Mounted in Ulster Mausoleum
you greet me with your rotted smile,
with oaken bones splinted into pose
with cloven feet riveted to the floor.
To the side your cratered eyes
that tunnel down to your cage
that watches of how we feed,
that recognises skin, fur and hair.
that will keep to see,
waves crash on mountain peaks
and we, holding hands in barren fields
and no one finding fossils in the mud.
Jun 19, 2013
Jun 19, 2013 at 11:53 AM UTC
October brings a flurry of trigger-happy handymen
to carpet over the potholes, puddles and last year’s cloth
with that emerald bract that’s rusted in seasons past and
now swarms in copper opulence.
I often wondered why sky’s most subtle inclinations
did not bleach the meadows into hues of tarnished brass
but will glaciate them rather than pull at the soil’s gums.
How I would thread a coat from those discarded teeth
and wear them out before they abandoned me.
May 20, 2013
May 20, 2013 at 12:00 AM UTC
Colonel Hathi with a hurl
that weighs in his illicit hands
like an AR18 play-park swing
and all at his command
are concrete soldiers he had left
to test the new recruits
with netted helmets drilled
into Private Sparky’s boots.
To detrimble and exhume
the cairns from the pyres
a jaded island from respite
and scripture from the flyers
but as he jumps the trenches
of his own conceited fame
he’ll turn a sharp three-sixty
and face the wall again.
May 19, 2013
May 19, 2013 at 6:52 PM UTC
A Sunday and she will not eat
cabbage brew
or the plethora of stale mush
stuffed within
her trusty rusty biscuit tin
even tea stained
and netted dishcloths wane
like fossil flies
on toffee streamers that were baptized
with gravey drips
of the Irish stew from her whitewashed crypt
and papal’s sprogg
plays housies with the dog
we keep shtum .
When threadbare ears are in the room
cull the conversation cull
Go Moe less scale, leather hull
until our hallowed family makes
familiar curiosity and lemon cakes
she’s broke down so give her a push
Maybe ninety two.
It’s Monday and she will not eat.
May 18, 2013
May 18, 2013 at 10:42 PM UTC
Mauve block of US is
frozen butter on soft bread
it won’t spread smoothly.
Nelson’s wee brother
cries gravel tears, Why can’t I
be more like Nelson?
The countless that has
lain in you are poppies now
beyond the stained glass
May 17, 2013
May 17, 2013 at 1:26 AM UTC
They look upon your brindle bake
and break the silence with their spite
it whips across the troubled air
and cracks upon your crescent mouth.
It lingers there for just a time
but now lost to the crowd,
how fortunate are we to see
the best of Ballyshannon Brown
May 16, 2013
May 16, 2013 at 4:34 PM UTC
It sat upon Virginia’s shore
stalked by the sea,
it’s lichen pale with salt
bark that broke the sand,
a haggard frame stark against
the last horizon land.
The butchered stumps contaminate
a hacked and broken field,
their sapwood leaking silence,
the birds atop them mute,
crowned with their annual rings
of righteous guilt and root.
But there it waits branded by
the blight of unknown fear,
a desolation beacon
when the other trees were cleared,
by then it was decided
what pilgrim eyes would see
CROATOAN
scratched into the tree.
May 16, 2013
May 16, 2013 at 6:28 AM UTC
Not the drip of freeway from Pittsburgh but a rough trundle
on chalk roads as flaxen skies shade to molten celluloid
and I can still see them
flash in August fields like a crop of traffic lights
they flare as hay-bale paparazzi or
floaters in the humour and hang
careless in seasonable decadence
so I’ll pass from the frigid, processed air
and join them in their closeness.
No buzz but a minor hum coming from the
moment’s luminosity and then they’re gone
making good on thunder’s empty promise.
May 15, 2013
May 15, 2013 at 7:11 PM UTC
In the glass I glimpsed her eyes
they flitted over dappled cream,
but expectation became a cloud
and so fogged her face from me.
I glanced about my forgone haunt
of candy stripe and lino check,
a board on which I could predict
the movements of her interest.
You cannot taste frozen chocolate
or those rainbow splinters.
Yet she was snared in naive thought
and caught in coloured winter.
They make it all round back you know,
But actually they don’t.
They make a cracked kaleidoscope,
its sight is skewed and bitter.
Mar 11, 2013
Mar 11, 2013 at 10:51 PM UTC
The mossy stitch of a concrete quilt can
cosy and tuck the gummy road. And should
we scrawl upon patchwork step, catching
skip in the slabby hopscotch ground.
Receding upon the pavement scalp
its riprap etching on our skin
where boredom breaks the cracked grins
left to trudge through polished tar
an asphalt crypt of broadbent muck.
But were I tried to argue stint
when waning wild and brittle at the knee
with a wary shuffle of aged feat?
Nevermore would you see
Flagstones on a seasoned street.
Feb 10, 2013
Feb 10, 2013 at 11:31 PM UTC