A Fork In The Wood

(By Gub, the 7th of July, 2012, London)

Ahead the verdant valley
Behind us, the ‘hood.

Sheeps’ bleats for sirens now
Street lights – withstood.

Oak trunks
And cud
Tarmac banished
By rain, by mud
Will our lives
Ever be the same?

Hearts waiver
Waiver again.
Choice and reason
Reasons with gain.
Losses?
Partings In the main.

Yet change is a must,
Tomorrow’s
Bites back the dust.

The places missed
Most – are warmed
By faces,
Yesterdays
Filled with kindness.

Our new landfall ?
The hang’d bank
Portent hope
Friends will not
Forget us

Even absent hearts
Need a stall.

Migrations

(London, the 4th of June, 2012)

I watch swallows
Flitting past, diving low
My eye shutters to slow
And break
The movement
Folding unfolding p
Penknives
They disappear
Under the roof
Of my grandfather’s shed
Out of reach
I hear
The begging of hungry chicks
Well tucked away in dried mud nests
Relentless on hot summer afternoons
Does their mother think them pests?
Grapes ripen
The great migration beckons
One fallen mignon
Wide gaping yellow beak
Wrestles inept against the dust
A cavity of hunger, surviving streak
I pray
Tatal nostru, care esti in ceruri 
Save this chick
My grandmother
High priestess of the burning matchstick
Extinguished in water
Does not pray,
For prayer is a balm to soothe
A child’s unrest
Birds feather, follow the heat, or die
In God they rest
No qualms,
No questions
And no quest

Grenouille

(the 11th of April, 2012, HBC)

Do I play the seductress?
Sprawled out on paper
I must appear
Exciting, vibrant
On stage
I burn
I dazzle
Make a mess
Collector of
Pretty things –
Painted silks, butterflies, violets
Killer and poet
I want to know
Where memory lives
Stalk and capture
This shy beast
In love, yes
Shamefully obsessed
With what I can never possess:
The propensity,
The soaring
Yearning souls
Of the barefoot beggars
All those cut deep

At Times You Play the Lover

(By Gub, the 11th of April, 2012, HBC)

At times you play the lover
Occasional wife
Most times it's the mother;

A cloak of first resort
To hide from unwelcome visits,
Retire to early bed,
With a warmer thought,
Than marital consumption
- or tedious rendition
Of 'thank you' for the most
Basic partner function
Like :- is the dog fed?
Are the lights off?

Are we dead?

Am I your soul mate,
Your husband,
Your chauffeur
Or fortunes' croupier
Raking chips
Across the green baize ?

Are we passing roles
Or passing out ?

The red light flashes at the
End of the Causeway
The oceans cavernous reach
A Perplex of white and dark creases

Never ending questions
Never ending
Waves

Such tension -

Ascend, descend,
Unceasing,

Life may be tedious - yes
But death is permanent
And dull.

Roadside Picnic

(the 1st of April, 2012)

In silence
We break the bread
Of doubt and terror
Share battle folklore
A longed-for release
From above
And below
The punctured reality
Of the Room
We’re visitors,
Facing the same wall
Uncertainty
So cast the un-retrievable bait
Threat, thread, rupture -
Precarious weave of
The full empty
Call on poets
To drag Cerberus
Out of the Underworld
Hold up
The three heads of the beast:
Shame, Loss, Envy
Frantic road-side feast!

The Map

(the 26th of March, 2012)

Don’t force the handle
Or confuse span and depth
Open the bundle
Of within and without
The Spirit slumbers
Unfolding, enfolding
Sacred numbers
Etched on the wall
A cave of experiments
Staring at shadows
Makes it not so hard to believe
That the world is propped up
On a turtle’s back
It’s the occasional stare
Into Death’s toothless mouth
That teaches you to read the Map
Sea/Wave
Part/whole
North/South

In-between and digress

In-between
(London, October 2011)

The world begins
Days roundabout
Staring at trees
The hour of glory
Cow-bells danga-langa
Haloed heads, eyes ablaze
Cruel scientists
Probe into nature’s flesh
With knives and catapults
Experiment cat
Chases a tin tied to its tail
Chickens hatch
And when they sprout feathers
We recoil at the grey ugliness
Of the in-between
It doesn’t wash off
So we shove one down the latrine
Hanging onto the window sill
On the edge of a ten-inch precipice
Hovering above deep water
In the living-room armchair
One push and you drop
In the sharks’ lair
The moon
A light-bug trapped in a matchbox
Queens of the night bloom
Scent buzzes
And we wake from dreams to earth’s quake
Standing in the door frame
Still against the wave
Fresh towels and candles
The cupboards are heaving
For the dead must leave gifts for the living
And a death feast suits rice
Seasoned with sugar not spice
To drink Christ’s blood
Cut with gas water
Large syphoned bottles
Are balanced in each hand
If I drop one will it go “bang”?
And so childhood ends in hormonal boom
Long before the sun recedes
To dwarfish doom.

Digress
(London, 2011)

I am late for a meeting
I decide on a fiddly blouse
I force sixteen buttons
Through sixteen minute holes
The organza folds onto itself
Mille feuille
Blundering fingers dig
Into the delicate fabric like moles
I race for the last wagon
I curse the legged crowd
I hurl my bulging bag across town
Shrunken in my seat,
Compressed to my slightest
Oh, F*** it
I’ve got the day wrong
Put me down now
(Or get me an eye test)
U-turn sequence gets tied up in knots
My thoughts spin at the speed of automated bots
Outside Brixton station
I’m oblivious to the sweet fragrance of dope
Until I witness the woman’s encounter
With the undercover cop
Her eyes bulge up into a plea of stupidity
His are greedy for validity
Under the arches I’m a captive
To gaudy Technicolor neck-laced roses
But the sale-woman only has eyes
For the girl who suffers from
Word trichinosis
I let the young man
With bleached eyebrows
Powder my cheek
I buy my little relief compressed in a tin
I can afford to walk past the crying woman
Clutching a baby with Downs
But on the bus I’m pinned down
To her private hell
Her sadness strips me of my shell
On the pavement
A robin’s orange breast
Lies arrested in death
An unturned postcard
That says: “To live is to digress”