I have been writing poetry since 1970 and was involved organising readings and poetry events in the late 1970’s/early 1980s. A few poems were printed in anthology pamphlets at that time, but it was not until 2014 that I brought out my first collection, ‘Emerging From Anaesthesia’; the pamphlet ‘A Letter From Fowey Moor’ followed in 2019. ‘Emerging From Anaesthesia’ is dedicated to my late wife, Jan; it includes poems written throughout our lives together, from 1975 to 2011, and digital images created subsequently. ‘ A Letter from Fowey Moor’ is a group of poems written about the moor that was renamed as ‘Bodmin Moor’ by the Ordnance Survey in 1830. Several of the poems set out here are included in these publications, others are unpublished. ‘A Letter from Fowey Moor’ (£5.00) and ‘Emerging From Anaesthesia’ (£10.00) can be obtained by emailing me direct or from Terre Verte gallery.
List of titles
Consett
True North
4 Now
Excalibur
Booglarised on Bodmin Moor
At Occazinny
Desire
Found Pome, Crossword 27/12
At Cocklawburn
The Last Chance Saloon
Consett
Walk the drover’s road,
the one that walks northwest
toward the wall, following a line
of roman mesh which
tried to net these hills.
Go when the frost sings on the glass
of the sky, breath freezes;
go when your feet snap brittle snow
expanding the silence.
The bare flank of a town
will cross your bows
like a black dreadnought
stilled on rolling white
Its stacks once supported growths
of gray, white and brick red;
its decks were dusted pink
with the powdered blood of iron.
The day I shot the billy, I hoisted
a friend by slack hooves and peeled him.
One slit opened his innards
and showed the world his engine room
silenced but still steaming
as it spilled forward glistening.
There was never before so much vacancy
as faced me in that cavern
between his narrow ribs.
True North
The sill’s whin edges
lean north, sphinx like;
as the straight road fades east
into low cloud and rain.
Here’s the march,
empire meeting wilderness,
lines of bronzed bog,
peat-water sky flatlining
North.
Close to the stars, flocked
and sparse, living etched.
Here love is like flint and
asphodel, all myrtle, husk
and lanolin; clouds of vapour
always scudding.
Mercury lives low,
and the needle so steady and
True.
4 Now
There’s the yellow globe o’ the moon
setting right over the rooftops
across the street.
It is 10 to 4 in the morning 4th February,
its fiery golden bead is lodged
in a narrow gap between the curtains.
Something woke me right now
to see its eye looking into the room
at me. I got up and went for a piss,
then looked out at the frost on the street
and the stars. Tiny crystal glinting, the
perfect stillness of everything,
frozen at 4 degrees below.
The alignment – la luna right on the rooftop,
the crack in the curtain, my eye –
made me write all this down.
Like the transit of Venus, a perfect moment
pointless and moving on majestically
slow-motion in the ball room
dancing dynamo of night wondrous
and angel-headed as the
huge atlas of the world is
to an open-eyed child
in their own early morning.
Excalibur
Mountain slopes into wind, a horn
leaning a crackled sabre on curved sky, a sweep
of corrugated blade, blooded at dawn;
climbers fold their tents, leaving sleep
and ashes on the turf where their dreams
so quickly slain, are already buried deep.
Rose light softens their silhouetted
knotting against the sun as it climbs
their aspirations, awaiting kinesis;
as day is loosed, their scramble tilts
at scree, the polished hillside flung like flame,
a sword from the valley embedding its hilt.
So another quest stretches up the pass
in sharp brief outline, as quickly the mist
blurs the distant point, stabbing at stars.
Booglarised on Bodmin Moor
(After Don Van Vliet)
Magnet pulls on the line deep in the ground
Draw the cloud cover down over the moor
Day almost lost in the sudden rain, sheeting.
From dark, pelting: below, above, past.
Sun emerges moments later, changes
Zoom after each other, tempest’s light
Spark the flint, pregnant with thunder, greeting:
“You can hold, once it start”
Now it is bright again, glistening light on wet
Which beads, smells, glows. Reach out your
Hand and touch the bracken stones, circle
Has it, stood silent centuries, stooped, pointing.
Bottom where the shadows end, moon rises
Or sets, more storm racing east, illuminated
Top, run for cover, ancient footsteps, panting:
“Neither got it, sun zoom spark”
Sun sets on the interlocking hurlers, nocturnes
Zoom in underground, aurora, see the sea,
Spark distance gold, edge of darkness reeling
“You can hold, once it start”
” I don’t care who you are, what size you are.
