Give me the still spaces of November
and the rain
caressing the cold windows searchingly
like it misses me
like it's calling me back

Your resentful face
brown-nosing shop windows
never satisfied
with my low wages

Oh my humming electric guitar -
your sunburst burns so hot
surely my fame
can't be far away

Last week - when the sun in the sky was eyeing me
and asking me what I'd done with my life,
and all the snooty clouds were an audience around it
waiting to judge my guilty response -
I said, "Sun, you're right.

Slow water
still water
this slow, still water

a July afternoon

Hey Mister Poet, heal my life.  
As you stand at the front of this room,
be a preacher with your poems.

Fill the air between us with life-affirming wisdom,

Let me get this weight off my chest. On the Sunday - it was boring and it
was raining, you know the score, the kind of mood where Sunday sulks -
I was a teenager stuck in my room talking to the walls for company and
getting no feedback. No matter how much I spoke, the walls just stared back.
No repartee. No conversation. No connection. No to-ing and fro-ing and

Girl - I'm jealous of you in your
Big House.

I'm supposed to be this spiritual ethereal poet, so why aren't I content with my
small matchbox house the size of a polite cough? Since I've met you, I've

"Make me happy", she said, putting her arms around me like she was a desperate sailor
about to drown as we stood in the field in October. In instinct my arms went around her,
trying to pull her up out of the seas of her life, but I couldn't convince myself. The wild
trees looked on at us, like slow impatient circling warships, dismissively observing this flotsam.

Well here we are. The final laps. Fifty, sixty, seventy. And the body is lined
and keeps lining itself as though it's got some puzzling compulsion and yet
our clothes can be so crisp and ironed - no lines there. This white shirt of mine,
like a layer of snow in a garden. So smooth. And this tranquil blue skirt of yours,
like the peace of a summer sky. There's something young about colour -

As I put this pen to this paper, outside the window
I can hear a bird singing: not a fancy and famous bird
from mythology and history but just an everyday garden bird,
some anonymous brown smudge of some bird
in some tree somewhere, making a three-second song.