REGRET Counting broken windows in a ruined city where hopes are corpses with outstretched hands. Strong arms holding your head under water until you accept mortality’s truth. Even smiles are doomed to atrocity: sunlight gleaming on a murderer’s shoulder. You will never sleep again; dreams are censored and you will never remember who shared them.… Continue reading Regret and Obelisks

Entered 3-4-1846 aged thirteen. Died 4-9-1849. Any season would do to tell this story. In summer these structures would gleam defiance, their dark brown heaviness standing guard pitiless and immoveable. Even spring would fail to brighten the picture with its thoughts of young life blunted, bent and then ended. Winter makes any scene cruel, but… Continue reading Mullingar Workhouse

LEGACY My mother was given some marron – unfortunately edible crustaceans – swimming in a plastic bag, claws grasping; throw them alive in boiling water. Lacking the neighbours’ prey drive, she led instead a revolt and set the victims free in a creek. Mum is no longer here to see them but the marrons’ descendants… Continue reading Legacy and Heron

SLAVE I was not born to this, but time has done its work. On the first day all those years ago, I smashed my head against the wall like the Spartan boy choosing death over servitude. But walls soften over time, and the life I fought against has become a barrier against the freedom I… Continue reading Slave, Art Imitating Life, Vase

Western Australia Boiling and roaring by day, the shearing shed traps heat, noise and sweat while thousands of sheep pass through, sliding on floors and ramps to leave their wool to the snarling machines and barking dogs. At night in the blissful cool the shed releases it all and goes quiet, except for the splash… Continue reading The Shearing Shed

The giant white screen is peelingand the speaker stands jut out of the concretelike stunted metal trees gripped by weeds,their long, thin evening shadowsstretching back towards another timewhen people in flares sat in carsmunching crisps and slurping drinkswhile movies flashed by and vanished. Published in The Frogmore Papers

The lurking stranger waits for his profits from pain. Waits to take a fleeting anxiety captive and subject it to serial passaging, selecting incessantly for infectivity longevity pathogenicity until it gains sufficient function. Then the mind virus can work on you with interrogation and sleep deprivation, all the while smiling the smile of the void.… Continue reading Sleeper Agent

ARRIVALSLambay Island, County Dublin As our boat approached, the shrieking cliffs dissolvedinto thousands of fluttering flecks,each one a bird swirling or huddling,swooping, bickering or chattering,living countless rivalries, battles and hopeson narrow ledges or buffeting winds –as we have since the sun first hatched, say the gulls –since before the sky could screech, say the fulmars… Continue reading Arrivals and Quiet Answers

FOREVER CRYSTALLINE The happy sleep in another country, while I read again my diary of all the years we never had, precious as a flower to a dying soldier; when love is over, you should starve it, they say, but I prefer my own futilities. Our silences hid a snowy forest, at its heart a… Continue reading Four Poems

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