March

Mr Ifonly

Mr Ifonly sat down and he sighed,
I could have done more if only I had tried

If only I had followed my true intent
If only I had done the things that I meant

If only I had done the things that I could
And not simply done the things that I should

If only a day had lasted a year
And I had not lived in constant fear

Mr Ifonly sat down and he cried:
I could really have lived if only I had tried!

Now life has past me by and its such a crime,
Said Mr Ifonly who had run out of time

FEBRUARY

As it is St Valentines Day soon I thought I would post a love poem.
This one is from my new Collected Love Poems, published by Harper Perenial

That Dress, This Shirt

That dress will not stop you growing older,
No matter how you wear it-
Nor will this baggy shirt I wear disguise anymore
A stomach growing fatter by the hour.
Now that we no longer have Times currency to squander
Lets get used to the raw material we are,
Lets celebrate this far harder adventure
And stop carrying about the dead weight of Ago..
That dress, this shirt-
We place them over chairs in rooms
Besides beds that sets sail each night without expectation,
With us the crew, held together by time and by the faith
That we are buoyant enough to see any darkness through.

January

Last Year...

was not the best of years.
Friends went,
Leaving bits of themselves behind:
Books, lists of things to do,
Diaries that widows were afraid to open.
Then in spring a woman I once loved
Took me to a graveyard where her shadow was buried,
Then she was gone again.
There were no goodbyes.
Indifference filled the gulf where they might have been.
By summer everything that had ceased to happen
Ceased to happen all over again.
Words spoken with great passion
Were airbrushed from the soul.
Autumn came, nursing cancer and terror.
In winter I convalesced amongst the dead,
Sat writing it in a room that smelt of nutmegs and dust,
And it seemed the years had passed so quickly
That they were like snowflakes falling into flames.

BP, a draft

DECEMBER
Here is a poem I wrote remembering back to my childhood, and seeing a thick fall of snow for the first time. It was so beautiful

REMEMBERING SNOW

I did not sleep last night.
The falling snow was beautiful and white.
I dressed, sneaked down the stairs
And opened wide the door.
I had not seen such snow before.
Our grubby little street had gone.
The world was brand-new, and everywhere
There was a pureness in the air.
I felt such peace.
Watching every flake
I felt more and more awake.
I thought I had learned all there was to know
About the trillion million different kinds
Of swirling frosty flakes of snow.
That was not so.
I did not know how vividly it lit
The world with such a peaceful glow.
Upstairs my mother slept.
I could not drag myself away from that sight
To call her down and have her share
The mute miracle of the snow.
It seemed to fall for me alone.
How beautiful our grubby little street had grown!

October/November

My poems of the month aren't always new poems, but poems I'm simply glad to have written.
This is one of them.

Inessential Things

What do cats remember of days?

They remember the ways in from the cold,
The warmest spot, the place for food.
They remember the places of pain, their enemies,
The irritation of birds, the warm fumes of the soil.
They remember the creak of a bed, the sound
Of their owners footsteps,
The taste of fish, the loveliness of cream.
Cats remember what is essential of days.
Letting all other memories go as if of no worth
They sleep sounder than we,
Whose hearts break remembering
So many inessential things.

BP

June

Hush Now

When the wave breaks
Who puts it back together?
When the night falls
Who runs to its aid?
When the clouds part
Does no one feel sorry for them?

The wave breaks the wind moans
The night falls The clouds part.
Hush now,
Sometimes words are dangerous things
Inventing chaos
Where none was intended.

BP

Best of Mates

February is over - in the orchard after midnight,
muffled up against the cold, whiskey on the table,
head back, staring skywards-
I raise a glass to him- two months dead now-

The grass white, crunchy as sugar,
His ghost, moth quiet,
Steps out of nowhere and is beside me.

Blue shirt open at neck, fawn slacks, sandals-
No coat needed against this worldly frost,
He smiles, takes a chair opposite-

Falls through it, grimaces, nods OK, tries again.
Not used to this being dead stuff, he says,
Sits finally, breath smelling of ice and apples-

Underfoot, violets turn mauve in the moonlight,
Tendrils of river mist drift through him.
Somewhere an owl takes out its oboe.

