs

& soothe the world’s unsouled.

Berlin, November 2020

GRAVITY

I hunt between the streetlamps nightly

cries of ghosts in shuttered bars,

& feel my own life as light & unlikely

as in the darkness between two stars

where nothing else remains perhaps

but two bright planets spiralling,

each equal prey to equal traps,

a furious, loving fall & spin,

blind in furious revolutions,

raging as they spin & fall,

blind to all great machinations

like the last couple in the shuttered dancehall.

The more I hunt, the more I find

the more I find, I tread less lightly.

It should suffice the patient mind

to never know but know how likely.

Berlin, December 2020