Finding Ways

It didn’t ought to be called love
For how can love follow
Abandonment and estrangement

To justify the inference of love
I have to back off, soften from
The black and white of leaving

That’s not easy for this engineer
Whose use of mathematical logic
Is cast in stone as right or wrong

To then walk towards maybe
Offers up a trepidation; but also
The excitement of pastures new

As I write my body feels, oozes
The energy of the release; freedom
From those past archaic notions

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Birthright

On the day after warmth came to spring

& daffodils flowered, beside new mown grass

The young boy came into our lives

On an evening when sunlight streams

Through leafless trees, I look more closely

To see the sticky buds beginning to open

That he too might enjoy the birdsong

Among the peacefulness, both now

& also in his later years

That his parents may soon walk out with him

In the countryside; also play endlessly together

On the soft sands, by sparkling seas

That love should come our way

Is itself the miracle of life

for Tim, Emma and Thomas William

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Closure

Away off Bluestone Heath

I see the dust trails rising

As if the wagon trains were

Leaving from East of Eden

At home in the garden

A warm breeze flowing

As if the spring-step of life

Was all over the grieving

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Dusted Off

Is it madness to write her a letter

Is my gladness, at the core or superficial

Am I fickle to trickle down my thoughts

Would it be better, left to someone special

The sadness and the longing have

Made way for songs of joy and loving

Undoing the reticence of my pen 

I sent out freely my words, to many

Without a penny to my name

I regained an eye for beauty

The tutored became the tutor

The suitor thus happy with his suit

The fruits of labour saved her; made her 

Resilient to impediments of single parenthood

She stood in liquid lucidity, independent

Of the love, I was waving behind her door

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Great Ouse

I would have written earlier

But I couldn’t find the line

A mix of decay and new ideas

Water lapping, sunlight sparkling

On the crest of the rivers waves

Warmed by that which I call beauty

I am warmed with the writing

Of this letter

It is to you, also to no one in

Particular, except perhaps those

Who have been, or are in love

With sufficient quiet, to hear the

Silent calm among the passions

The dry grasses and the reeds

Buffeted by the spring breeze, the

Water burbles at the bank where

Children with their parents stroll

I wish to close now, move a little

Closer to the drove, ever thankful

For these few moments together

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Littleport

I write of you

Not for you

Neither for me

Not even to wander

Nor wonder how you are

I write of you

Not for you

On a Saturday

In the breezy morning

Before the moonlit night

Beneath the stars

I write of you

Not for you

Instead looking up

At the thatched roof

With three brick detailed

Triple stacked chimneys

I write, I write

I write, not of you

Not of you, not of you

Neither for me, not for me

Not on a Saturday

Instead I’m looking up

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Tilt

The tears have dried in the stillness

As if yet the silence might roar

In some distant time

In some instantaneously infamous place

It is I think a good question:

Did she ever read the Italo Calvino

Six Memos for the Millennium I mean

A present that I gave her

Did she pick up her pen & write

As I asked of her. Did I appreciate

The beauty that she introduced me to

Do we unfairly put upon our lovers

Do we overload, with expectations

Our friends, relatives, employers and patrons

These I think are good questions:

Did she share my views, my sensitivities

My desires

My incomprehensible flirtations

Did I empathise, or collaborate

Or listen, or co-operate or in any way

By being useful or helpful

The good questions just keep on coming:

Should I expect you to understand how we were

Does it matter that you did not know us

Neither to understand, how & why we were together

If though I tell you; of boating lakes & outdoor

Moonlit Shakespearean theatre, tell you, of vacations

& soft seashores; nights of passionate lovemaking

Does that that require further good questions

I tell you all of this so that you may work out; why we

Are estranged; why we did not communicate

Also to tell me, if, after eight years apart

Is this an unhealthy obsession, have I missed my

Way on the path of grieving, or is it healthy, and

Reasonable to still pour out these words of love lost

This is the last of the good questions, the rest is up to you

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Doubtful

I wouldn’t take it past the line end

Unless I was certain of my position

Better to be unsure

Better than being mellow

I wouldn’t try to find a rhymed blend

Other than the strength of my indecision

Better to be blue

Better than being yellow

I wouldn’t close or sign the letter off

Without the crisscross of my derision

Better to be lured

Better than being a good fellow

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Transit Stop

Even while doing nothing

One wants to do less

As we worry and bother

We settle for the stress

That first caress, nevertheless

Carries a rare perfume

Unzipping her dress

In a warm, candlelit room

The tune is minimalist

Piano played; key by key

Out across the runway mist

Nothing more, but, I want to be

Redeemed by the deeper kiss

Whose mistress knows no bounds

Her sounds float towards the bliss

Infiniteness, from sky to ground

That we found in his mind, by

A kind meditation, on the curved

Crescent of a station, sensations

Of pasts, absorbed by those present

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Recliners

Her legs move, as would a lovers legs

She begs to stretch out

To the tips of her extremities

There is a small delay

As if the dream

Is warning the stroll of her fingers

She lingers, takes time out

To check her nails; she fails

Entirely to distract my attention

I only mention this

As an old man in an airport

With all the while to cream off

The edges of his youth

Long past searching for truth

He is becoming a fan of erotica

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

R & R

Almost the final patrons

In the university museum cafe

Until two sisters enter

Glasses, worn for indignation

Which may soon be released

If the counter staff do not return

Why would I make it difficult

Keep it sweet, keep it short

Keep it within the limitations

I often make ill defined connections

From this obscurity to that, from

One nowhere circumstance, to another

As in the letters

Where the flow is lost;

