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

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