PART2.

MY BLACK ANGEL

The shadow of my wheelchair is like

A raven an Edgar Allen Poe image

Guarding my hell, my black angel.

I woke and the raven was gone

It turned back into a wheelchair,

Nature is only a footstep away

If only I could walk.

The light floods into my room

And creates a shadow of rain rippling.

They say an English-mans home is his

Castle and this hellhole is mine.

Its 2009 and I live in a middle age, limbo

All I can do is cry,  I cant even commit suicide.

I’ve got to fit into an able-bodied timetable,

I piss in a bottle each day and wheel-

Chair a wheelchair:  I’m as low as a spider

Or a mouse.  Wood louse and beetles highway

My floor, shell-shocked noble beasts.

The blue is crying from my eyes into

The reservoir of loss.

I’ve been waiting a lifetime for happiness

And four years for contentment.

I know these images come up again and again

But there’s nothing else in my life only

Torment and pain.  This is only half a poem

From half a man

THE BLACK HOLE POEM

For Stephen Hawkins

1.

This is the theory of everything.

life begins as a poem.

‘The source, eternity  darkness

 within darkness’, the Tao Te Ching.

a letter of light comes from negativity

and the universal poem is formed

radiating light from dark

and love from hate.

2.

I woke from the darkness of a bad dream.

Why was I witnessing such darkness?

It was like a cancer or a plague.

I was afraid to go back to sleep

I lay there listening to the rain thinking

maybe this went further back?

to Dostoyevsky or Van goghs time

Maybe time is timeless?

like world war one or Adolf Hitler’s name.

Maybe this is as Nietzche said

‘i’ll turn this muck to gold’.

This is the shadow of my event horizon.

A KILL HOUSE

Death: blood guts and brain

All pulped into a grey/white

And cured into a pudding.

A skip of swimming maggots

Above skinned coats of hide.

Pig’s shot and the squeal

Cut and torn from their throats.

Dipped in a bath of scolding

Water and the layer above

Blubber shaved, the parts

Hung in the window like

Decorations on hooks.

Memory hangs like a crucifix

A blood dried landscape

apron-ed on a sawdust floor.

LIGHT LUNCH

These are words dancing on a page

Portraying a catalogue of Hodgkin’s paintings

Under a blue moon a transparent screen

Of colour, a garden of delight.

A face I almost know along these streams of light

Rippling patios and sculptured daffodils

A light lunch, life on a plate.

A lonely spaced interior occupied by a sphere

a framed sky beside a garden of everyday lines

In a world of art in this cafeteria of people

feeding on jealousy, gossip and hope.

Sculpted dreams in a letter of mooned memory,

Humanised movement in a hot country

Swimming in the bay of Naples

Water-falled foliage of misting vibrancy.

In a honeymoon suite, waking in another world

Beside a small good thing that transports a wreath

A glass vase and me reflected from a valley

Looking down at a riveria or an Indian sky,fruit,rain.

A monsooned tangent in tangiers, a splash of paris or italy

a lovers leap in the dark, a water-falled snapshot.

A painting reflecting these words in stilled life

Rain from a bedroom window in the evening in Scotland.

A Blur Of Light

The branches replicate

the landscape, car lights

on the motorway. 

Mans DNA is

but a snapshot

a kaleidoscope.

through the glare

of autumn sun

I see red and green

and orange and blue

spotlights on this road.

My stage.

THE LIGHT ON THE STONES

I retrace your final journey now in a blue car,
Not black, alone on the motorway.
Passing the Maze prison the stench of my engine
Overheating is like gunpowder, spent shells,
Lingering, your dream of Irish freedom.

I climbed the mountain graveyard
Above the violent divided the city,
Above the peace-line that stood between us
In the living -room.

Your plot all weeds,
And wild grass cries out for order.
The fallen wooden cross bears no name;
But you are there. Like a sculptor
With clay I reach inward, my hands
As delicate as salmon wings riding
The white water, struggling
The strong currents of grief.

I brush the soiled tears from your eyes
And you wake in me, swimming
And glistening in mine. My hands
Shape the clay moulding our wounded past,
Emerging in the light on the stones.

What The Doctor Said   by raymond carver


He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong


- Raymond Carver 

A FOX THOUGHT
for Ted Hughes

I imagine a landscape of your poems:
A sacred wood, a Pagan burial ground
Where the eyes of the wild life shine
Blood red devouring it's prey.

Surrounded by the darkness of gothic tales.
Cold moons fall on the winter trees
Drifting behind the black sheet
Of a perpetual November sky.

Winter soil on your chalk white flesh
Deep in the womb of your savage earth.
The nonchalant delight of your toil
Free from the vulvitis noose.

That something else is alive unseen
Black velvet festhers oited in crude sway
Within black rainbows and peck the grubs
From your birds eye tombed vision.

Rain from a broken gutter spout
Unclogging earth and bits of sky,
Your poems gush, cold delight,
The purification of a stagnant well.

FOXHOLE

During that war

I was deep in that

Foxhole in the attic

wallpapered

in propaganda

on the front line

hearing and feeling

every bomb and bullet

as if that war was mine.

Lying here in 2009

shooting my head out

during this pause of peace.

Thinking, what was all that for? 

I’m lucky I didn’t grow

into a bitter man 

I think there’s a little

shell-shock in my family .

Why am I still in this foxhole?