One river stops

One river starts

Discontinuing their

Breaks in continuity

Where tired shoes tramp off

Without guidance; their footfalls

Fall where footfalls have always fallen

Stolen, from the lack of a campaign

Without cause enough to believe in

As if to say: Yes, I am treading water

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Royal

Tiredness takes me

To the coffee shop

Already I feel slightly lighter

As I remember the young man

With puffed up eyes; his lost gaze

Makes me feel way more fortunate

It wouldn’t do

To focus on negativity

The day to day of her life

Is way too beautiful

I have found a seat, in

The museums upstairs alcove

With a window, to a tree

Whose sticky buds welcome

The somewhat delayed turn

From winter to spring

It is more true

The locus of connectivity

The time to time of seasons

She is so sure of beauty

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Vigour

Brown and green and intense

Navy and neat and no pretence

Not so for those who quietly view

To yawn with absolute splendour

All intent of boredom

Theirs to eschew

With the strength

To defend attention

Contemplating

Most, or all of the truth

Sufficient to walk, crossflow

Across the floorboards

We, who wait to see why

It is she who takes the next step

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Intake of Breath

Tiredness, dullness

Again excess takes its toll

Always an irritation

Calls for the scrape of movement

Always the failure

Of concentration provides my escape

I am a fake

Of contemplation

Which itself

Is beyond my state of comprehension

I am out of tune

In mind and body, I am flaked

Rest for rests sake

May be the only stake-able cure

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

All In

It will be some time
Before you find me

I look out
Of the window
To the canal; also
In the foreground

My gaze falls
On a straight and plain
Drinkers glass
Used now as a vase

Filled with sunflowers
Tulips, and bluebells
From the woods

My body is exhausted
I have the beginnings
Of a stitch in my shoulder

A result of four long days
Walking, while wearing
My winter overcoat

The exhibition is exuberant
With the works of Vincent:
His ten years as an artist

Given
(We pay 15 euros each)
For all the world to see

Would I have remained
In the yellow house?

Would I have stayed beneath
The blossom in the orchard?

Would I, I might
Except for the fear of practice

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Modern

With the familiar

We are familiar

Yet close up

One eye is green

One eye is brown

& the vertical lines

Are masculine

& the horizontal lines

Are feminine

Within three rooms

To see Mondrian

& Gabo 

& Spencer

As daylight falls

Through the window

Blinded

With a fine mesh gauze

Some works

Are never realised

With others

We are never

Familiar at all

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Third Morning

It is the grey mist that wraps itself

Around our borrowed houses

It is the cold air that enters through

Our closed and open windows

It is the time that will bring back

The blue sky and the sunlight

It is all of these and more

Perhaps

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Adhere

Three young girls

Eight older people

Who all want to be

In love with the one

Who so slavishly

Applies red lipstick

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a Homemade Print Book + Audio CD from poetryshop

Vulture

One of you said I would look good in green

But it was to be many years before I saw

The pullover in an Amsterdam window

Another of you said it was the colour and texture

Of the grass-plain, in the museum quarter

And would be inordinately expensive

One of us didn’t visit this city; I often reflect on

That being a part of one of our heritages

Another us, we came together, I rather imagine

I wait for you both; you, my past and present

Incarnates; in love with two women, one

Now and one a somewhat distant memory

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

KL 1490

It is the simplicity, there to make one more attractive

In this case a cloth belt, wrapped twice around the waistline

Just sufficient, to create the outline of the female form

Adding to the beauty of this world everlasting

The flight represents the spread of nations, humanity

On the move. We question the goodness of people

I am inclined to think more good, maybe many more

Kate is inclined to think less good, maybe many more less

Beside me the passenger reads 

Chapter XIII of William and the Ancient...

