dissident
oh to be a dissident
now that the coronation’s here,
whoever wakes in england
sees, some morning, unaware,
that the lowest peasant in earnest belief
round the royalty are in disbelief,
refusing to bow with a proclamation,
are we not a freedom loving nation?
cows
across the field
a dog chased a cow
the barbed wire tensile against its horned brow
ping twang! in a puff of dust
off trotted the cow down the road
the dog was chastised
as the boys ran away
"all behind like brown’s cows"
my mother used to say
oh to be a boy again
soon
do they
they don’t say do they
mothers of the past times
the scars from the shell factory
the tin works sheets slicing
pickling the memories
sealing the lids of the jars of the damned
the condensation in the tears of a child
held as close as close can be
to the veil
t’weed
and then there is that scent
of a weed and not a flower
that take’s me back
and as soon as i look it is gone
again and again this floater
of a memory beyond the periphery
bidden i can cross to that weed
unbidden i go back through that hole
of a memory bungee jumping
me
a train of thoughts
waiting waiting
do i look for the train that is coming
or after the one that just left
the back red distant lights
or the bright front beacon rushing
not too near the edge
now
sundown
and in the murmuration see my face
once more the sun enjoy relax
and swirl with thoughts of you again
as pink as the blush i always knew
this sundown streams my eye-bright tears
across this down-day going away
to bring clouds of bird thoughts home to roost
to pass upon this day
big sur
the mind expands with the vista
in the longing of the eye’s distance
we see laid before us possibilities
in going there to look forward
we see the past relegated to footnotes
in the greying of perspective
we see end’s diffusion
here we write such things
and it moves us to write more
after seeing a new leaf
the palest hint of trees
all along the avenue suddenly
slightest is the word this month
as april comes as late as cold insists
here encouraging the palest hint
of a green so sweet as to desist
any attempt to touch this impermanence
for all too soon the greening holds
the clock’s turning of the season’s mirth
at man’s poor tenancy of thought
here take this moment and store it there
in the words of a heart held in enthral
for here lies all you ever need know
how birth is just death reborn
for like these leaves we just hold on
until the avenue we walk
grows dark along the longest sigh
and slightest is the word we thought
unfortunately
unfortunately
the word has preponderance
carries the angst of a leaking ark
of all the pairings sinking all
the smuts of a burning world
out across the oceans of disbelief
now even leviathan is cooked
the dove of a poem finds no perch
all have turned their backs
on the grave
bath laugh time
it was in front of the fire
i was just out of the tin bath
and drying in a cuddled towel
her feet were on the edge of the bath
when whoosh over it went
and she was on her hands and knees
for ages mopping the cinder-inflected mat
she cried
but often we belly-laughed
my mum and i
Dupuytren’s
and in my hands
time is a curled medium
in the way the contracture
cripples my timeline
and defies all reading of the lines
that for all my life have stretched there
undisturbed by work
but now distorted by time’s contracture
Dupuytren’s they call it
well they would
wouldn’t they
an ocean of thoughts
to approach the sea
is to see all the disarrangements
of danger
the venom beneath the smiles
all at the basest level
the primordial fear wrapped
in the words caverned there
with the salt that triggers the cellular functions
the flare of a moon’s trail across
the gulf between being and not
is cold you see
bone cold
in that disarrangement of survival
the attainment of that potential
time and again the atavistic hormones
surge with the sea although itself lifeless
but filled with life’s adaptations
judge
the rip tide
the storm surge
the waves imbroglio
we put a name to
a personality a gender
yet all the while it is but saline
salinity almost the anagram of insanity
that bids one talk to it
or grudgingly
swim in it
often in the mumbles
what can one say
to the rising sun
when the full tide is in
and the day just begun
there is one boat there
far across the bay
where the blue is reflected
well you know the way
the dazzle right up
winsome your eye
that follow the railings
right up to the sky
come now my dear
for the tide’s on the turn
let’s walk to the pier
to linger and yearn
for a day such as this
when we visit again
for to arrive is such bliss
on the red mumbles train
the mixon bell
listen ~ ~
can you hear the *mixon bell
toll in the slow swell
way out across the bay
where the bluebells look down
on this late spring misty day
oh the sun it was out yesterday
and maybe tomorrow it will
but for now to look out is enough
and to hear the mixon bell
*the mixon sand bank lies just off the coast at Bracelet Bay and is marked with the large red Mixon Bell
the swansea poets
to walk there where they walked
dylan thomas vernon watkins
nigel jenkins peter thabit jones
et al et al et al et al
ways rings hollow
this hello like mun boys
the cadenced swansea sons of the meter
at their kadhoma oozings
the gower wind buffeting
all of town’s smoke eastwards
leaving the clean air of their words
for the discerning of the fine birds
not the workings of the sulphur
in the grime-nailed words of toil
can one soak it in
the mysteries of their meeting
or absorb it from their foot-stepped
ground sitting sunny days
or the blood town days drunk
in the docking of the world’s trade winds
hymn-booked along the archdeacon bay
dare be not enough to speak
like the poetry of those times
the impudence of thinking you could belong
to a treasured genre may it be allowed
but where birth by default has left
the swaddling of their shroud
the only page upon which to write
all the wrong words written right
well here i am see bachgen bach
here i cwtch not in crumpled piles of words
but on my iPad spinning faster times
so lay not around the barbed wire
of the genuflected times of old
but open the viewed gates of the fields
and coast of rising seas my friends
see the setting sun down west
well now
it always says that best
is yet to come again
and settle today’s memes
in the reams of dreams and themes
and themes
for here am i
i am me
not them
you see
just me