New Poetry

I love taking off
but want flying to be over.
When I close my eyes
and look into my heart
I see the jagged rocks of fear.
I also see a lion.
Yellow buoys across the bay
like rows of continuation dots.
Hey, why aren’t they passing
the ball to that girl?
Three blind mice.
Stars between pine trees,
the sound of the sea
breathing in and out.
I accept suffering
because I don’t want
desire to ever cease.
My wife notes how some
young women are both slim
and big-breasted.
See how they run.
The rocks like old elephant skin.
I wonder if anyone else
is looking at the clouds,
the vivid purple flower
I can’t name spilling
down the hillside.
Whatever the philosophers say,
things will not go away.
I like this because it is
exactly how I want to do it.
Cicadas like a fridge on the blink.
Money makes me nervous.
Waiting in line to buy something
almost makes me shit myself.
Hexagons of wobbly light
on the sea floor – Jane’s observation.
Italian women in bikinis talking,
hands on hips, on the shore.
Husbands apart, arms folded.
Orange evening skin.
Van Bronkhurst scores
a screamer from 30 yards –
the trajectory like certain
beautiful lines of verse.
Ice in pink wine.
Passionate recollection of self
as a passionate youth.
Those bitter-sweet years
when we were trying to be poets.
Rhyme: what an odd device –
as though poetry resides in it.
Bed-hopping gives you back-ache.
A new poem arises out of
a reorganised self-concept.
Like her father, my daughter
is learning to swim in the Med.
It gets deep very quickly.


extract from 'Fifteen Minutes'

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