WAKING, DREAMING, DREAMLESS The horse of old age is on the horizon, mane ruffled by the black north wind and lit by the setting sun. It gets closer even as you look the other way, carrying in its saddlebags fragments of the future: a riot of rocks that time’s fast glaciers will leave behind as… Continue reading Three Short Poems

Three poems inspired by my returning to live in Ireland, the country of my ancestors: MY CLAN If I just sit still and listento the silence and my heartI can imagine them all.Kate stayed on alone for yearsgossiping with the shadowswhen everyone else had left.I’m an accidental man, said Thomasevery day of his life as… Continue reading Three Irish Poems

Haunted time dragged by insects. So tired you can hear it ringing in your bones. Floating on the coffin lid of desperation in a race long and slow as starvation while your mind is an amphetamine bus searching for bodies after a cyclone. Medicine brand names like fantasy gods that you read aloud in the… Continue reading Insomnia

ELEVEN KILOMETRES Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean This is where life’s journey ends,  the deepest well of the world’s mind, mother earth’s vagina and darkest subconscious. The outside pressure would crush you flat; remember what it’s done to the creatures we passed on the way, the world’s deformed children that it hides away for shame, floating… Continue reading Three Poems

Grand Canal Dock, Dublin That hour of the night when sick people fall forever from the high ledges of their lives and the city is deep in a dream it will not share. The moon clasps its head in cloudy blue hands, reflected in the canal but shivering among the cold, uncaring ripples. The echoes… Continue reading Their Share of the Dark

GUILT Three times today I’ve gone to the window to see what’s happening outside. I know I’m to blame but I hope there might be someone else who’ll look out at the same time, searching for another who accepts their share of the fault. No one’s there and I feel like an astronomer hunting a… Continue reading Three Poems

FAMINE VILLAGE While the rain turns the ground to spotted mud, I spy a flat stone and jump, balancing, a sodden flamingo in dark plumage, teetering in the middle of the mess when I see a face next to my foot; not etched or carved, but grown into it: a man with lines of pain… Continue reading Five Poems

Grand Canal Dock, Dublin This gasworks chimney is a survivor, the last standing stone of its circle; the others have eroded over time but they once used to cover this landscape. That must have been a world of primary shades lacking the luxury of colour, a collage clipped from old newspapers, when those pipes of… Continue reading The Luxury of Colour

At eight in the morning the city exhales its gritty breath laced with the odour of standing rubbish and lagered dew dripping down walls. Outside my front door, I become aware while walking the semiotic streets of so many needs I didn’t know I had last night. They call from billboards and shout from the… Continue reading NEEDS

A town, complete in indifference, where noon falls heavy as a concrete slab and the days are long, bright and vast, far too large for their meagre content, waiting for the promised arrival of something. There should be vultures on those branches watching the efforts of the humans to give a semblance of meaning to… Continue reading Empty Trees