Dressed in black, dark eyes amused
She strolls into a room
With the specialised tread
Of a femme fatale,
Tossing her streaming hair in arrogant joy.
Her perfect body
Contains the calm and unexpected force
Of the sea, shifting in a moment between

Reason and fury.
She graces the men with sure-footed Arabic,
Stark, sibilant, passionate words
Laughing like a poem.
A Moroccan beauty,
Guedra dancing in the sun,
From the desert coloured mosque of Casablanca
Punctured by the worship Of 70,000 songs,
To the unremitting souks of Marrakesh,
Her complexity
Emboldened by the courage
Of poets.

She has a silence in her intellect
Such as few have,
Unusual evidence of a soul
In a world of franchises,
Her past imaginings deeper and wider
Than that of her peers,
Dancing to fast Gharnati rhythms,
Beneath imagined Andulusian sunsets
And glowing skies.
An effervescent scintillating gasp of fervent
Desert air, beating across her limbs
Moving gently towards silence.

UNANSWERED



How strange it was to see her there
After so much suffering. Her dying marriage
A bleeding and untreated smear,
Disguising a love neither would salvage.
The music played, the guests danced
With savage partners whose love retreated and advanced.  

His awkward lover lingers quietly in the room
By turn shade, shadow, and silhouette,
She sways slowly to each repeated tune
Too triumphantly passionate to experience regret.
Mistress and wife exchange no glance, assuming ignorance
Of each other’s uncomfortable presence.


The loss of another’s love can wound
More brutally than the lover’s death
The secession of an intimate bond
Becomes a winding, coagulating mess.
When lovers connect they forget
What broke when they met.


A slow guitar riff makes her weep.
She takes my hand. She calls me friend.
I smile, with thoughts of my own to keep,
My own unanswered love to tend.
I kindly wipe away her tears,
But not my own. Those I’ve kept for years.


Beautiful songs, erratically played,
He glances towards her, smiles and leaves,
She turns away, both destroyed and dismayed,
Stands silently in the septic light and grieves.
I take her hand, but she pulls quickly away
I offer her a drink. She declines and will not stay.


I buy another whisky at the bar, tossing it down.
In a cruelly dissipating cloud, her fresh perfume lingers
Mimicking her constant image.  My phone rings and I frown.
My forgiving wife is calling. With guilt and regret, my fingers
Tighten around the glass. I say: “Honey, I’ll be home soon.”
And, like others, leave the signifying gloom.


Touched by the sharp morning light
Half-empty glasses, abandoned halls,
Breaking out from the hasty coition of the night
Love radiates, caresses, falls.
When ubiquitous lovers combine it highlights briefly
How lonely it leaves those who grasp at love weakly.

As they grew older they grew further away
Withholding their love
Remote, with apparently little to say
No words, no tears, no kind of stuff
Falling from their distant lives
Living with new thoughts, lovers, wives.
A troupe of sons, gambling with time!

Alexander was a rotten son of a brilliant father
Misled by a mother’s lies
Into an oedipal outrage. Spurred to violence, rather
Then be a man he became a legend, pursued by biting flies.
Betrayal often leads to success,
The betrayer a psychological mess.

The love of a child evaporates
Evident in the lives of kings
The urge for power saturates
Ignores duty, gratitude, those kind of things.
But hell! So what?
We once, objects of their beaming infant smiles, received such a lot.

OK, Richard the First left his father to die alone,
John ripped the money from the dead man’s purse,
They then fought each other for the throne
Making a family feud undeniably worse.
Throughout history, the mothers taking new ambitious lovers
Caused greater angst amongst whole generations of brothers.

Families are rarely friends: brother fights brother
Sister quarrels with sister, battling incessantly,
Despising each carefully chosen lover
Examining each other critically.
The success of one initiates gloom,
A show of brilliance, a thunderous rain-wrenched boom.
  
