Four men I don't see in the market.

We stopped just short of smiles
we were always about to begin a conversation
we told each other we had years ago
met somewhere
and we talked only with eyes.

Then on a day, for days
they weren't there anymore.

I try to imagine their age
if they were old enough to be dead.

Like a ray of hope I love to believe
they moved away elsewhere.

Four men short and it will be five.

Maybe one eye will look for me
a little sad at my missing
just another man not seen anymore..

An ordinary man, a poet at heart
who felt more than could express.

He wouldn't know.

There must be
a hell where
forgotten
words and lines
dwell.
Similes scamper,
lost like beetles.
Bat winged metaphors
fly to that dark
hell of forgotten
poems.
If those wandering
words escape, they are
gone forever.

When I swim in
the ink, and the
writing streak starts,
the prose comes to
me while I try to nap.
Now, I sleep with
pen and paper,
to put the words in
that white paper
prison where they
belong.

I'm looking for salvation
by the wounded hours of night

I'm thinking of a giant to the ****** of my plight

My pen lays as idle as the silence of the slain
As I've aged I wonder if I will ever write again

The thoughts go tango to dance that subtlely divides

The words are rudely gathered then told they've been denied

Someone dared to ask me
if I lived in
a graveyard
of shattered dreams

After a moment of silence all I could say was , "Yes ,  so it is as well it seems."

The paper island exists far out on an inky sea

The words have stowed away on boat and sailed far away from me

early yet
I have to tell you
that
i went a different way
to avoid the usual

before. And shall be said
again. That friends can turn into
lovers. But lovers cannot turn
into friends. I cannot talk to you
without wanting to kiss your

strawberry wine lips. I cannot walk
beside you without wanting my hands
around your lean square hips. I cannot
look up at the stars without seeing

them in your shiny chestnut
eyes. No matter how long it's been
I cannot cut these ties. I cannot
pretend it doesn't pain me

to see you with another
woman. I don't like to be
like this. But this heart in my
breast has turned wooden as
a spoon. Without your warm

caress nothing sticks like the snow
in June. I still lose my breath when I look
at you. Guess I'll go to my death
without saying these two little words “I do.”

SUCH A SUNNY DAY

the objects
in his pocket

have lost
their identity

their significance
to anyone but him

a hairy comb
photo of an unknown

woman
who can she be

a torn-in-two
train ticket

chewing gum
much masticated

yet put back
in his blazer's breast pocket

small change
a penny and a sixpence and

a button
from the cuff

no clue as to who
he had been

before the water claimed him
as its own

the disgust and fascination
of those

passersby who continue
to pass by

it such
a sunny day

for death to
intrude this way

the miscellany of objects
ownerless now

the waters of the Liffey
calm and unmoved

*

I was just coming up to O'Connell Bridge and the bus got snarled in traffic. It was a beautiful beautiful sunny day and as I gazed idly out of the window a body, sodden and shapeless but still all too human was being winched out of the river. So we were forced to witness this before the bus finally made it to the bridge. It was startling and cut like an emotional knife through the fabric of the perfect day.

My girlfriend at the time told of a friend of hers who had sometime last year thrown herself into the Liffey so that added an extra dimension to the horror. Everyone who had met her on that last day said she seemed so happy and were amazed that she had done so because "...it was such a sunny day." She only had a comb and a button and small change in her pocket...all she owned. A human life shrunk to so little.

the sea of sleep was shivering the other day
today the clouds are in a rush towards the freedom
of the leaves perhaps, and I don't need to know anything about love
cause I can feel it silently labouring, growing more space for sight might light night for despite and ignite for dynamite and satisfied
the child, the lover, the warrior, the go-getter, the wise and the fool
the vulnerable, the humiliated and the daring, the dreamer
they need to talk to each other like the winds talk to the roots

is this all one can give to another, the patience of the flow,
and nothing more  more space to be
is it the echo of your bones that I can't left behind?