From ear to temple,
A well-defined vein
Scampering
Like a mouse’s ECG.
Is that effective, in the boardroom?
Does it clench, when brushed
By an intensity of thought,
Or misgiving?
Do clients divine in its shallow
Oscillations
Reassurance?
I think, perhaps unfairly,
That it must say something,
If only because its bearer
Feels that way too.
Someone with the authority to do so
Had tended a toppled bollard
With black bin liner.
The University slope recalled,
Of all places,
Aberystwyth.
Stethoscope antlers peeked
Ostentatiously
Out of white coat pockets.
High-rises everywhere,
As inscrutable as people
You will never see inside.
It jerks and rumbles through the blue,
Hauling night-capped sitters
Over seven time-zones.
They emerge rubbing bleary sun,
Breathing forgotten toothpaste.
Clock hands are all out of whack,
If anything slipping slyly back,
And the taxi red in a breakfast noon.
That night it’s 3am, or 7pm,
Dinner: broccoli, salmon, spaghetti!
The routine buoys him,
The rhythm looses,
And floating on homeward foam,
He departs a nameless jetty.
Dotted lanterns wend invitingly
Up the smudged hillside.
I want to go there,
But the sculpted steps will be treacherous:
Yesterday was T8,
And the typhoon washed the whole island.
It has moved on now,
Moved home across the waves,
But it is still apparent,
Puddled on the roads and in the vapour.
The descendant mist stoops fast,
Faster than expected,
And soon those distant lanterns will be unwinked;
What then will guide the crowd,
Through the heavy, pressing shroud,
And keep the stumblers back
Beyond the brink?
TOMMY ROBBINS
I’m not a poet.
I don’t even know why I’m writing these lines.
But it seems the best thing to do.
I’ve got to man up,
Stop fumbling a greeting
Each time she swings past.
The smell of her!
As a kid, I’d roll in the fields,
Crushing the tansies and chamomile
Beneath the back of my Marvel tee;
Their scents spilt all over me,
And I’d lie in them,
Somehow assured that school
And Paul’s cancer and my lost iPod
Would be alright.
That’s how Yvonne smells.
She’s periphery too.
I think we’d understand one another,
If I could just muster an ice
Breaker. I remember when we
Brushed arms. My dark and her pale hairs
Pulled for one another.
I was too shy to apologise.
YVONNE BLOO
These boys-not-men,
These less-than-gentle,
These eyes-not-on-my-eyes.
I hear their filthy dreams,
Conceived each minute
In flush and heat and thighs.
Momma told me, she told me,
The quiet ones are the worst.
And that Tommy Robbins is quiet.
I’ve seen his gawks and ogles,
His nostrils when I’m near.
He’s lust in a pinkish shell.
Last week he touched me,
TOUCHED ME!
I know I heard him moan,
Like a conscience tasting delicious sin.
He must think about me too;
In his mind he’ll have defiled me
A hundred ways,
As a quiet boy’s mind will.
Well, he’ll not spoil me in
God’s
Eyes much longer.
I’m up now against his window jamb,
Carrying Pa’s hammer.
Ben had an ear stud
And was already thirteen,
Which made him the natural leader.
He marched us across the wasteland
In a proper wedge formation,
Scraggled grass and dust
At our feet.
When we reached the chain-link trees
And leafed fence, sun in our
Eyes, he pointed out the old persons’ home.
Pruned Glaswegians lay sunk
In the terrace deck chairs.
We had munitions:
Wild fruits like cranberries,
But poisoned, maybe,
And we flung them with our kiddy arms.
Until Ben cried,
I got one in his mouth!
We bolted then, but a rasp from the faded
Feminine span me round.
Let me get a good look at ye,
Ye delinquent thug!
My conscience whimpered, and I hated Ben.
People get away with things
Because they make good metaphors.
Nobody wants squid ink in their cow’s milk,
Or snake bite in the community well;
The path most trodden is for chattel,
With the cud unchewed
In all four stomachs.
And the voice on the corner,
Swept up in the prevailing wind,
Surely has some sense to breathe
From her unkempt lips.
Don’t you hate it, when the umbrella
Span is nearly enough and leaves you nearly wet?
You pull it down fast, like a blind,
And single hairs get yanked in the metal hinges.
The amount of human festooned
In umbrella frames defies belief.
Plenty to restart, when we realise
The personalised clods we stand on
Owe us nothing.
That’s assuming, of course, that Elon
Finds enough introvert fuck-ups
To water carrots for the rest of their lives.
People get away with all sorts of silly things.
Fourteen days adrift at sea.
Morale had ebbed as far.
Sun dried spittle on the lips
Which crimped like roads to Shangri-La.
Men sucked orange (flesh and pips)
And ground the rinds down for their tea:
“A treat,” they’d whisper, close to tears;
The waves below lapped hungrily.
More days passed, in their place fears
Took sailors in their grips;
Those fears hauled three men overboard
To glug a fate beyond their ship’s.
At length one sailor saw his sword
Not as a sword but as some shears
With which to trim a better meal than
Dregs and rinds and empty beers.
Man looked to man much less like man,
Much more a scrumptious hoard:
Offal, marrow, suckled meats —
Enough for fillets flat and broad.
June rolls around, and I hear them,
Coiling their canisters
In the meadows
And depressions
Left by picnic blankets.
They want to bung me up,
To pepper-spray me until
My eye-water leaves me
Smudged rugged.
They want me to slow choke,
And wake with a stale fur
Like lichen over
Teeth and tongue.
These are your flowers, you poets,
These Husseinist bioarms,
These roses and lilies,
Petunias and daffodils,
Ranked to smear summer
Across the unchallenged face.
What do you know?
My name.
Your name?
My name.
Do you suppose Eric
Is stamped on your soul
In indelible hand?
Or did Dickie and Sue
Pluck randomly from
A blue boys’ book of names?
The latter.
Is Eric then the germ
Of each thought, word and act
That Eric — yourself — enacts?
Unlikely.
Unlikely.
Maybe though I have a better name?
One that spoken explains my borders
And maps out my life to the last.
Without a doubt.
But tracing that name is like damming
Time’s meander:
Hopeless, hopeless,
But what else can you do?
Shorter Poems 