You come down from the sun
dancing
as I sit in the cellar
with my broken harp
the colours in your hands
are warming
where dead rainbows were sharp
and shovels for my tomb

You waltz into my eyes
with laughing
as I count the matchsticks
I have dropped like tears
the lovesong in your voice
is talking
where darkness froze my ears
to emaciated skies

Roll ’em said the Almighty Director
and by Behan by Falstaff
by Jesus and by Monroe
the bloody waters had their bastard
birth
in the gurgling of a cracked-up
magnified bouncing Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
of a drowning earth

and by Sir Larry
cooling it in my painted on-stage
perilous raft
i was there
and i said
a bit wet, all this, isn’t it?
_______

If she played Life
like she plays Monopoly
my wife would have the power to buy and sell me
many times over.

The inner London of my soul
would be owed to her Company Store
from Park Lane to the Old Kent Road.

My sole possession would be
the highly dubious camaraderie
of the equally poor –
only the citations of King’s Cross
to mark our road to God.

But thank God
she does not.

                   ‘Bad Friends’ published 1975

Bold as a new penny
she holds us
touches us
all we can do
is not resist
trust

watch what she’s doing
breaking up distance
catching our dreams
in hands
like a goalkeepers
turning back over
a swan in each wrist
a snake in the
hips
unrest and tension
clutch boney arms
and are flung back
out to a sudden
place
where they came from

the breath is held
in the pleasure which she
holds for us
sure of her time

Mystics, mistresses, madams and mattresses
You are the monsters now,
in the fields and towns, on the map.
Look, see, far greenier blues,
pearly skies, hypothesize, wow!
Maybe I, maybe no,
hedgerow and Heathrow,
Hey, mister, is this it?
Beads of sweat and play-
acting,
all these years of fair-
dealing,
No, I’m not squealing,
only a wing and a prayer-wheel,
and a terrible feeling
nothing is there (is there?)
Reflexes, twitches, and
go sleep
with you monsters under
the continents
slumberland towns.
Catch me, don’t drop me
I’m coming down
I have got to come down.

The brush can only try
to light a canvass with a candle flicker
the hammer and the chisel
are dumb dividers of a hot-faced whisper
the wind of flame
can never even gasp a dying semblance
of an ember in the stolen wood
of sapless lead.

When growling men
try tongueless to exude a crucial
river of expression
when howling mummers
try their roles on neurotic
first nights of the soul
the theologian will descend
to bless their efforts but only in his cloud
confess emotion.

For he and they
have dignity enough to leave
the hammering of blushes into blue
to mad exiles who wander
with unlit candles for torches
in search of tools
which trade with colours
in a lover’s pool of whirling oils.

Once there was a rainbow with many colours.
I was young then and I looked at it for hours.
Then the colours slowly started to fade
People with me cried a bit and said
perhaps we should pray!

When there was only one colour left
we all worshipped it like dogs
and called it holy names and dyed our socks
and everything the same colour.

But soon even that started to fade and
everyone got together to invent
a new one before it got dark.

It was absolutely no use I just
consoled myself as best I could
by trying to lose my sight
in a dignified manner
I said to myself,
Well blind people develop better hearing,
smell better and all that sort of thing.

But perhaps I should have thought
about listening to rainbows
before sundown.