Poems published online:

Three poems, From Lines by Kenneth Patchen #1, #15, #25

There, at the entrance to the other world,
every prospect looked tired.
He wanted to throw something
so he picked up a baseball.
It looked tired. The world, it said,
is too old. Too old for a home
run, it said, and added
you can’t run home…

Two Days before the Fall of Kabul

On the examining table,
woman leaning into my back
as the hard end of her scanner
presses into my breastbone.

Looking for the sort of evidence
the body gives up to scrutiny.
Is the heart up to the forces
ranged against it. Or not…

Extended Magic Cat Metaphor

Once you disassemble it
it’s all fucked up.
Turns out just
despair held it together.

Blinky the magic cat
laid sweets —
paper-wrapped,
coloured or  plain,

familiar or unknown
like eggs for years,
then one day
Blinky broke:

Oft Have I Travelled

Evening light hits the garden like a paint bomb,
drenches the rusty gooseberry patch and the loganberries,
drowns the tumbledown flowers and the compost heap
with its surround of corroded metal grates
glowing orange — explodes, and throws its shrapnel
straight at my eyes. So it’s no wonder — you see —
that I can’t see. It makes me a Midas,
my green-fingered fingers golden in the dirt,
where everything I touch becomes — well —
Focus, on something little. This flower, borage.
This one’s really borage, the others aren’t.
Their furry leaves will prick you if they can…

Note: This poem originally appeared on the podcast The Thunder Mutters, produced by Adam Horovitz and Becky Dellow

The Love Ditty of an ’eartsick Pirate

It’s time we be goin’, me hearty, avast!
When the night’s nailed up its colours to its mast
Like some swab loaded to the gun’les ’n’ lashed to the plank;
Arr, make our way by th’ ghosty ports o’ call,
The bloody Triangle,
Quietin’ the parrots, kippin’ in dens of iniquity,
Where the scraps o’ the earth mixes with the scrapin’s o’ the sea:
Down alleys where ye argues if ye durst:
The forebodin’ of th’ accursed…

The Bog of Despair

We’d lunched on Greek salad and coffee
In a place with white walls and a skylight,
And when the guy in the corner’s phone
Went off in a polyphonic can-can
We laughed without even trying to hide it…

From Lines by Kenneth Patchen #5

I pick up the evening as dusk falls, pick up fidgets
as the storm hits. Here’s a letter about the weather
to all you so-called liberals. Goddamn us all & our
carefully sorted recycling, & the freezer’s friendly hum,
our ice-makers & our accounts at H&M.
We hate the frackers & we run our mouths off
on their hot old gas. It should be sufficient, what’s
in front of us, food in the cupboard and garden,
the friends we live (if we’re lucky enough) among.
But here I am, peering over thousands of miles
to a webcam, again, watching another hurricane…

Note: the poem is appended to ‘The climate, capitalism and poetic resistance’, an essay by Fran Lock

Three poems on Peony Moon

from ‘Hammershøi’:

ii.
Interior, With Coffeepot

The other chair is pushed away
as if the artist had been sitting on it;
a coffee pot hovers on the table.
There is a woman there, and one cup.
‘Not only is the artist,’ he says, ‘a child.’
‘He is an only child.’ His wife sits by herself.
He sits by himself. They are joined together
by the two ends of the brush.

From Lines by Kenneth Patchen #48

This body of blood & flesh, this ‘gift’
this female body, about which even now so little is known
& so much contested
so many contracts drawn up by men —

just imagine your body as the battleground
in every battle of your life —

Do the Culture Clash

You can zap but you can’t count on zip
if the charge won’t fly and the genetic
(wings have evolved) possibility (and de-
evolved more than) remains (40 times)
many times
vestigial in the dystopia.
There’s cute, there’s more cute,
and there’s electrocute
in our dystopia…

The Something of Your Heart

I drove the pickup of my wildest dreams
and crashed on the rocks of your wildest dreams.

I practiced the oboe of a neverending gymnasium
and sprained myself on a sonata.

You slipped on the banana peel of a colander
and were trapped in the heartache of an enclosure.