Some words or smells or skin prints shift into a shimmering inside your skull the pull uprooting and settling all things bothering you.
Springtime

When all is quiet and all is still when you don’t talk and you don’t work a tiny light comes dropping soft, the tiny drop comes lodging lodging within the softest loft of your body slowly growing, growing out and growing in a rose, a tree, a bird, a diamond, a droplet of pure gold, a gentle hand, a salty treat, a sweet so sweet it melts away the clouds.
They cannot dismantle the bread.
The kitchen wafts of yeast. The field is
Full of people greening. A father flocks
his young, a daughter hands her mother
her cane, though in her mind
she’s still unfettered. A cat oils her paws
with her tongue and
although the billboards tell us otherwise
a kiss is still all that matters. We talked about it
this morning over breakfast before that time
we spend cogging, day after day we blow
the sunlight. They cannot dismantle the bread.
My chick smiles inside my arms’ circle
my soles have brushed so many a flower,
in many a fenceless field. The butter we unfurl
macadamizes the thick slice for chunky marmalade.
They cannot dismantle them either. In our hollow stomach,
they spread a meadow. Our blues and browns and greens
blend the stained glass we’d cut on.
When you blank and I quake
see-through like a tiny snowflake wilting
a crust of bread frames our chests, and out of the blue
fairies sure up the wood in the bones
we’d imagined dismantled. If you let them,
they moulder under the thundering train,
they dismantle at a peep. Or so we figured.
But fingers nudge and irises skew and when
we sunder from the moorings
the lake and the valley fling a line and a buoy,
the crust rounds our lips and the butter
rears our mouths on what it is to quench a rash.
Then, we fit into the river, glide past glittering stones
and circumnavigate fallen branches
some of which firm up the bed never to be dismantled.
In the kitchen at home, riverside on the far side of
the world, in a factory where they make
dried yeast, we eat sandwiches
drink milky tea and talk.
The dog gulps up the crumbs we shed
we speak Everyday and gesture sunlight.
On the wall, we are a big blotty shadow
no one can dismantle.
Feck Capitalism is a money poem, a celebration that there is so much more to life than owning stuff lest we forget.
And another thing / the sugar you paste on them / how you sink a hole and pour oil on the monkeys / because peanuts are for protein balls / like an itch you rile / with the matt bling of a pig in blankets/ how your half-empty cup runneth over and into your vault / hinging on the shoulders of billions of minions / crumb-scrambling
but /
how chummy the sound of plastic film splitting / worth a trillion trickles of sweat and tears / finger-licking swatting cogs don’t plot / how a small pack of hoarders sow canes and split beets into the scattering beyond / if only to bulwark the vault / bait eyes away and play a honey rondeau on repeat / sleep / toil / swallow a grain of sugar / sleep / repeat
except /
how well the monkeys know how to pick a branch to swing from and the worth of wood / how they talk to parrots and hummingbirds / how they peel a banana in line with the sunshine / how squirrels stash nuts and badgers make dens to bear cubs and bears get a share of honey and how we can make a candle out of the comb / place it mid-way / and have it shatter any night
And the Humming Ebbs is a dusk poem, a painting of a city’s evening and people passing through places and days.
Dusk, and the humming ebbs People homing, Sparrows heading Offshore. At the bar, after-work pints In the beer garden. On the veranda, He rocks her chair, she reads a line from An old book she’s read a thousand dawns When the chirping and the rev of the first bus Broke light sleep and the dew sweetened The scent of the grass. A boy and a girl play Hopscotch, Traffic and an old man can’t Cross the road. A seagull roves down Shop Street And lodges fronting the Treasure Chest Swagger on her webbed rubbery feet. They dull The colour of the paving stones. On her beak, The red dot, the knob her chicks peck When they are limp. But that was many dusks ago And wingspans across a bunch of oceans. But Distance is nothing, and still one hand in another More golden than gold itself. Inside the glass Teapot, the Chinese flower blossoms on a canvass of water on the boil, talk and no talk.
The Lake is a summer poem, a celebration of warm summer days spent together outside.
All year the dripping sky plunged into the dip In the landscape; light and crystalline Rain had partied there, sketched in by wintering winds. All year it swelled inside the deep cavity. Drops clattered like seashells, water poppies Sloshed veils of yellow rays across the lake. You could spot purple mosquitos and blue dragonflies From the wooden rowing boat we had fixed up Out of scraps one warm day the rain wouldn’t let up In the middle of our summering. Once afloat, We would sky an oar and each stroke into the deep Rippled a fish and rocked a water lily. Within the crutches, the rudders nestled we were Hanging off the beaks of birds inside the mould On the thwart. They would tell us how it is To fly for miles and miles and how plumes want Springing when the long nights floor the early bright. We Could tell the shore was listening even adrift down-lake it Framed the water and the fields beyond and on it We’d lodge our boat for the next day Fire-side until the day, dusk weighed anchor at dawn. Now the clouds were fumettos and The lake was a pop-up book with us in it, the sun A giant reading lamp. We heard how the sand had Beached a fish and stuck on so that the angler threw it Back in and how the bird considered snapping it up Mid-air only to be nudged out of the way by the breeze And how what we said nursed the ladybug many miles Away. On the whitecaps, a grey heron pencilled A map for the catfish and us as far as the slough and Through the cattails and the floating sweet grass of The moor and beyond to where we’d dry off before Going home for iced tea with a slice of lemon. Soon, We’d be falling then wintering before budding and Summering again.
Delicate is a bravery poem, a celebration of anyone who dares step up and out no matter how terrifying it may seem to us all.
When my plastic skin melted into a puddle…if only I had skimmed the barks of trees and felt that texture is matter and matters to the birds and the bees who will not cling onto slippery slopes. I was used to slathering oil on my face plumbing the arid valley around the wings of my nose, I plumped and smoothened my future double-chin, I lifted and tucked the dark rims, I concealed the buds of branches and my foundation was above all, cover-all clown faces, pants around the ankles, frost-bitten lips, and burnt bones….months of leaf feasts peaked in a shivering swaddle and now the sun fills my dimples, rays tug at my limbs I’m moving downstream. This is easy / life in a school of tadpoles, one fishtail to lose, four legs to grow / to one day,
live between river and woods, wide-eyed and quick-tongued but not v the painted ladies. They do not vanish in winter, they migrate to where the food is, thousands of miles across scapes only to home here again come spring, icy winds and squalls no match for their paper-thin canvasses gliding above the surface where you or I try growing tomatoes on a good day. On a bad day, we wear scarves and costly shades so no one can fish for our eyes. Then, everything is tanned, even the flicker of a heart has a tint of chocolate choking it. Why hide? Why not drink the rain and wash in it, make toast in the sun and bathe in it and plummet into the plumbline between the sky and the green, green grass / every day?