It’s gonna magnetise you, drawn day,
Neither got it, sun zoom spark.”
At Occazinney
(for Rich Lloyd)
So the road and I arrived at Occazinney
( land to the west of the rising sun ).
It was in the mogshade, nearly midsummer
and I saw the half moon go halfway up
the blue, cloud flecks painted onto the supple sky.
I saw the buttercups getting yellower
across the fields, as far as my eye would take me,
it was after a long journey, winding
here and there, in the cities and their streets, over
oceans, between walls and their people,
their dalliances, suffering, the eager sharpness
of lives, the long losses, hopes and
disappointments, all their gifts and voyages.
It is downhill now, between the banked trees
foxgloves and campions blush the hedgerows
pink; I walk in the middle of the lane,
where nobody walks any more.
The queens of the May have all been decked
in their blossom, cream, now it begins to fall
like snow. The spuggies are fledged.
And everything past is remembered.
Only the future’s enigma eludes
and eludes, as it steps beside me, into me,
stride by magical stride; and the sleeping blue dark
overtakes, the shadows of the moonlight
still as memories in this place of stones.
Desire
The day quivers, is green
between walls made of stone;
anticipation builds in the dam.
Soon our limbs will tangle deliciously
in the sluices. Taken by the flood,
we will know the unknowable,
momentarily.
Found Pome in Crossword, 27 December
Very hot band.
Unhappy fall guy kidnapping primate,
shot person is a bloomer
spending a penny, hugging woman
on throne, admitted
to the smallest room.
Somewhat discreet in shade,
nowhere to be seen, I seat building
after pay increase – almost getting
nothing. Doctor of poetry.
A classical hero with clothes
for yellow top.
Soft, inhale dope, the mad dog
unites a trio of redheads, furious
with enmity, nail-biting
until exhausted. Europeans taking
siestas, one on deck doffing cap,
beginning to climb.
Encapsulating native gas ring
blocked by end of pipe bruiser,
chewed thistle, roll criminal,
loose, untreated idiots identifying
the house sparrow : ancient
individual breaking leg.
Fastener held by Greek character,
the wrong duck on land. Port
where British don’t work
with Irish infestation.
At Cocklawburn
Beyond where harebells nod fragile
in the blue breeze, and sandy aprons of dunes
drop down to the strand between tufts of maram,
the cracked ribs of golden stone finger
out to where the waves break and foam:
it begins and ends here in the tidepools.
The dust of you scattered where they ebb
and fill beneath a pure blue sky that
opened sheathes of cloud as we walked.
Your fragments lay on the saltwater, drifted
on the midsummer wind, shimmered down
to settle with the sealife in the rock pools,
anemones, urchins, tiny crabs and crayfish
who live in a world now still, then deep,
at one with their daily tidal turbulence.
The breakers come in line by line, sets
softly splintering at rocks and dividing
into ripples, eddies, wavelets. The pools
are overrun and over flow, the flower
grain essence of you, eddying too, mingling,
dispersed into returning; our tears, you
atoms from stars, our source, the briney.
You are even more at one with sand and surf
than when you played here as a child. Sea
reclaiming your gone body, your presence in
the cool wind on my face, the thoughts
that thud in my ribcage, wrenching : always,
every beach, each whiff or glimpse of saltwater,
will float you back, one buoyant memory
after another – seal, kelp, kite and submarine,
in rocks and sand, amongst the flowers.
AT THE LAST CHANCE SALOON
(Dylan Thomas centenary & 2014 IPCC report)
If earth’s oestrus is over, we decline,
and then, for sure, a dying of the light;
if not, it’s time for rage, rage one last time.
Wise men know and follow evolution’s line
and they’ll accept the coming of the night –
if earth’s oestrus is over, we decline.
Good men live true their lives, have seen the signs,
gentle persuasion undoes the doubters’ sight –
if not, it’s time for rage, rage one last time.
Wild men run to the woods, live in their minds,
shrug their shoulders, no point in the fight –
if earth’s oestrus is over, we decline.
Grave men pondering their last chance to shine
ask, is hope enough for their children’s right –
if not, it’s time for rage, rage one last time.
And you, my father, I ask you what is mine –
to choose the path, to know the future’s might:
if earth’s oestrus is over, we decline;
if not, it’s time for rage, rage one last time.