· Graduation Day 3/11/80
Life Sentence 12/7/81
Returned Dundee – Sept ‘81
Mum Died at Christmas sometime in 1983
Call for the Razor 18/12/98
If you love me 18/10/98
Gone 24/10/03
Shingle Beach 17/12/03
Waking the Dead 8/1/04
He does not deserve you 22/1/04
Graduation Day
Sadness drops its crazed rain
To beat me down again.
Your trophied voice is caressed
In memory
And graduates
Into poetry
Still falls the rain
As I leave your thoughts
Shuffled recollections,
Hoping to turn up the ace
As the rain mingles with the joker’s tear
Perhaps,
When night compels your solitude
And you meet yourself once more
The loaded hand of love
Will beckon come closer
And risk another look
Perhaps when night compels my discourse
And I meet the King once more
The cards will reshuffle
And the hand of order
Will dry the tears
That the rain beats out.
3/11/80
Life Sentence
And when the time came to speak
The automatic voice continued
While inside the angered screams grew louder,
Pitifully confused by their silence,
Shedding their knuckle-
Around prison walls
And when the time came to stop
I was saddened to ignore you
Through my self-
knowing your unconscious disapproval -
Should the truth be known –
Of being outside the walls.
And come the time to leave,
Should death have stood with me
It would have found comfort
Within this condemned cell,
Where words can no longer be withheld
And distance now makes truth tell
That I love you.
12/7/81
Returned
Back again…
To the raised voices
And tear-
High-
With spinning-
Self-
And punch-
Back again…
To the searching for riches
Beyond the flesh-
Beyond the masquerade
Of lepered hand in silken glove
To the nail-
In the decadence of Your love.
Dundee – Sept ‘81
Mum Died at Christmas
And as the tinselled world
Celebrated its Christ in lavish ignorance –
We walked together to that cliff-
Where lovers depart in silence.
The life-
Stretched for its second parting
Carried your remote eyes
Back to the pains of birth.
And silence, brutalised in this contortion of events
Asked my hand to take yours
Until the edge was reached
When you walked on
Then death at Christmas
Returned the pains of birth
That tinsel insulted
And death alone brought meaning
sometime in 1983
Call for the razor
Call for the razor, the scalpel, the knife
The sharpest of tools that can cut through my life
And carve out your soul from my overblown heart
Until I find what is mine
Until I see who you are
Until I trace how we fare when taken apart
Call for the pastor, the poet, the priest
The wisest of women, the learned deceased
To sever my dreaming from your true delight
Until I find what is mine
Until I see who you are
Until I know why the two of us fail to unite
Call for the moment, the month and the year
The distance of time that can stifle my tears
And banish your ghost from this spiralling dance
Until I find what is mine
Until I see who you are
Until I know what is real in this spell of romance
Call for the reaper, the father of time
And come put an end of this fierce dream of mine
By snuffing you out of this lingering flame
Return what is mine
From the want of who you are
And let me discover the light that remains
18/12/98
If you love me
If you love me
I must wait
And see what gifts
You choose to bring to my door
Because I have spent
Too long
Giving to others
Only to discredit their gifts to me
As reciprocal obligations
And I must bear the silence
Without assumption
And allow the pregnancy of love
Chance to grow its offspring
And if you don’t love me
I must wait
And let the absence of gifts
Not represent my lovelessness
Or your distance
But that love is rare
And precious
And I am still valuable
Without your love
Only,
I don’t know who I will be
Either way round
Because I am so lost
In my abandon to you
And so lost
In the silence of these circumstances
That I ache with the yearning
And I grieve with the waiting
And I die with the fearing.
So dear love,
Save me.
Because I don’t want to save
Myself
From this tragic journey
That must be better
Than the boredom
Of my current
Safety.
18/10/98
Gone
This empty page
Stands fuller than my heart
More complete than the shredded sinews
Left by your stolen life
Lock every hope away
Hold every breath of life
Quieten the eager birds of fancy
That fly when attachment is gone
Sit close now the ache of loss,
The protracted absence that
Turns its shock into the constant pummel
Of the helpless heart
My love is gone
The world is dead
But I live on.
24/10/03
Shingle Beach
Strange, coarse sand-
Where grey sea strikes lunar gravel-
Here we come to scream at God
In the span of water and thrash of the tide
On harsh stones,
Ground to insignificance by the merciless
Force of generations
We stand to fight,
But collapse in the futility
Of our useless screams,
Beaten dreams
The battered shores of our short lives
Search for a plausible horizon
But hear only of death lightened
By the power to resist despair
Strange, short life-
Ground down in the flowering hopes of spring
And driven into winter's fierce tides
All gone, all gone
All drained into the shingle of this bastard beach
All dried of promise
All crushed
Overpowered
Silenced
And now
Washed up on a new landscape
I stand with these pictures -
Without you
17/12/03
Waking the Dead
That moment…
When you say their name
Over and over
Pulsing hands on pulseless skin…
Not daring to accept
The obvious -
They are gone.
Months later
Heart still bent on
Waking the dead
Head still dead from
Waking alone.
No point now in
Wanting the waking
Only the waking of
The living
Borne on the trail they leave:
The waking they brought
In you
The gift of life
Now yours
To live
Awake
Awakened
More fully alive
Where they awakened the dead
In you.
8/1/04
He does not deserve you
He does not deserve you -
Accept nothing less than being
Completely
Cherished.
I came to her in the long grass
When summer bronze was all our memory
And skin grew more tender by day
For lazing in that pasture
And whispers' echoed motion
Teased our love to boldness
'Til touch and heart found union
And sun flamed in our open veins...
Does he so deserve you?
Accept nothing less than being
Completely
Cherished.
I held you as you awoke
Roused from love's enduring dream
When bodies vanish, float and burn
Then wake entranced in love's return
And more than awake but awakened we sat
With this gift, our gifted new being -
Then I gave you back to the green earth
Forever grown and gone
No more in need of my love song
Does he, does he deserve you?
Accept nothing less than being
Completely
Cherished.
And release nothing less than
Your own
Complete
Cherishing -
So find the
Homecoming
That kisses your future
With freedom.
22/1/04