How can I not walk the twisty path,
Sit in chairs away from everyone
To read about poetry
and drink hot chocolate
When your beauty is at every corner?

How can I not grow and flourish,
Like the long shadows of the early morning
on the path in front of us,
When I am nourished at all turns?

How can I not feel lightness,
Like the soft white flour sieved by a cook
Into a competition winning cake,
Baked to perfection,
When you stir my worries into treasures.

How can I not love you,
When you brave
Unmanlyness
To show me your soul.

This Christmas
I had no-one but the dead
To apologise to.

No cards sent
Could match, in feeling
My sorrow at your passing.

No wrapping paper crunch
Could drown the sense of failing you,
When trust had grown
Up such a precarious path.

Full blown
Shapeshifters
Of streets and shops.
They swirl dervishlike.

When they stop,
I mistake them for dead crows,
Suffering rats,
Run over cats.

They meditate
In sheltered spaces
And parking places.
Near extinction
Almost fiction

Elevated by balloon ambitions
And skyward missions
Plastic projections of our
Longing for solutions
To pollution
(it's all their fault! ).

When I walk a beach with you
The sea comes to know us,
Holds us,
Sees that we are lovers,
And tells all Oceans.

When I walk a road with you
Love poems, gentle in the trees,
By a breeze
Carry to the clouds
And tell the Sky.

She's found him.
She is home.
All is well.

To crack the husk of singledom,
I close known roads,
In case one leads away from you
And I stumble up it blind.

And if the tender seed of love
Lying in its casing
Fails to take,
Then I may break.

Softer dances of selfdom
Replace my solo march.
I swirl more gently,
With Grace the Caller.

You were right
The gales subsided with the light.
At the station leaving for home,
A Turner print hangs in the waiting room.
A runner passes, his feet beat concrete.
A dog, mad with squirrel chasing in the park, barks.

The fields hold water in blue reflective puddles,
The muddled mention of your previous love,
And the sciatic tension of leaving you, hits me in
My right thigh.
On the train,
The colour green, speeds by.

This lack of
Professional identity.
wakes me too soon,
With the dawn moon.

The building tones on a single stone note,
Like blood through ears.
Overlooked, but for the silence
Of time unbooked.

I go stumbling
into a different fame.
Where smaller applause lulls me,
Like crumbling brickwork,
The flashing indented,
Re-invenited,
Like ancient sea rocks,
Soft to the shells of clinging creatures
And the feathers of gulls.