Shaking when I walked into his shop,

Thoughts of the beautiful, white Crescent Moon

Lost  in the ebony sky of late November.

Fled like winter sleet melted,

The glint of the knife on that coal black night

The one in the hoodie, with no facial tattoo,

 Lunged forward screaming into thin air:

“Put the fucking money in there!”

So what'd he get? In the blink of an eye?

T...

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Near is very far
Space, time,
Dark star
Black hole
A wandering soul.

Still
There’s a vastness that appals
Chemotherapy,
White walls.

Scurrying through
The corridors
Of the Christie, this Monday morning
Early,
Meeting Emile, yes, named after Jean Jacque’s eponymous hero.

Married at the weekend, it has spread,
He fears he’ll soon be dead.

His Caribbean lilt
Sti...

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Faoin trá seo de ghaineamh agus sliogáin

Feicim íomhá na farraige rollta.

Frámaí agus seithí talún nua-aimsithe nua

Na fairsinge leathan seo; Siúilim feadh an aill:

Fágann an duine ar thaobh na gaoithe,

Trilobites leabaithe, faoi bhun mo chosa

Grianchloch agus Muscovite ón eibhir

Na gaoithe agus na dtonnta a thug an t-am

Fóicphointí farraige, carraigeacha i bhfolach, phluai...

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How can I write about the famine

Born into the welfare state

Brought up on a council estate?

But I read and I know

That the Warehouses up and down

England’s west coast

Liverpool, Bristol

Were stuffed with grain

While babes in Connaught,

Mayo and Donegal,

Were left to die,

Again

And

Again.

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A cold-hearted man with a gun in his hand

He loved to control, did this man with no soul.

He died long ago, in a land made of snow,

Was soon born again, in a world without end.

He lived in that cave right next to the grave

Of his brother, his wife, his lover, I mean

Just someone obscene.  He worked and made money.

He thought it was funny,

His nature was such, so-cold to the...

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So scared tonight, he made me feel as helpless
As I am. He’s looking at me as I write
Cataracts on his eyes, panting. Fear. No disguise.
The fear he feels at the strangeness of the universe,
The inexplicability of life. The Thunder..
But he knows I love him and he takes heart
As I tempt him into a cave under my desk
And Yes! He has finally settled down –
At least a bit – panting still ...

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No buggy-pushing for you, my son

It’s done. You’re dead.

26 days we had you

Saw you. Felt you. Touched you.

And I am snake-bitten

Clouded and red

For all crumbles under you.

Shadow-fall

Penumbra: winter tree

Stripped.

Rain-shine on our time

You darling boy. So hard born, I sang.

Now even your blanket-smell has gone.

Nobody mentions you.

Kieran Sean Ja...

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On a windless night

I feel the house shake

A child swirls rises

I smoke. Sit stil.l

Forget. Remember.

In this twenty-first century

The wind screams, rises.

The wind screeches

Scattering thoughts, paper

Rocking foundations, shattering monuments.

Outside I gather windfalls in my night clothes

Amass them

Images scatter like dust.

I forget. Remember.

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feeling empty

a leaf on a tree

enough for me.

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Once I knew you,

Red hair blowing free

Catholic and wild:  

The young banshee.

A Jacobite, like me.

The moral guardians condemned us:

Said we were the transgressors,

The breakers of the law.

.

So then we asked each other

What was life for?

It’s the wildness that’s within us!

Our spirits roaming free:

The accomplishment of nothing

That is you and ...

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  In heart-broken memory of my good friend Charlie, who died 7 May 2020

Charlie and I walked our post-cancer walks
Down this narrow stretch of green in the city
For a full decade. We aged together
But not like malt, we’ve blended into each other,
Man and Dog. He recognized the smells, me the sights,
And his life is shorter than mine. That afflicted me like
A sentence. Very few minute...

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My love didn’t come from nowhere.  

My father was a bastard, a sailor on the seas,

My mother just a peasant

Spent her life upon her knees.

The noblesse oblige:

The drinking and the drugs,

Was countered by Intelligence

And a tingling in the blood.

We were the late Romans

Much diminished and now, finally, gone.

For since the death-stroke of 1453,

When we he...

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In Calvados you have your cross

And though you won, you most surely lost.

Your sacrifice, at twenty-four, to modern wit

Is nothing more than a crying bore.

Who now has read Alamein to Zem Zem

Your story of the war in the western desert?

For though you certainly knew how to kill

You knew the cost, for you had no draperies over your eyes.

No deception, no disguise.

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