As in my warmly blanketed comfort IDevour reams of torment and miseryWith lusting, shuddering glee, I know why.I know the hushed why of all history. I who wince and cradle a stubbed toeRead of the sleep-robbed, the starved, the scourgedAnd with absolute certainty I knowThat’s not me. I would have survived, emerged Glorious. Unbroken in soul if not…

The cherries. Ah yes. Someone must guard the King's cherries, to make sure no poisoner may reach them. But the guard, naturally, deserves some recompense ... He popped the first cherry into his mouth, squinting out of the narrow gap between window and shutter at all the rich idiots pea-cocking outside, preening and showing off their glossy feathers under the golden rays of the evening sun.

Trampoline Poetry

If you would have me hear your truth, my friendFirst listen to mine. And then we shall standBefore mirrors that reply without endTo ‘Who is the truthiest in the land?’  You. You. You. ‘Thou shalt speak’ we tell each child. ‘in wordsandOf not-lies, beach-grains that swallow their blue’Know all things, save thyself, truthier than true…

I hear the scraping sounds you used to impaleLife. Like wind-driven linen forced to grow staleOn frost-stripped branches, you captured from the stormSounds on the flimsiest hand-rake wood can form:A pencil. I hear your trees say “We inhale The spring more slowly than the rest. We exhaleMore gently the stiffness biting our bones, wailMore softly, lest our grip fail as we grow warm”

Stumbling on the ridges in wry-mouthed mirth  My cold square fingers trace out loud  The grey sliver severing sky and earth,  The pure child-stern lines of each cloud Pressing inward through the nib-enfrailed page  To a side bereft of colour,Where the black-gowned lives tread one kind of stage  And the white-robed ones the other.

The first volleys are gifs, cannon thunderFor our e-march towards shared moments. Next,We shall tussle with the borrowed grimacesAnd quirky grins of random emojis. Now we wait to see who shall first blunderInto words, yield to the desire to textInstead of waging war with false faces.Then we'll call to resume hostilities. We’ll snap and snarl and jeer, go on mockingEach other and all the world. HappinessIs still forbidden treasure, like playingWhispered word-games in quilt-tented darkness.

Snooze your phone once with bewilderment, then with anger, and finally with groaning resignation. Stumble out bleary-eyed and catch the bus, gulping down the chocolate-coated energy bar you made a New Year’s resolution to give up. As you glare in undisguised envy at people with seats, wonder if you should buy the thirty-egg carton or the twelve-egg carton, given that the thirty-egg one always expires before you can use more than half but still costs less per egg than the twelve-egg one.

The first story is the last. It bleeds trueThough it is made up of stolen sliversAll hacked out haphazardly from diversPlaces: A high-mountain farm housing blueBlood. A horse set on by wolves in the snowA dark hooded stranger to the rescue. The first story, long forsaken, lives onCast aside, scorned, it will not cease to be:

This thing pumping blood in my chest     Loves clichés,Those socially accepted ways to rest The blame on the world, and save – not the soul,But its own dregs, worn and unwhole,     And gaze At all things in a bleak monochromy     Made fairBy skins shaded, set colour-free – Well, here’s the cliché: If your home must turn greyTo be loved, there’s naught left to say,     Is there?

A sock wriggling just out of reachUnder the bed, it burns my lipsIt burns my stretching finger-tips,The word for this, the other wordCrannied off after being heardOr read somewhere. I wring out each Crease, dust and destroy. If I canNot find one word, what right have ITo language at all? If I dye…

The eagle within me dreams of soaringAbove aught that in earth-tied eyes may gleam:Plucking the richest prey out of the plainTo the echo of wails and vain roaring;Brooding over the talon-scarred bones,Adding daily more tokens of the slain,Vaunting each triumph with a savage scream;Queen of a lofty realm all of hushed stones. The sparrow within me dreams of making…

Look. ‘Look’ said each wondrous comical hodgepodge of illustrations. Just one word, the perfect invitation to draw in a child. I spent hours staring at each page, whispering the word like an incantation as I mined it for stories, or put in the ones I’d read and heard, from Goldilocks and Red Riding Hood to The Three Little Pigs and Puss In Boots.

