Contents
BLACK WATER..................................................................................................... 4
HEART SURGEON............................................................................................... 5
INTIMIDATING SWIMMER............................................................................ 6
A POEM BEFORE YOU GO TO SLEEP........................................................... 7
MY ALBATROSS................................................................................................... 8
INTIMATIONS...................................................................................................... 9
TWO MAGICIANS............................................................................................. 10
THE BORDER...................................................................................................... 11
THE BORDER...................................................................................................... 11
NAVIGATORS..................................................................................................... 12
THE SOUND BARRIER.................................................................................... 13
SIGHING SPIRITS............................................................................................. 14
ORPHEUS ON THE UNDERGROUND....................................................... 15
The Definition...................................................................................................... 15
The Bridge............................................................................................................. 15
The Ever Open door............................................................................................ 16
Semicolons:........................................................................................................... 16
Their Spheres........................................................................................................ 17
Time Zones........................................................................................................... 17
In Step.................................................................................................................... 17
Her Question........................................................................................................ 18
Fear of Snakes....................................................................................................... 18
Waves..................................................................................................................... 19
The Frozen Lake.................................................................................................. 20
The Lower Levels................................................................................................. 20
New Tortures........................................................................................................ 21
The Last Song....................................................................................................... 21
No One Listens.................................................................................................... 22
The Bridge And The Abyss................................................................................ 22
The Inner Circle................................................................................................... 23
The Romeo Trap.................................................................................................. 23
Another Answer.................................................................................................... 23
The Last Illusion.................................................................................................. 24
Last Fragment....................................................................................................... 24
THE LIE................................................................................................................. 25
DECEMBER.......................................................................................................... 26
IN BETWEEN...................................................................................................... 27
ROCKABYE........................................................................................................... 28
ON THE SHORE................................................................................................. 29
THE PALACE OF TEARS.................................................................................. 30
TOGETHER OR APART.................................................................................... 31
BLACK WATER
Black water still
Tidal and deep
Surface emulsion
Iridescent as oil
Cupped in your hand
Stained like whisky or tea
With tannin from the soil
Your hand in the water
Watch it disappear
Deeper and deeper
Sepia to blackout
Just like
Just like my memories
HEART SURGEON
She’s taking back her life
And only now it’s starting to hurt
Every smile has to be paid for
Every touch, every word
Every molecule removed
And all her strengths must be turned against me
All her acuity and edge
Her silence and her deliberation
Honed like a knife
I see her take that knife
Heartsurgeon neurosurgeon
Without anaesthetic
She cuts her eyes out of my eyes
Her face out of my face
It’s really beginning to hurt
Cuts her chest out of my chest
Memory by memory
She takes back her life.
She performs the operation perfectly.
She’s practised it on herself.
And when I look in the mirror
All I see is the shape of her vanished face
The darkness where her eyes were
The old heart pumping failing
Gushing useless blood...
Look at it all. Here it is...
Out through those arteries
Which no longer are attached.
She doesn’t leave scars. She doesn’t leave fingerprints
She doesn’t leave anything.
She’s a good surgeon, the best.
She’s practised on herself.
INTIMIDATING SWIMMER
Cut me like a sword
As you dive into the water
Lash out with your body
Like a dagger in the water
Blank me with your flip turns
Counting like a dancer
Rippling like a samurai
You know how to hurt
but your wake is calmer
Then turn on the light
Come up for air
You've grazed your lip
I can make it better
A POEM BEFORE YOU GO TO SLEEP
If words
Could keep
You warm
If thoughts
could take
Form
If letters
Could be hands
Figures
Turn to flesh
This poem would have
Unbuttoned your blouse
and be half way up your dress
MY ALBATROSS
So be my albatross
Hang around my neck
Feel my hot cheeks
As I plumb the depths
She said:
"I walked through the door and you gave me the startled look
Of a man hoping against hope
That I would walk through the door.
I thought what the hell
Your cheek was warm against mine."
Yes my cheeks are warm
Walking a tightrope of terror
Coming up to hit me
On either side
The loss
Bigger than we can imagine
My sweet albatross
Hanging around my neck
Feel my hot cheeks
As I plumb the depths
INTIMATIONS
Of being
The water
You swim in
I glide
In the slip-
stream
Hide
Alongside
Then slide
In your wake
You feel me
Slipping
Between
In between
Sheets
of
water
flesh
cotton
paper
Intimidating swimmer
My intimate
TWO MAGICIANS
He came to drink at the pool
And saw you there
His predatory eyes
He ran after
Playing without suspicion
She grazed herself on the side
Then transformed into
Wavering butterflies
She ran after
Became the snakes she feared
Slipping across the path
And he a desperate cockroach
Climbing forest bark
They ran after
He was the
Wide-eyed
Frightened fledgling
Shivering on her sill
So she made her
Blue grey eyes
A sky big enough to fly
But not fall down in
And where are the two magicians now?
