Selected poems
Around the world in eighteen waysArabs fan fainted me, dehydrated in Aden.In Tahiti I fall ill, bronchitis amid humid splendour.At a summer camp in Dutchess County I get the sack.Cops warn me for hitch-hiking after sundown in Maine.In the wintry Cotswolds I wheeze in a bedewed attic.A lost aunt is found in Liverpool post-Toxteth.I cycle The Orkneys crabwise in North Atlantic gusts.Ireland's west coast lays me low with gastric misery.Norway's Customs suspect me of being drug cunning.East German guards check for smuggled children.Strasbourg hustlers flog me a carved vase that leaks.Blackfly bitten bloodsucked, I itch The Cabot Trail.On Newfoundland my backpack tips me backward in a bog.Quick wits save me from a crazy in Thunder Bay.Sailing The Inside Passage I awaken soaked on deck.On the MI I leave lifeline money in a telephone box.Bronchial again, in Barcelona, Las Ramblas torpor.A drunken South African punches me on a plane.My years approaching roads' end, I savour souvenirs.Again? Where do we queue for the Time Machine?
Decryption
I crossed the border of my overcrowded birth country
alive with anticipation after decades of absence.
Rooftops, dark vaults, slid past the train window.
this rainswept return caused my breath to riot,
memories tremors in phantom limbs
during years I felt were a waste, a regret.
Travelling back to my grim childhood district
forsaken for emigration to an arid land,
the misery of the past's crooked ways,
signalled the irony of fait accompli rather than fairytale.
Belongings sold, cost of passage all I could pay,
this midlife crisis nagging in my half-breed's belly,
I guarded my kitbag, frugal, alert, excited,
in a low-ceilinged pub, nursing ale, accent noticed.
Each life is a mystery, death the only certainty
in the refuge of small towns' cautious clusters.
He reads in safety by a window, thoughts flickering
to a time he struck out on a personal odyssey
before his spirit of adventure withered, jaded.
He bookmarks the page, looks out as if across a chasm,
not at his neighbour mowing, but blackened hovels
seen through rain, survivors of war, of loss.
A tremor of memory calls up sweat forgotten,
intimacy left behind in a dark, sorrowful landscape.
He trawls for clues to his lone wolf life now,
those ectopic days, their profound effect pivotal,
this man with ink stains on his fingers who reads,
looks back, puzzled, scratching imaginary itches.]
In the swamp now (2)
In an industrial zone a decade after he left school
an unskilled workman, 24, takes on Year 10 English,
evening shadows stark beyond the windows,
classmates mostly teenage apprentices needing a smoke
sprawled at desks for work requirements.
There