I

A mole cricket dives into its hole,
a crack in the plaster, Main Teaching Bldng:
the students defend economics, Marx
and capitalism, and science;
lychees so fabulous for breakfast,
the songbird that sings pre dawn each morning.

II

Without articles or tenses it’s easy
to be vague: misunderstandings happen,
so sorry, you are a little confused,
disputes to be settled in favour of
stronger party.

No machine, no maid, no significant other
To do this task - judging the quantity
Of soap is crucial, not to spend all night
Rinsing - poems become shorter:
The democracy of art, sans subsidy

* This 5am songster, half an hour before dawn.
* Buzzards over the dingle …
* and curlews on the damp slope opposite.
* Dawn chorus in the summer.
* Swifts over the campus in north China …
* and the hoopoes nesting in the eaves of my bungalow.
* Almost electronic, duck on the North Norfolk marshes.
* Cuckoos space-shifting.
* kuku, kuku-K-burra
* Ravens on the silent moor …
* and larks.
* Sparrows in the scramble by the shed.

I

There is no water here - the river beds are dry and dusty and
the smell of burning plastic fills the air. I cannot stay.
This day and the next and the next are pleasant with mild
weather and smiling faces and purpose and friendship;
a comfortable house with your TV and your fridge and your
en suite bathroom with a hole in the floor, with music
books food wine but
the paths through the fields, where you grow your wheat,
are pathed with toxic dust and in the air is the smell
of burning plastic. The fruit is sweet and juicy but
the farmers are so busy
shovelling piles of toxic shit on to their fields that
it seems true love does not exist. We could travel
to a city and eat in an expensive restaurant once a month
or struggle to the mountains and look out across the hazy valley
at the phallic chimneys polluting the sweet air. We talk
of many things but each night the dreams still say
I cannot stay, I must away.

II

I walk with beauty . this guy who is the pest, appearing
when we want to stand and talk, the uninvited guest;
the lazy drivers of the expensive cars with their hands
on their horns; the tinny blare of the college radio so
unpeaceful in the early evening air; the glorious hawking
and spitting and the ice-cream wrappers gaily tossed
to the ground; the two lakes, stinking, sewage and worse, with
no fish, no ducks and a farmer collecting duckweed
for his sheep are . all so beautiful. The dirty, dusty, identical
villages with grimy brick walls with fatal cracks;
the treeless miles of wheat with
impatient farmers feeding the soil with their sweat and
two bewildered mules harrowing, harrowing, harrowing; the mountains
barren and dry with a carpet of broken green beer bottle glass
at every scenic vantage point; in the stunted remains
of last years crops, in the fruit trees, along banks, where
there are fences, hedges, plastic bags, plastic bags
blown and shredded in the wind; the rusty creaking
of the bicycles and the tractors belching black smoke, taking
loads of soil from one place to another, are all
so beautiful: so beautiful because of love and because once
every two days you visit me and smile - shall I stay?

they dance as if they don’t
have endoskeletons
electronic jerking
like dead frogs’ legs displayed
in high heels and leather

nor butterfly nor bee
their comic strip clothing
a certain quantity
of flesh in the harsh lights
hair lacquer and face paint

she seemed pleased and surprised
that i noticed walking
down the busy street
where her shorts were tight
her camel toe

The girl was, in fact, a grandmother. That May,
damp in the hills under heavy coats,
we sat: waxed cotton; stunted pines; TV mast;
the head of the valley above the town.

Beneath the layers of clothing her breasts
were soft, like gentle broody hens,
but without the vicious peck.

I'd like to write a song about a tree and a stone
And live by the marks on the oracle bone
I'd like to make music and would dance and sing
Like a fox and a rabbit in that sacred ring
I'd like to be profound and mystic and true
But pretty pretty woman I keep thinking of you

I'd like to write a poem 'bout the meaning of life
Use the magic of words to heal all mortal strife
The shamans rock an' rolling in a wooded glade
Some hippies re-unearthing Arthur's holy blade
I'd like to be profound and mystic and true
But pretty pretty woman I keep thinking of you

      Please can't you see what I'm trying to do
      All these words and metaphors just for you
      I'm praying to the spirits, the heavens up above
      Pretty pretty woman, it's you that I love

I'd like to put in words all the gnostic truth
And live in the mountains with the stars for a roof
I'd like to express all the magic I feel
What the dogs and the cats and the trees all reveal
I'd like to be profound and mystic and true
But pretty pretty woman I keep thinking of you
I'd like to be profound and mystic and true
But pretty pretty woman I keep thinking of you

He sat on his haunches by the dusty road
Watching the wind ripple the green velvet
Young in the paddies, calculating growth
And yield, his fat grazing buffalo flicked
Tails at flies, swallows hunting, his patch of shade,
Girls from the college, laughing, passing.

As the cauldron bubbles its messy brew
the witches turn away, the recipe
is not their own. They recite vicious spells.

The pouring: lick the mould first, the earth
fertile beneath the matted sward, tight knit,
leaves and stems, obsure fungi and mosses
in the half-light; the lowly crawling things.

Phoebus Apollo vanishes into the darkness,
the rising steam of midnight, witch-fed,
incantations in the shadows, crying.

He slaughtered his daughter to get favourable winds
and went off to war with the past.
He was the proto wunderkind

and stood tall and proud like the mast
that held his gaudy painted sail
which pulled his ship on fast, fast, fast.

Fighting the telling of the tale,
quaking in fear of the truth,
he was a dangerous damaged man who would not fail.

Idle on street corners, the disaffected youth,
whom the schools did not educate,
who could never be anything but uncouth,

struggle to articulate the wounds
in their aching hearts, whilst the state
contrives to manipulate and emasculate

all their dreams and aspirations. Hate,
perhaps, in the understandable outcome. They
can only stand in the rain and wait.

Lonely tears stream down the mourners faces on another grey anniversary.
All the songs seem weak and sentimental now
when nothing has changed or gone away.

It was like a mad cow dancing
and singing beautiful poetry and telling
magical stories of the enchanted forest and how

the sprites and the fairies stopped the felling
and the loggers all went home
and poems just went on selling!

Improbable. Only a guy in pain, feeling alone
and having the courage to sing the blues
in the face of the power of London and of Rome.

But by then the ships had pulled up on the beach and the crews
sat idle because of that historic dispute.
They played dice and fornicated, waiting for news,

one way or the other. Some ugly played a lute
and scribbled in notebooks, pages and pages,
but most, as I say, gambled and fucked and were mute.

(I wake up each morning and rage,
as the rain beats down on the roof of the caravan,
against this lousy play we’re trying to stage,

But my silent protest of inactivity reduces me to an also-ran.
I feel so impotent, so wasteful, so
unlike a man.

Arriba, arriba said this chick who I didn’t know.
We talked, drank, talked with other people, danced and talked again.
The party wound down and it was time to go.)

They were fighting over a woman and the champagne allocation.
They argued bitterly, without reason,
eventually only really wanting to cause pain.

Each sat in his tent, his henchman
pouring the wine, becoming ever more drunk
as the battle slowly went against them.

Their brains, all rational sensibility, their dicks
all shrank, as the moon waned
and slowly sank into the fishless sea.

And so history found its tune
between her legs. We celebrate the great victory,
the heroism, the rhythm of the epic verse, but Neptune,

angry, maroons us with a dream-girl, a porn-goddess, a playmate
from heaven, and each morning there are tears and guilt and
Odysseus sitting there calling the divine gift cruel fate.