A squirrel stole a cheese slice from my plate  And began to dust off one edgeI would have chased it screaming to the gate  But that it sang to me of me. ‘Half of this cheese I must give to the rats  Who taught me theft. A fourth must goTo the forces that guard us from the cats,

She is always darning the frayed fabricOf things. Socks or sentences, she contrivesTo darn them, with the needle and the word. Like the pruning spade, she heeds the warningClink of steel against roots. Though something loth,She locks word threads and sound cloth in a truce. Where a simple seam would mend, her darningIs forced always to masquerade as cloth,

Born of melted bone-stew, my first forbearsWere conjured to bind and to sustain. PouredInto the cracks and creases of your wares,They sealed flaws forever. Then you soured  On such strength, and so   We started to growWeaker. Latest of the line, a stick-shapedBlob in a tube, I do but briefly bindPaper to paper. Your hands boiled and draped…

Thread a way through every scrunched-up story  Through skeletons piled by an unblest horde    Wince and wonder at the turns of the sword What unfrenzied heart can learn to savour  The glory of first poems that unchecked    By a deadline, flutter onto paper  After the rigours of a nuit blanche deckedWith the laurels of the last victory?     Wince and wonder at the turns of the sword  Through skeletons piled by an unblest hordeThread a way through every scrunched-up story

Crawl past the barbed wire onto concreteFox, grab the plumpest chicken and flyPast the ruins of our feasting hearses,Ghosts of your kinfolk driven to cry:All nature’s burnt off, they now serve wheat   Spirit-Animal, Silver-Tongue,Running through mank dens as we sleep  Spirit-Animal, Silver-Tongue,    Leap Leap Leap Lurk on the shed where you last saw treesHawk, grab the plumpest rabbit and fly,

“We must dim the sun,” The mother squinted up as she adjusted her torn shawl to make a few more inches of shade. They had spent the nights shivering and stumbling aimlessly, the days squirming as they crouched under her pitiful makeshift tent. She had scoured the vast brown expanse for a shoot or shrub, for a trace of water, for a rat or lizard to catch and kill.

Green eyes wide with wonder, she has no fears:Root of gold, swelling gold bulbs, a gold shootBlossom and shrink in the bewildermentOf doomed innocence. She knows not the loot,The trophy in triumphant merriment Borne away from her treacherous home-landIs to be herself, when the feast is done.She touches turnips turned by the handOf Midas, those lies unfit to feed one…

To its new-born river. But flow down allThe way to the sea. When drought comes to stakeIts claim, when plateau, plain and desert stretchTheir thirsting, sun-cracked feelers out to takeYour soul, do not die gasping in the sandOr compound with other rivers to makeAlliances that will consume and erase     Your name.

Stick your head out of the windowAnd sing, crow feather, crow featherWill you take a message from meTo the flowering apple tree? Blooming in the spring so fair,Tree, in your whisperings,Do you remember those whoPreferred you to their kin?Do you swish-creak nice thingsAbout them when you are blue,Or mock the fools locked in…

I do not know a fishing rodFrom a sugar-cane, but I knowThe fishermen are ready nowTo dredge the seas for me, the oddMorsel you trifle with and throwOut at last, off the plate’s cold rim In beds full of sand black and grim,I rot. In a week you could growRoses from my bones. But this shell…

How long is forever in the winter? How long is forever in thin shoes and thread-bare coats, in pouring rain and whistling winds, when pepper-garnished fragments of memory are blurred by the sky’s smarting, dissolving salt? In summer it stretches all the way into the gloaming, perhaps even into the moonlit night, this forever that is to be waited for, but in the winter, when the earth crunches underfoot like a potato crisp?