I pour him one ghost glass after another-
We down the bottle – who cares if we get smashed now?
Celia is up in London- can’t see us.

The stars are bubbling away nicely, he says.
It’s Gods soup, spilt out across the heavens, I reply.
We exchange banter, his ghost and I; best of mates still.

For Adrian Mitchell

BP

The River Dart in Winter

In winter the river is an outlaw
Imprisoned in itself, it looks ashen with hunger.
Chained to beads of ice
It pulls the little it can down into its belly.

The fish pay their rent in breath,
In bubbles of light that rise
And sacrifice themselves to the air.

Stark in its beauty, manacled to February
It drags along a retinue of leaves;
In the Estuarys mouth it dumps the clouds reflections.

The encoded message of birdsong
Drifts from the deep wood,
Rinses out the clogged up world.

On the iced over mud flats, where the moth-eaten moon sleeps,
Boats are stranded, sails rimmed with frost.
And the river sneaks by, saying nothing.

BP

Selfepitaph
My good friend the great poet Adrian Mitchell died just before Christmas
He wrote with more joy that any other contemporary poet I can think of
He wrote this poem

I Was Lucky

That's all. It was good.
Love was a planet
full of amazing creatures.

This Death is only a dark little town,
in a country, in a continent,
on a planet full of amazing creatures,
a planet called love.

DECEMBER

There Is A Boat Down On The Quay

I remember as a child going down to the docks to see a merchant seaman uncle I adored off on a voyage. We none of us ever saw him again. Since then, there have been so many other departures.

There is a boat down on the quay come home at last.
The paint is chipped, the sails stained as if
Time has pissed up against them.
I imagine the sea-routes it has followed,
Sailing through the worlds sunken veins
With its cargo of longings;
A little boat that has nuzzled its way
Into the armpits of forests,
That has sliced through the moons reflection,
Through the phosphate that clings to the lips of waves.
I knew its crew once,
Those boys manacled to freedom
Who set sail over half a century ago,
And were like giants to me.
A solitary child in awe of oceans
I saw them peel their shadows from the land
And watched them depart.
What did they think when they peered
Over the rim of the world,
Where Time Roared and bubbled
And angels swooped like swallows?
Reading an ancient Morse-code of starlight,
Stranded by the longing to be elsewhere,
What secrets did they learn to forget?
I longed to be among them,
A passenger curled up in fates pocket,
I longed to be a part of them-
Those ghosts who set sail in my childhood,
Those phantoms who shaped me,
That marvelous crew for whom
I have stretched a simple goodbye
Out over a lifetime

BP

Simple Lyric

When I think of her sparkling face
And of her body that rocked this way and that,
When I think of her laughter,
Her jubilance that filled me,
It is a wonder I am not gone mad.

She is away and I cannot do what I want.
Other faces pale when I get close.
She is away and I cannot breathe her in.

The space her leaving has created
I have attempted to fill
With bodies that numbed upon touching,
Among them I expected her opposite,
And found only forgeries.

I know her wholeness is a fiction of my making,
Still I cannot dismiss this longing for her;
It is a craving for sensation new flesh
Cannot wholly calm or cancel,
It is perhaps for more than her.

At night above the parks the stars are swarming.
The streets are thick with nostalgia;
I move through senseless routine and insensitive chatter
As if her going did not matter.
She is away and I cannot breathe her in.
I am ill simply through wanting her.

BP

So Many

So many of those girls I longed for are gone now,
Turned to ash that skin so inexpertly kissed,
Those bodies I ached for-
Gone beyond diaries into flames.

When the years tear up our surface beauty
And throw it away like the bright wrappings on a parcel
What is left is what links all the breathing world:
An empathy, the burried knowledge of our going.

It is so easy to forget how the years pour away
And take out of sequence and before their time
So many who deserve longer
On this lush earth.

Along the streets in which I walked with them
The dawn's clear light varnishes houses and gardens,
And fixes forever under the day's glittering surface
So much half-remembered anguish.