Beyond romance
Beyond chance
Beyond reason
Beyond sense
Beyond caring
Beyond harm
THE BORDER
Who recognises this border?
A torn strip of shirt
Hanging on razor wire
In the spotlight of a searchtower
Fledglings feed and hush
Grass gapes through the broken
concrete of a checkpoint
Do you recognise this border?
I'm standing by the bridge
Looking at the river
Imagining what line I've crossed
What lines I've yet to cross
Will she search me
Refuse my excess baggage
Grant me a temporary visa
When does my exile begin?
Writing on the water
Drawing on it
Borders
After floods in Honduras
The roads were washed away
A bridge was left behind
While the river flowed around it
Blood flows now
where it shouldn't flow
The Atlantic ocean grows
At the same pace as
our fingernails
There is no border
NAVIGATORS
It was an act of suicide
Setting off without maps
In search of new world
When the world is flat
The world is flat
And there are not enough rations
Soon the knives are out
Everyone fighting over possessions
The bulwarks are leaking
Now the currents run awry
and every landfall is a desperate
Search for food and water
And there's no turning back
Because the winds have shifted direction
And even if we make this journey
Through the doldrums between the black rocks
We'll come to the edge of all known things
And fall off the flat earth
It was act of suicide
So they thought as they hauled
Further and further westwards
But the world is round
Even without flat maps
THE SOUND BARRIER
Night accelerates
In the jetstream
Orange to red to green to black
The moon rises phenomenally fast
When cleared for takeoff and the pounding jet
Takes a delicate ballet dancer's step
Into the big air, four g’s of compression
That’s how I feel now
High up in the jet stream
I cry at stupid movies
But at minus 70 outside my moisture
Cracks into stars
I had looked out of the same window for so long
Down the same street
Walked the same mental pathways
Knowing where they would lead
Night accelerates away
Through a crack on the horizon
Like a slanting trapdoor
A new day opens up
ORPHEUS ON THE UNDERGROUND
The Definition
Darkness defines us
Her hair up, black suit, smiling
At someone else, I just missed her
Glance –
It was a deeper way of glancing
Separate tours through the plantation
We were captured by the same expanding black
Pupils of a crouching panther
He saw us when we didn't.
Even when we danced, I didn’t
Dance with her, but the air
Behind her
And when the music stopped
We were dancing still
So much undone, unsaid, unknown
Understood
We stroll through the night rain,
Leaves shake
She’s afraid of snakes
I can’t dream of leaving
She returns to her room without turning,
(I admired that non glance)
But the night outside was now so dark
Turned the window into mirror
And she could see me
Looking back
The Bridge
Waiting by the bridge
Black water
White oak
With my head in my hands
To focus, for I knew
This was a border, watershed,
No maps for what lay ahead
If I went any further
There'd be no point turning back
Then you arrived
Your flashing smile
And without even noticing
I had already gone
The Ever Open door
There was something in him unfulfilled,
Something bigger than the shadow that he cast,
A photo of something not quite in frame
A language he had heard but hadn't learned
All through his childhood there was a picture
His mother called the Ever-Open Door
It was small - a faded watercolour of
Timber porch and a big stone arch
Opening onto a path that curved away
Round rockery and shrubs and dry stone wall
Into an unseen landscape where
The distant sea was somehow near
That was how it was when he first walked with her
The path dark but familiar
Waiting to be explored
Like an unmapped territory always in his mind
Semicolons:
She pushed me away in the water
And then held out her hand;
She told me she wanted closure
And twice delayed her flight;
She didn't look back but in the mirror
Looked at me looking back;
Quick, Orpheus, give me one last song
Before furies come and tear me apart:
Their Spheres
He lived in two spheres,
Like day and night
Both full and integral
You could say he had everything
But caught in their contradiction
Everything to lose in both
She lives in one sphere
She does not contradict
She has nothing to lose
She does not wear perfume
Doesn't send him gifts
Doesn't meet his friends
Does not exist
Time Zones
So late in her night
So early in my morning
The night cannot be subdivided
A whole hemisphere is dark
In a pool of silence
Of pagelight and silence
She waits
Darkening the screen.
She may be all alone
But what does she want
With any Orpheus?
