Esa es vida, mi querida - That's Life, my dear...

Woman at 'Sunny's' pizza shop
chops onion and salami,
cries huge tears running
the colours of Italy
through the flour on her cheeks
"Que passa, mina Linda? Que passa?"
"Oh Querida!" she sighs
kneading the dough with
hands like clamps,
"hhhWhy???" she exclaims,
brushing more flour through her hair
twirling the base high into the bright sky
"Esa es Vida, Senora - es Vida!" say I,
my palms upturned, the pizza flying through eclipse,
the picture of her face before the moon lands,
spinning on her upturned fist..

Snake

Condemned to be a belly on the earth, you slither masterfully around the beehive, away from the beating of bamboo sticks, riding the air in a ripple of desert sand. In the whoop and holler of discovery, lengths of you hypnotize unraveling waves of dancing feet in a strike, a miss and retreat. Later, I wonder of your bite, hidden in tall grass, quiet. You are a toothless face on the fence skirting immunity or else beautifully venomous, contemplating legs, hips; no footsteps, no trace, just movement, and the lick of escaping lips

Fine

Colloquially speaking,
It is just a case of a
'Wayward Spirit'
Which sounds,
When put like that,
Quite charming;
Sparky, don't you
Think? After all,
It's not like you
'Served up your soul'
On a silver platter,
Extending invisible
Grams forward in
A fine spun, porous,
Net-veined manner.
Lets not split hairs.
We are refined; both
Delicate - marked by
Subtlety of discernment
And even though
I cannot often follow
These fine distinctions
Between design
And the undevised,
My soul has always
Wandered wayward
Through transpicuous doors
And home: no silver platter,
Just a fine-tooth comb,
To serve.

Skeletons 1954, Mexico (Frida Kahlo)

He took photos
To capture his favourite child
To frame the world
Or his vision of it.

She Painted
Tin paintings
To collect
And decorate
Her world.

A sun, a moon
And Pyramids;
Grey skyscrapers
For criticism,
Dead babies for freedom.

She was crushed,
Childless
And from her bed
Passion plays
Out with pictures
Of her pets,
Painted, "with no consideration"
Although she cared
About them all.

A jungle is always
In limited colour.
A monkey sits
In her arms,
Unaware of her presence.
She - unaware of his,
Her black hair a solid mass
Individual strands - there, but not seen.

Skeletons leap from the cupboard
Elegantly smiling.






05/06

Grace

There is no mercy, caritas, or thanks
In the everyday moments of a greedy life.
We would have to look for it
On a plate before we eat,
In the flesh of a tender fish,
In a fresh bread of wheat,
And afterwards, in a moment
Captured, well after the blessings given
For the honest way
Or the elegant way
We attempted to floss our teeth

The Golden Egg

At The Golden Egg, a cafe,
where ugly folk eat all day breakfasts,
we sip, smoke, read The Mirror,
The Sun, take notes in reams.

An old couple in bobble hats,
crater moon expressions
face their plates, each other,
over his fried slice and beans.

They slurp with all the time in the world.
I think they must be cold,
no jokes, nothing more to win.
I think it's all over - until she chokes,
dribbles on a bit of gristle
and he wipes the egg yolk from her chin.

I can still smell the Eucalyptus

Apache, the tanned horse we'd found,
had been lost from the grazing garden above the town.
We led him to our home, borrowed brushes...
Neighbourly folk came with herbs in cooking pots,
their kindly tin-wrapped remedies for wounds.
From our purple veranda
we watched him graze in the moonlight
and in the quiet of the noisy night
he must have slipped our gaze,
flicked the bolted gate
and then, again escaped!

From the telegraph poles, the owls hooted
and took flight, so we turned right
to find him on the silvery ribbon road
waiting by the forest of Eucalyptus.
You took his face, spoke his name, scolding
and stroking his nose. "He's well - he wants
company: Patch? Were you waiting for us?"
and taking his mane, you cartwheeled onto his back,

like you should, a sound now, getting faster and lighter
into the darkening tangles and slow soft places
of the fine pine wood.





06
07

harvest

you know as sure as it is
soft and light around my shoulders
and warm as a mango sun
dipping the line dividing you and me
that the fruit of our labour
is a basket upon the sea
so tell me of one thing more magical
than the harvest on the table
this candle this flame
flickering here and there
vulnerable
to a darkness this night
will never swallow whole

to the warm charcoals of the soil

1

Was a hurricane here, or a war,
leaving gaping craters where trees once
lined the avenues? Walls are built to fall,
but these roots were 'ripped untimely'
from a womb of soil: Gone;
our Earth invaded, our friends snatched.
Now the Earth is the Moon,
the Moon is Venus hit,
Venus is Mars with all the fire of men.

