We don’t really understand

How atoms behave;

Or infinity;

Or how winds carry the seasons -

Like ‘Olde April ‘ with it’s 'showers sweet' !

Yes, I’ve felt them...



The clean stinging scent of rain

Scratching at the earth,

Pelting aromatic plants,

Condensing the smells of seas, winds, continents;

Infusing the sum of all these aromas in its perfumery,

Marketing it: April, again.



And Eliot said,

There be April,

'The cruellest month'.

Oh my (!)

Appealing April, with its sunny flavours,

Cascades of cats & dogs,

And dead-eye jack,

Firing frosts that just might spend the tender herb.



It was snowing in April,

And Easter was early, that year

When I took Schrödinger’s cat walking

On a leash, And April was still new,

And capable of shocking...



Now any month - could bring pitiless ruin.

The year annually

Out of step with migratory designs,

Throwing epithets out of its greenstick pram,

Its months in disarray ,

No-one knows what’s going on...





The drunkard earth sups up it’s own tears,

Reeling in its spin,

Until,

Saturated,

It can drink no more,

And every dip fills,

Every meadow spills,

Banks overflowing,

Its resolve drowning,

Questions washing

Up like a tide of interrogative curiosity.



OK – so I am really hiding in my acres...

At least I can tell - it’s April !



Enquiring lily-of-the-valley,

Puts up green periscopes.

Peering through the sodden grass,

The remnants of last year’s soggy leaves,

Cosset primrose & ramsons.

Daffodils are past their best, but soldier on

Like hungover squaddies,

Snowdrops have fat capsules where white drops shone,

Hellebores have been up since the crack of time -

Good movers - they could dance all spring!

Dingles are glinting green with native bluebell leaves,

And their mophead mates have muscled in the garden,

Quiet violets lounge on the field’s chaise long,

Coy, understated,

How British!

Oxlips and cowslips join the brave primroses

Who have been on the razzle for weeks.

White & purple lilac in green cassocks,

Will soon burst out

Like kiss-o-grams.

Boughs hung with clematis,

Still tiny shoots like birds on wires.



I am giving a prize for the first celandine on my patch;

Each little celandine - Rannunculus ficaria - is

A miniature sun uttering: Oi! You up there, old currant bun!

Here’s the template for a perfect summer sky !

I’ve whittled shelves into my body to try and bring an

order to things. All it did was make space.

So many shelves like staircases built in anger.

Winding forcefully

until they end right where I stand.


2. There are days I wash my face with vinegar

and soak my fists in horse *****. I use it to

conceal the musty smell of forgotten Bibles.


3. It’s while God is in my novels,

that I see my bedroom floor.

A junkyard of loose-leaf prayers,

my boots go out of their way to step on

dry crunchy ones.

I can hear the breaking, and it’s satisfying.

The acrid smell of fall

in my mouth,

I bite my lip just to feel the sting.


4. The phantom pain in my chest tastes like cotton

stuck to my teeth.


5. I am Leonid Rogozov in Antarctica, I’ve built my

staircase-shelves by cutting into myself,

only local-numbness needed.


6. No, my shelves are not staircases.

Shelves never extend forward. Just, upward.

A little too much like trees,

not permanent enough in the ground.


7. It all reduces to sawdust anyway, collected

on the bedroom floor.

I’ve been sweeping it up for 40 days now,

each day, a little more.

One day, the floor will be clean.


8. You say, “You are made of blessings.” I say, “No, I’m made of blood

and skeleton bones.”


9. I love You. You say you love me.

Some days, that’s enough.


10. Today, Just yellow-

brown pages and

nothing resembling gospels.


11. I wasn’t born, I just walked in

one quiet evening and started living


12. After every shelf I whittle I still ask,

What is numbered in my life?


13. Things will change, things will change.

Things will change.


14. I have layers and layers of papier-mâché skins you can thumb

through like pages.

You’ve peeled them away,

each becoming more raw and permanent.

The cleanliness worries me.


15. There are 17 different kinds of fractures:

non-displaced, complete, oblique, transverse, comminuted, greenstick,

simple, linear, incomplete, compound, compacted, avulsion,

compression, stress, impacted, displaced, spiral and fatigue.

Believing in You makes me tired.


16. ‘Post mortem nihil, ipsaque mors nihil’

Death built its own shelves

After My body was felled.


17. When it’s you resting on my tree-shelves,

I begin to see an end.

Books are the most efficient weapons in the world.

I’ve diagnosed it with industrialized rickets,

stomach is open and distended

metal is bowed with greenstick

fractures, hard and bendable,

compensating with growth

disturbances and wider wrists.


If I squint enough

there is movement

in permanent metal, micro-movements

as the ants shape sand hills

far from half-buried

fire-hydrants and barely there

Red Hot Chili Peppers

laced with frat-boy yells.


I’ve named it insieme

just far enough away to be together.

It’s body isn’t big enough

for all the purpose that it has.

At some point it’s been welded,

Atomic number 29,

add tin and it becomes 79.


Gold. It’s on fire, comprised

of a thousand tiny synthetic

flames fused together by rust.

It’s too open a place.

It should be found in ignorant alleyways

where half smoked cigarette butts marry

pavement, where brash teenagers go to cry.

The ants make sense though.

bone...
clicking..
fine china flicking..
cracking, shattering..
greenstick fracture..
stalk, greengrass  waving, growing, changing, cutdown
fine inscision, muscle, mulch
resow, regrow meld together
memories flow, memories flow
bone
clicking, aching, rasping,
shaking
back bone pointing, picking
etching time.
line by line...
until the callous grows