While I write
She sleeps
And when I sleep
She writes
In Step
And one time he was leading her through the darkness
And then another time she was leading him
The first time he reached out to touch her
She withdrew but then instantly
Reached out
Through the certainty of never
To the uncertainty of now
Through the certainty of pain
To the uncertainty of joy
Not Orpheus and his muse
But two lost children
Like Hansel and Gretel
Walking through the dark
Their hands never parted
Searching on the path
For whatever breadcrumbs
The birds might have ignored
Her Question
"Where are you?” she asked
In the misty square at night
Big red walls
Seemed to echo back her voice
Might have beens formed halos
Around the lights
Every particle can take a different course
Each collision lead to a different world
And we scatter in the air
And never can cohere
Till a voice says;
“I am here.”
Fear of Snakes
She had no maps
Moving slowly northwards
She was afraid of snakes
Snakes abstract, real, unconscious
But still kept on moving north
Towards the bridge
While each step pushed her back
To that fear she couldn't get across
Maybe HE was the snake
Lying low on the path to bite her sweetly
Then withdraw. The venom would act
Stabbing her insides
She could feel the loss already
Waves of fear kept sweeping her back
A force stronger that the river
Brimming up inside her
Like a hunger that hurts the more it eats
Her resistance now her only direction
But still hoping he would wait
She tried to be the wall against which
The current pushed unabated
But then what can she hold on to?
She was the force she was fighting now
Beside herself - gone
The dam broke - water flowed
A torrent an avalanche a blaze
And the force inside her like a river
And like a river runs away
Leaving snakes stunned bridges undone
Maps irrelevant the landscape changed
Her
Standing on the other side
Waves
Like the quiet of a tube station broken
By lightning bolts running
Along the steel track
You turn to your fate
A subterranean gale
Blowing on your face
And then someone wonders
Why you were looking?
Or as the impact of a comet
Darkens the whole planet
There is no time to panic
Her energy comes in waves
And following in their wake
Everything is changed
And then she politely asks:
Do you want your old life back?
When I didn’t have her body
I still had her voice
When her voice had gone away
Whatever I may say
Everything has changed
She comes in waves
Around me
Like a tidal wave
Sounding
Deep down here
In the underground
The Frozen Lake
The chill got to her. Ahead
The sky bone white as the landscape
Nothing to steer by on that frozen waste
Every step
An ice break
But now it is too late
She’s already made it to the middle
The future seems obscure
Too frightened to advance too
Tired to retreat
But the thing about frozen lakes
Is that most lonely place
Far from either shore
The ice is also thickest
And the most safe
The Lower Levels
There's nothing he can do
In this place of shades every
Shadow overcasts another, each
Action incomplete, timelagged
But still he searches for her
Faces turn, hoping he has come for them too.
Their sudden disappointment. He turns away
He must be strong - the thousands he can't reach
And she's waiting somewhere.
In this world
Every level compacts another under it
Foot falls on broken teeth
And even he's reached the rock base,
The lowest he can get
He hears it Unmistakable
Tapping
From underneath
New Tortures
When reality bites
And the knives are out
The greater the love
The more to suffer
The Last Song
I was waiting in the restaurant
One cold December day
She came down and sat with me
(No-one noticed) but when she left
I saw her place was empty
Then I knew she'd been here.
And she is here at this moment
In this room, she leans over
Finishes these lines
But the moment I look up
She's gone. It's just me reading.
That's how I know she's been here
I see her long brown hair
Trailing on the underground in dreams
I would ask what she's doing
Haunting me here
In semicolons and silences
But she would only shrug
Unable to say
She cannot speak
when I am listening.
While I sit under the rain
Imagining missing her forever
She sits under the sun
Half hoping I will find her
But I won't. She hides so well.
At her best
When no one listens
No One Listens
Deep in her fear
Hid
Her pride
Her pride was strong
Her pride was right
But her pride was
Coiled up
With her fear
She was lost in a space
Where his voice
Could not reach her
The Bridge And The Abyss
We are on a narrow bridge
Over an abyss
And the important thing is
Not to be afraid
Don't incite your fall
By pre-empting it
Imagination spiralling
Over the parapets ahead
And don't look back
The heat is so intense
Blinding yourself
With burning old bridges
We are on a narrow bridge
We were always on it
And the important thing
Is the bridge
And the abyss
The Inner Circle
This is the inner circle
Drawn
By his own voice
He stands there, unable to move
He cannot be drawn one way
Forced into his future
The past still calls him
It has an equal sway
Only the night is undivided
Black water
White Oak
His past a dark river
His future a blank sheet
The Romeo Trap
Sometimes the song they sing together
Is a trap
Sometimes the rhythm fetters them
To rhymes and reasons
That they don't have
Sometimes the need for love
Diminishes their belief
Sometimes the belief in love
Diminishes its effect
At some point the song must stop
Another Answer
Maybe that is
How he gets her back
Maybe she’s the one who has to sing
To rescue him from daylight
The Last Illusion
Only by breaking his promise
That he had devised for himself
Just at the last moment
When they were coming to the light.
