IF IT’S THE ONLY WAY OUT

Feel the need to shout. 

Hurl your hurt at me; 

Let anger tinkle in sparkling shards 

If it must 

To my feet, to my toes that redden, 

My blood a curious rust. 

Grow roots into my stone perch. 

Come, hang your rage, 

Festoon my granite arms. 

Don’t let this wall dwarf 

The omens that show in your eyes; 

Climb it and sway 

On its treacherous width. 

Shake your treetop; float down with 

The leaves that waft my way. 

Make your hand grow long; 

Knight me with your dart- 

Draw a bead on my iced heart 

With my wrong. 

 

YOU TOO 

You too 

I have had to 

Rub out of my morning eyes 

Watch as the shadows shift 

Speckled dust in stray ray drift 

Your whats to my whys 

Your truths that are lies 

Lying in my dusty corners 

The glint of unbrushed teeth 

Holey socks on cold feet 

Walking down icy streets 

Searching for snatches 

Of laughter that used to 

Sound when all I’d do 

Was spin your six digits 

Now everything’s in bits 

And you’re missing in patches- 

Did you have to, 

You too? 

 

LOVESPEAK 

You are in soft focus 

Traipsing elfin down my morning 

If your laughter stops being a spring scented storm 

I might remember how to be sad 

Slowly swishing down a playground slide 

Into touch with your grass stroked skin 

Orange tang on my tongue 

Moulding my language furry with song 

Holding my heart on the spill edge of a swing 

Time whispering at the tip of a pin 

Drop silence in a light glob into my lap 

Bend the daylight to just short of snap 

Make my morning do cucumber calisthenics 

Cool inside like the ringlets of sleep 

Exhale breath music on my fingertip reeds 

The green brown secrets of a varicose leaf 

All its past in autumn thrall 

Childwoman, you are 

(!) 

Life creaks by with rheumatic joints. 

Can I mimic spring’s brief call? 

I hang by my fingertips from the fanblades, 

Swept around to clocktick pace. 

I crawl the lawn and peep through the grass, 

Smell the brown beneath. 

Raise the glass- 

My hair must stay in place. 

A year thumbs through the calendar. 

Even, like grandmother’s picture, 

That memory fades. 

Open your eyes 

And let me fall — 

A heap of pencil stubs, 

With broken points. 

 

LINES TO A PERSON WHO DESERVES TO BE AWARDED PEACE 

Settle upon our world’s brow, 

Captured sun in cupped palm. 

Chart a course into the glow- 

Let your veins flow into noontime. 

Snatch laughter from our grasp, 

And fling it into the wind. 

Take us gently in your clasp- 

Or our hearts will break in two. 

Gather in the sounds of dawn, 

And shape them into yellow flowers. 

Put music into our everyday song- 

Touch our minds with unseen powers. 

Don’t take the world 

To be filled with shadows. 

Somewhere in the woods peace lies curled 

Waiting to be woken, 

Dreaming of nothing more 

Than its name being spoken.