Compared to great and legendary figures
Our problems are played out beneath a dimmer light
We drown our thoughts with liquor
Squabble like screeching bats in the night
No grabbing of swords, fastening of armour, beribboned horses
Our mundane arguments have tiny causes.

Mutual embrace severed
Out of politeness, leg
Removed from leg we pulled
Apart desiring separation
In the afterglow.


An affair just begun
Is like a morning
After a night of rain, the
Sun sliding through gaps in the
Ceremonious cloud,
Serene, reassuring and secretive.


It was not yet love,
Just *******.
A curious investigation
Of a stranger, hardly known,
Of unspecified views, who
Has not yet freely spoken.


The routine had long ago been fixed,
Inconsequential phrases over coffee,
Denying breakfast, smiles
Without intent. Holding hands
At the door, a kiss,
And then the regretful goodbye.
A voice remembered as a sigh
A movement as pleasure,
No other memory but the callow scent
Of brief uncertain intimacy.

I grieve for you in the cold quiet of winter
My absent child, my long lost son
Warming my hands over dying flames, frost covered smouldering clinker,
By the wood where icy streams run
Through the shrunken sedge, and barren fields
Stretching for miles, empty of meaning.
The landscape like a worn photograph yields
Your tremulous smile, then nothing.

Here, you ran with startled steps
Through the yielding sheaves, yelling with surprise,
Chasing indifferent spiders, and discomfited birds
With hatred in their pebble pool-dark eyes.
Querying awkwardly spoken words, small
Tenacious fingers that caress and clutch
Every passing object, loudly chuckling, wisely playing me for a fool
A silly father who loved too much.

On the anniversary of your leaving I required solitude
Partnered only by memory
Away from familiar crowds, the booming, barking fusillade
Of the present day commonplace urban itinerary,
Where only the crackle of snow
And the fleeting trajectory of birds
Distracts my slow
Marshalling of comforting thoughts.

The cottage where we lived haunts the shallow glade,
A shrouded ghost swaddled by the half-light,
Positioned squarely like an old man, its cladding beginning to fade,
White branches like dead-fingers that gleam in the night.
In the closet are your dust-sprinkled toys, a yellow plastic duck,
A cheap skateboard, ancient video games,
A guitar you never learnt to pluck
A chess board on which you pulverised my endgames.

In the preserved furnishings of your bedroom
Your school work gathered into stacks
Barely visible in the gloom,
Our life together in disorganised packs
Denoting year and level
Development and academic achievement,
If any, (but I mustn’t once again cavil)
Indicating, even in your earliest years, a specific bent.

Standing on the mantelpiece, propped up against the wall,
Are brightly coloured, polished pictures
Of you. Plump, blonde, agreeably small
Dancing, standing, jumping, grinning, absurdly wistful mixtures.
A bitter echo resonating from the shadows
A cold thought darkening into memory
The spectre of your voice disappearing in the meadows
Having left all of us! Having left me!

Catastrophic end in sight,
light bends, her eyes contrite;
a shaking phantasmagoric dispute
making both husband and lover mute;
revelation upon revelation,
hatred in each exhalation;
exasperated rivals stand apart,
one soul exultant, one twisted heart.

Intense and distant, the sun
Slid imperceptibly upward through the yellowing sky
As the ships powered across the water
Oars cutting into the waves.
Like a crumbling sentinel, on the cragged promontory
The temple observed the sea. Within
Sat Poseidon, golden trident in hand, his
Features frozen into gleaming marble. Around
Him, murmuring incantations, marched
His priests.
Time has dismantled it all, except
For the pillars that poke upward, jagged
Snapped-off fingers of stone clothed
In moist, inch-thick moss. The ships
Have long disappeared. The crews dead.
Beneath the waves the turbulent god
Waits, his muscular invisible arms
Shaking the ground, as he roars out
His discontent. Reduced to bedtime stories,
Beautiful Technicolor films, the old gods
Drift hopelessly through the memory
Desperately trying to be noticed again.