Only by cutting off his future
By dwelling on the past
Only by looking back
To see her swallowed in the dark
And then the blessed relief
As furies tear him apart
Like silver axes descending
To sever the strings of his heart
Now they carry him back
Beyond the gate
THE LIE
The scalpel flashes across your mind
Lie
Lie
Or tell the truth and die.
Relieve her of her madness
Light up her seeming darkness
Her confusion is so clear
Only loss on either side
Whatever you do you are divided
The parting has already happened
Though you cannot get her back
She was always right
See her standing on the other shore
On the side of light
But before you disappear
Into your darkness
Feel the keen edge
The razor blade of insight
Lie
Lie
Or tell the truth and die
The scalpel flashes
Across your mind.
DECEMBER
Now the wind comes
Westerly and strong
We are not the player
We are not the song
We are not the instrument
But like two strings
Helplessly struck
By the same things
IN BETWEEN
Everything entwined
Our limbs toes our
Dreams and dissertations
Open eyed
Our skins are indistinguishable
Everything makes sense
Then the phone rings
Or we row about the past
And the flight is already boarding
At gate six
Our fingertips touch
Plate glass
On your arm I remember
A childhood scar
It doesn’t make sense
Now miles of empty air
Separate us
Useless empty air
In between
My hands reach out for meaning
But nothing is worth touching anymore
ROCKABYE
Driving along
Your hand on the nape of my neck
In our own sweet
Special way
Or with you at the wheel
Your leg outstretched
Your hand
On another place
We cross state borders
Heading northwards
In search of snowfields
Though the weather is warm
Who knows where we're going
Don't care. No maps.
Soon we've squeezed out the last
Drop of the daylight
We find patches of snow
Under the trees
But we'll keep on driving
Till this road hits the sea
So put your foot down
And don't look back
Keep on driving and
don't ever stop
What's known is over
What's found is lost
And ahead of us
It's only hearsay
ON THE SHORE
Hit
By the big saline wave
Of sleep
Caught
In the electric fizz
Of its foam
Then washed
Deep into sleep
Drawn under the sheets
Spun by the currents and turned on the tide
Till some storm
Tosses us back
Here on the dry shore of the morning
Naked and raw
Time to wake up!
Get in the shower
Sand in our eyes
Wash the salt from your back
The sound of the waves is receding
But here
On our mattress of sand
Our imprint is left
The curvature of your body
The restlessness of mine
Like a plaster cast
Of our desire
Which these little words
Can't fill
THE PALACE OF TEARS
There are no more border guards
In the palace of tears
No bugging devices
No eavesdropping spies
Trying to find out if you're defecting
To the decadent West.
Now you can rent a car
Drive it to Moscow or Milan
Buy gift wrapped chocolate
Tread on marble floors
Extract your cash from a swift machine
In the palace of tears
Bodies which together
Seemed so light
Floating over each other
Here take flight
Hearts unravelling like barbed wire
In the palace of tears
I could say to myself
Time spent together goes so fast
Before we know it
So will the time apart
Me waiting in arrivals
You coming through the gate
But the airline soap removes your smell
I can't remember the last few days at all
Like dipping my pen in frozen ink
Or touching fingers
Through frosted glass
In the palace of tears
Former East Berlin 1999
TOGETHER OR APART
Together
Or
Apart
Much easier to see
Just one dilemma
In the frame of forever
See it now
Together
Or
Apart
But unpick the words
Suspect the simplicity
Apart could be
Communing despite miles
A constant presence
Like a subtitle in your life
Apart could be
The meaning you hold
Like two strings vibrating
To the same note
Unpick the words
Together might mean
Cleaving down the middle
Inseparable as a wound
Dependent as enemies
Demanding as
A beggar's bowl
Imploring the pennies
That make you poor
Unpick the meaning, unpack the words
Go beyond the dilemma
See us both
standing here
And listen to the world
Beneath the footsteps
And murmur of voices
And the passing cars
The world is so quiet
So quiet
And we have to keep
Ourselves
Together
And stop
Being
A part
LAST FRAGMENT
A sequence of scratchy black
The stutter of the projector
As the reel flaps.
The screen is burning white and blank.
What? Can it have ended?
I stand up, shade my eyes
And glare back at the projectionist:
The story isn't over.
This must be some mistake
Then it dawns on me like halogen
Brilliant, innovative, yes
This is the last shot
The unexpected ending
Of the film I've come to see
My hapless shadow protesting
On an empty screen