Feuilles mortes

What is this thing? 

I speak to you. 

I reach out to you with music. 

I sing. I offer you my embrace, 

to hold you close and comfort you,

but all these things 

that I would use 

to touch your heart are dead: 

wood and metal coldly resonate; 

words, skin, epidermis and air, 

are atoms, tugged in through lungs,

and pushed away from the heart, 

made to vibrate and then exhaled, 

exiled to the edge

where they chime as they tumble 

down the slope

and fall over the precipice

into that nameless abyss 

from which they originally emerged,

innocent and terrible, long ago, 

before I first opened my eyes

and discovered I am not them, 

and yet I rescue something, 

somehow seize it before it falls, 

and hoist it up, 

and swing it around,  

and heave it over to you,

you over on the other side, 

and you know me from it,

and that thing I save for you 

is not a word, 

or a song, or my tender caress, 

it is a story about how I feel, 

and how you make me feel,

a story that makes me naked and alive, 

alive and present, raw, 

despite all the dead things between us,

but I cannot own this thing,

I cannot admit it is mine,  

exposed, vulnerable, and helpless as I am.

I act like the dead things are me.

I pull them towards myself. 

I wrap myself up in them for protection, 

become a child clothed in bark and autumn leaves,

and ask you to be patient, and make believe 

that I am what I pretend to be,

for a little while at least. 

Children's crusade

They say don't worry, 

we all grow up. 

These playground histrionics 

where everything is staked 

on a single petty disagreement 

will abate, and one day 

we'll all feel embarrassed by our conduct, 

and learn good faith, respect, humility, 

and how to live together in the twilight 

between unanimity and annihilation. 

They say that, but we won't. 

We will defend our errors to the grave. 

We will end up as old fools, 

spitting ad hominem and tu quoque 

and cui bono at each other, 

deploying our straw armies 

to hold entrenched positions, 

identifying with the struggle 

and missing the point.

We are all on a Children's Crusade, 

all ultimately standing on the shore, 

waiting for the Mediterranean to part 

and grant us passage to the Holy Land, 

and falling prey to every passing brigand

who would sell us into slavery

in the meantime. 

Aestivation

Hibernating in summer, 

waiting for it to be over:

withdrawing from a world

no longer rotating on its axis, 

a world that has twisted its ankle

and stumbles, so the seasons spill

their heat too soon, or late, 

drought competes with downpour,

and time is a river run dry

or a torrent in spate,

and men form glaciers of hate

that advance down high street

and into market place to guard statues,

themselves dumb sentries of the state, 

as a hot ice age of anger rages; 

so I withdraw from summer pastures

and peonies and skylarks to my cave

and wait for this to be all over. 

Remember the taste of stolen food?

Remember, as a child, eating apples

purloined from radiant orchards

ablaze with the tongues of sparrows,

orchards whose walls we scaled as easily

as fortifications patrolled by toy soldiers

in our rooms on rainy indoor afternoons;

cobs twisted from thickets of corn

whispering and swaying mysteriously

in some summer breeze only they felt;

carrots plucked from soil near fences

through which we reached

at the edge of the field; 

and childhood the secret passport

to all these ecstasies of transgression

pursued together in the primal loyalty

of common purpose, or in pristine solitude, 

in the endless summer days of childhood

that had two flavours, the mother's love

that was always in season, and the taste 

of stolen food in summer? Dream of that. 

Dream of that during this summer sleep,

dream of that in the unremembered dreams

that stir deep in your summer slumber.

Dream of well-fed and unworried days

before the vexations and the drought

of this uncommon age. Dream of that,

when to awaken is to weep,

and carry that dream through the dark,

keep it safe, and one day, I promise,

the pessimism of the mind will yield

to the optimism of the heart, 

and we will break bread together

and eat, when this is all over. 

The fallen statues

What shall we place now on our empty plinths? 

Or shall we leave them empty and vacant 

to testify with eloquent absence

to new ambition, humble and benign,

yet greater than the fortunes of one man? 

Then let us uncommemorate their crimes,

so unremembered victims can now stand

in empty space, and we can spend our time

imagining a future less malign.

June

A peony rose lies ruined on the lawn.

The white night Sun clears skies of solstice stars,

and tear gas haar arrives with early morn 

on the empty beach, to be burned away 

by more intense mid-morning heat. The breeze 

gathers debris from fallen blossoms in the sheugh, 

sweeps Spring's joyful pamphleteering from the street.

and the proud cat drops dead hatchlings at my feet:

caught in a nest he plundered, tiny, bald, 

and blind with eyes that never opened.  

We knew this day was coming

We knew the day was coming, 

the day that we had feared,

but found we had done nothing

to prepare once it was here. 

At first they cut our tongues out 

then demanded that we speak

and laughed at how we mumbled

when our mouths could only bleed.

They ground our bones for baking

the bread that they would serve

to the midget in the bunker

in a tale turned on its head.

They rewound modern history

like it was old videotape

and made us watch the classics,

an atrocity hit parade.

We learned to be grateful

as a way to stay alive

now the calculus of victory

is merely managing to survive.

We knew this day was coming, 

the day that we have feared,

but find we have done nothing

to prepare now it is here.