We do not share conversation. I write these few words

To remind me of a Saturday morning, the first in April

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Overdone

I didn’t go to meditation

I didn’t go on a spiritual retreat

I didn’t have a soothing massage

Nor have reflexology for my feet

Mostly I did nothing, nothing

Neither in nor out of doors

I didn’t go big city shopping

Nor set-to, on washing the floors

First plans fell by the wayside

Taking the wind out of our sails

Snowfall and the fearful frost fright

Forced the horse-racing off the rails

We did drive out into the country

For a pale ale and pub pie lunch

We walked through the graveyard

To hear our footfalls crisply crunch

I didn’t offer up much excitement

My conversations so slow to start

I hope I didn’t mean to mislead you

Your place is firmly in my heart

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Familiar

So that is the holiday over

That is the holiday done

It’s been an odd old time

I fear for my oldest son

Yet how might I have lived

In a small house, no work

Nothing much to aim for

But pastimes & a dog to run

That we don’t communicate

Itself a self evident truth

I broke him as a young boy

My parting was a loaded gun

Lust took me from his mother

My ambition; to set myself free

All I wanted wasn’t enough

After the rough I chased the fun

He doesn’t like what he sees

Thinks I’m full of fancy stuff

A tuppence a’penny millionaire

See, it is his clarity that I shun

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Wim Wenders

Darling that was

From a long time ago

So long ago

I don’t remember

It was before

The Jews Harp

& the judge you told

You don’t remember

He takes a Polaroid

Yet knows for sure

It will not show

What he sees at all

He makes

A telephone call

To go nowhere

Except on the road

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Spring

There was no frost

For some reason

The minus five degrees

Did not materialise

We are sheltered

For what purpose

Surely not

To burn the toast

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Removal Man

I have no connection to that house

Other than to remember the light bulb

That I broke off his lamp-stand, with my bare hand

Which came through my inexplicable, yet 

Abjectly anxious desire to leave your house quickly

The broken bulb then, and the return of Italo Calvino's book 

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Which I gave to you, but asked if I could reclaim it

Along with an introduction to philosophy - 

Think by Simon Blackburn, if my memory serves me

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Insight et al

I walk across my home town

Between two drawing offices

There isn't a real desk space for me in either

My old boss Roger wants me to design

An aircraft refuelling system

I tell him it's all about

Finding the right operational staff

The second office is really busy

A meeting of everyone is called

I see this as an opportunity to slip out

A fox approaches me on the petrol station car park

It bears its teeth and harasses me

I shout and wave a stick but I am frightened

A big dog grabs the fox

Eventually it works the foxes head between its jaws

Before determinedly and manically crushing

All life out of the bereft wild animal

It was a dream that I couldn't leave

In the same way I couldn't leave

Another work dream earlier in the week

In another of tonight's dreams I was explaining

The solution to a control system problem, & even 

Though I knew the fix was to move the measuring

Device nearer to the process being measured 

I had doubts that it would be correctly implemented

It seems to me the dreams are about a lack of control

Doubts about the resolution of issues

I am neither able to complete a task, or walk away

In the morning I find that a Fox in ones dreams means:

Insight, cleverness, cunningness and resourcefulness

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

One or the Other

It is with the knowing

That in the coming hours and days, months and years, there are tasks that I have to accomplish, conversations that I have to join, that are not of my own choosing, not of my wish to be doing

And with such knowing

Comes my disturbance; a feeling of being unsettled, of being always behind the clock, of being left with no time just to be, of being unable to make any sort of decision, or commitment

This is a poem from Vagaries:

Love of The Key to Room 149

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book and audio cd from  poetryshop

Basin

There was no one here

Yet quite suddenly

It is busy

There was nothing to fear

Even the past

Of dizzy Miss Lizzie

These are hill people

Hills and valleys

Grass to stream

Dry stone walls

Surround

Sheep farmers dream

Barns and bairns

At work and play

Tor-views to redeem

This is a poem from Filmic: Love of Our World of Purples & Blues

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book with audio cd from  poetryshop 

Someone Else’s Song

It's always somebody else's airport

That have low priced flights

It's always somebody else's parties

That party on through the nights

I wouldn't get married again she said

Not that anybody's asking

I'm still paying for the last one

He didn't leave me a goddamned thing

But I'd like a week away

Even have a bit of a fling

Have me a few glasses of sangria

Wearing loads of bling

It's always somebody else's airport

That have low priced flights

It's always somebody else's parties

That party on through the nights

This is a poem from Filmic: Love of Our World of Purples & Blues

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book with audio cd from  poetryshop 

Lodge

Into the conservatory

I might spend all summer

Taking breakfast here

I watch the grass grow

Marvel at the swoop of swallows

While my compatriots take tea and toast

The orange juice chilled

The starter table filled

With champagne and cereal

Beware of golf balls says the token sign

Beneath my broken

Double glazed bedroom window

I was working for the BBC

In a sort of time and motion study role

I watched; it’s no use, I can't remember any specifics

I do recall that some things were measurable 

Some stuff took just too long

So had to be bundled

I think it was all to do

With the move from London to Manchester

Although I might have worked that out later 

I wish I could remember the specifics

Maybe it's something to do with me unsuccessfully

Trying to buy Freud's book on Dream Analysis!

At this time

Slower than before

Less audio interference

This is a poem from Filmic: Love of Our World of Purples & Blues

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book with audio cd from  poetryshop 

Yes

Always

On days

When I didn't

Feel like doing

Good things 

I would do

Good things

This is a poem from Filmic: Love of Our World of Purples & Blues

Available as ebook from Kindle
or as a homemade print book with audio cd from  poetryshop