2

I walk our woodland route, under
the tarmac, and tread abandoned tracks.
Silent freight-lines are lost to nature's bed,
gaping craters are fresh filled graves
covered by nature's year - and yet,
hydrangeas. Even now, hydrangeas flower:
blue ultraviolet and pink infrared,
their litmus paper petals, first white,
then acid or alkaline,
falling with the earth's colours
to the warm charcoals of the soil.




06

Mosaic

Enter the arena of enquiry as a subject,
Record the event, speak about it,
Arrange chips of broken glass
And the ashes of burnt pages, in revelations.
Opinions everywhere. What to believe in,
Is written and rewritten, not only to consider
For what end or vested interest,
Not only for moments of understanding,
Tiny Eureka's and striving sound bites,
All of nothing whole.
Also incomplete are the lists of names,
Carved on mountains of marble or stone,
Each individual name, a marker, a sculpture
At Menin Gate, Miami, Hiroshima,
Names standing in solid stone, each a life story.
This, is something felt ' the history of it;
A dawning of why and how beliefs held,
Have carved us up.
There is no denying it.
We are who we are.
As for what we believe, we should chisel out
A lifetime's work in sculptures of dust;
Watch dissipating pearls and imagine
All the possibilities as they fall away.
When making art,
I'll judge it next to a memorial wall of names,
Stand, in front of the stone, a work in progress,
and carve out mine.

The Dinner Party - Judy Chicago's Plates and The Woman of Spheres

The Dinner Party. We were there feasting on her life,

as in each plate’s sheen they found some of theirs.

This feast, extends through the gallery walls to dreams

sat at different tables – it is Sappho 46 again,

Judy Chicago’s plate for her so fine, who needs food?

It is Sappho 46, where by the tint of each plate

we are known, and transformed by a little light here,

a little dark there, as desire leaps longing to know

the single woman behind the scene. Untouchable. Vanishing.

At night, ‘The Woman of Spheres’, one of the acrylic paintings

living in the dismantled exhibition of hand me down

1940’s suitcases, wanted to know each Judy Chicago plate,

walking round, leaning in to a name she knew, each leaning out

to her beyond the artist’s impression of a female fleur-de-lille.

An exhibition revealing all life story there to see, breathing

the bleeding colours of ideas, those untouchable, those felt.

7 times she circled, reinventing tradition.

The old curator’s night lamp, the stockroom stairwell

much too dark; the gallery – so still, though still

lit enough for all the movement found in art -

so when she dreams of an empty white dinner dish

back in the comfort of her lodgings, and a crumb,

the potential for corruption, glimmering, and recognised

by Sappho’s plate, she would bless the hours since you were gone.

Her exhibition had been ransacked in the Blitz, crushed, replaced,

by The Sky’s Eye, and other complex maps of town and country,

diagrams retrieved, explaining everything: war trauma,

room for portraiture, three standing on a bridge, train tracks

and curves; a bears cave, abstract art’s blue eye north,

a place to rest; themes connected by a red road,

a yellow brick road, all impressionistic dabs,

1990’s acrylic leaping tactile from the canvas

stacking story worlds, all eventually replaced

by Installation art exhibitions from the Tate Modern,

name tagged burps, a Turner prize – an Oscar nomination,

and so instead, from the suitcase, she chooses to remember

an open-air Huppa’s four corners, an open-air prayer; a father,

a glass napkin-smashed under foot, a celebration like no other,

a Black Christian blessing Rose gave at the wedding, beautiful Grace,

roots curled around each other, embraced, like Chicago’s plates –

nothing but space could separate one from the other,

and by her plate, she; blessing you 'as often

as the hours have been endless while you were gone'

08

---------------------------------------------------

Endless Hours

thank you, my dear

you came and you did
well to come: I needed
you. You have made

love blaze up in
my breast - bless you!
Bless you as often

as the hours have
been endless to me
while you were gone

Sappho
46
by:

'The House of the Tragic Poet'

On a clear summer's day, at lunchtime in Pompeii,
tiles must have rattled from the roof.
Carefully constructed walls
crushed intricate mosaic floors,
sinking them down under ash.
Then hot rain, deadly gas, and a hail
of pumice stones the size of a plague.

Vesuvius battered and smothered,
shattered a world, engulfing this House of Art.
Pictured through the door: CAVE CANEM,
the grim black canine greets the visitor,
as he would have done in August A.D.79.
and again, in 1824, when they unearthed
'The House of the Tragic Poet',
to hang a 'For Sale' sign on the door.

They disturbed the graves of the suffocated,
consumed most of its treasures. What is left?
Just the shame, that for one hundred years
they let the rest 'dissolve' out in the rain.
So, I cannot describe the Theatre Mosaic
at the centre of the Tablinum floor,
a small 54 by 54 centimetered picture
of actors rehearsing Satyrs backstage.

There are some, swapping stories
in the wings of the Naples Museum,
set and prop designers reconstructing;

and elsewhere, scientists and artists
of all the crafts, recreate some
of what is imagined to have been,
before it was torn apart.




(Nicholas Wood - his book - 'La Casa Del Poeta Tragico' )

Virginia Woolf

One stone in your pocket must have been for Vita,
the one you dance through a century of leaves,
falling for her, waiting in the mud-grass of home.
Did someone call you a Pointillist writer, each ball
of light weighed in mass? I am afraid they painted
impressions of you, pointless really, flecks left out;
Mrs Dalloway without Sackville-West, too much
amber filter on the banks of the river, too little red.

Picasso

An earthquake, and another
to remind him of the first; another,
and the lop of his stomach,
the floor sucked out of it, shaken;
and slices of life hang,
speeding towards a falling earth,
the temper of the bounce back tremor,
the ripple, a sudden absence of curves.
Then the womb in the hills, his mother
giving birth in a shadowy cave,
angled walls, a diamond treasure,
a sister in pigment before bedtime.
Dreams shape a collage of resurrection, waking
to a lifetime, colouring out in the shade.

A Disturbance of Shen

Remember the first scream
taking stale breath
and breath not yet breath
from the cavities of memory
through the oval of an open mouth?

Unlike the daily exhale of a sigh
hurtling, hot down nasal tunnels,
heat enough to steam a window,
tears rolling in quantities
of homeopathic salts.

So unlike the comfort of a sigh,
air gurgling over the larynx,
drying teeth, the fluttering
reef slip over lip. There is a rip
and tear to it, an opening; there

in a birth or in the wail of grief
lives something more than expelled air;
when breath could slice a bauble of flesh
in two; scalpel tissue, scissor sinew,
and laser through the pores.

The throat chakra, opening
to a rocket jet tunnel of force,
a primal scream of spores to the sky.
A disturbance of Shen, perhaps making clouds
of rain to wash the skin of the body, the leaf
of a tree, where fuel toxins lie in limbo;
pathogens preparing - there to dust,
for a returning to the earth.

The Backdrop of War

There always was the ripped backdrop of war,
and ‘The Scream’ silent
in every meeting around a dining table;
there, in the apparent quiet of ornaments,
or behind smoky piano notes,
drifting the air of a violin, along the OM of a cello -
there, encircling the joy of music; or as a presence
in satire, in the tone of our laughter,
- how intimate is war -
in the toast we make before drinking, the process of eating,
in the privacy of bedrooms there are ghosts at the foot of the bed
who listen as quietly to the silence
behind the chatter and the clatter of plates and cutlery,
as when they share the breath of our dreams;
we live a hush with them, and we know it,
especially when we stand before ‘The Scream’

Then there are memorial days, festival days, birthdays,
and a visit to a cemetery; and afterwards,
screams lurk the silence of coffee houses,
waiting the tables everyday
behind the turning of Newspaper pages,
in front of the words “collateral damage”,
“…ethnic cleansing…”
“The bugle sounds….”
and of course, the scream is there in aura
all around the images of flags.

It is here, all through a one-minute silence,
all along the red road to Peace,
here with the years it may take to travel Home;
and the ghosts come too, escorting, without a sound,
the lifetime it may take
to find a quiet time and place
to scream for them out loud.



(c)07

Holocaust Stone - Hyde Park (April 15th 2005)

1.

You were not one of a nice round number.
You were liberated and no one knows
how you made it to his door.
Were you carried or rolled,
wheel-chaired along by the hands of the unnamed,
lifting you over the potholes in the roads?
I looked at a map,
at the lines you may have travelled
from Belsen to the canals of Amsterdam.

You were not one of a nice round number, who
died in the weeks after, shocked by their own
freedom, still shot by the guards on the watchtower,
still hunted by each other for morsels of food or
shrapnel shards of pencil lead or
partial scraps of paper.
On April 15th, you were not one of
the 17,000 more who need to die.

When the British found you, did you cry?
Were there still experimental tears
left in the ducts of your eye?
History's tears make their journey
to the oceans of the map and
this paper that I have in reams.

2.

He had travelled with Anne Frank's Dad in a truck to Auschwitz -
he was one of a nice round number to be freed.

He had a key to a canal side door.
No one knows what his skin and bones must have felt,
sat perhaps,
waiting behind a safe Dutch door,
his eyes - hers, covering every molecule of wall,
ceiling, floor.
No one knows if he had company or
if he wanted it at all.

It must be that he grew stronger.
The network must have pulled him in;
collected, like the debris from a terrorist attack,
the Diaspora of shattered souls and minds
that were roaming,
like blue phantoms across the map.

No one knows how you, months later,
made it to his door,
to sit unrecognised a while - perhaps to remember
the unused muscles of a smile..
No one knows, but he.