8/6/2019 Recently Published Magazine Poems

1/10

AS GOD IS MY WITNESS

Before the books ranged about our kitchen table,blank CDs in cases racked beside a bottle

of Calpol, my jacket flung on a varnished chair,the wiry frizz of your walnut-mahogany hair,

I swear the hollow of your spines exposed,shoulders arced in the tremble of a compositebow sprung, waiting for fingers to release.Would that I could claim an archers inner peace

when I become the string wound, taut, achingto let go. To hear the honest moment sing

we both must bend, a contrapuntal orderwhere the present projects itself into future.

In this suspension of tension, for eternity hung,I have one question must I wait for you to come?

first published in The Moth

8/6/2019 Recently Published Magazine Poems

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CERAMICSIts not that she wasnt generousor that her gifts didnt grace the dresser

standing now in my married home more that it was a private pleasuremy father shouldve savoured alone.

Their black shone with a dangerousglamour in the dark of my imaginationlike the top-most shelf in the wardrobeof my parents' room, frustrationat thekeyhole of mind and earlobe.

Earwigging through their ceramic glossmy fingers traversed a star-crossedsurface I cradled a universe of dream a world that by choice my father lost,where what was was not what it seemed.Hand laid on our home from a distance,the whorled patterns were fingerprints,anairbrush mist of nebulae; remotegalaxies we knew not despite the hints

he dropped, falling from a clumsy throat.Each miniature lived a precariousexistence on the dresser, for despitemy mothers careful dusting they all fell no sudden explosions from a low heightmore like the slow back and forth of a bell

ringing a call to reflect on the Angelus.In her realisation of time and space

a shadow on my mother's home was lostand the world seemed a warmer placefor having grown through a strangers frost.

first published in Boyne Berries

8/6/2019 Recently Published Magazine Poems

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MY WIFE, GARDENING

Down on your knees you root in our lawnfor tendrils of dandelion, daisy and clover

these emblems or monuments of ironyto numerous days of neglect or repose.

It always seems like youre reluctantto be rough, parting clay with your palms,disentangling roots of weeds from thoseof bright green blades sown years before.

Your patience and gentle ways amazeand never bore this lug who jabs his

fork into the earth for all hes worth,levering great chunks of it into the light;

gashing the little paths worn by tiny feetand whatever shoes find a way onto yoursas they walk away with baskets of ironingfrom an empty washing line, time after time.

Forgive me for being long-winded, my love,for even when you need to pick up the pieces

or perform extractions you take the greatestof pains to be kind.

first published in Cranng

8/6/2019 Recently Published Magazine Poems

4/10

AERIAL BOMBARDMENT

The web tremblesas thousands of propellers plough

their narrow furrows througha porcelain sky shatteredby the weight of machines;clouds split by crackand seed of flak and splinter.

Radials sing to a spidercaught in the centre phone lines hum with tremorsof planes height and direction,

numbers of shadows passing;a swarm on the surfaceof a rain-rippling puddle,its mirror blurring.

first published in Revival

8/6/2019 Recently Published Magazine Poems

5/10

MECHANICS

It was not the lurid trundle of a fire engineemerging from a stations rolled-up shutters

that set your teenage hormones ablaze, bulgingbiceps or cocky thumbs hitched in braces,charcoal brows smouldering from calendar pagesthough the station siren roars around the cornerfrom where your father was deputy headmaster.

Closer than that, a mere fifty yards away,where he had his central-locking serviced an auto-shop and mechanics bay yawningopen but never captive to the suns rays

were men revealed, smeared in grease and oil,tinkering with the underside of a citys motors.

Maybe it was the display of revolution,car wheels whirring, petrol fumes in the air,the sway and balance of stasis and motion:intoxicating images and some lingerlike that of a girl in blue and borrowed,sticky overalls, tranquil in her shadowedlanguor and content in sucking her fingers.

first published in The Raintown Review

8/6/2019 Recently Published Magazine Poems

6/10

CONCLUSION

Sometimes the best reaction is silencewhere you can hear your own heartbeat

and breath and that of the person oppositeyou recede into a shallow near-distance.A silence where the clock in the next roomurges each moment on, hands suddenly awareof the space they must but cannot span.Sometimes words on a screen fail to appearas if a reaction to a presence so closeto the heart of the reader is something to fear.Sometimes silence is all you want to hear.

first published in UCG Writers Exchange

8/6/2019 Recently Published Magazine Poems

7/10

TREE (II)

Let me live and die ordinary,unremarkable, a tree

that bears no leaf or fruitof quartz or adamantine.

Let my green be a greenthat seems to growfrom the grass at my feet.

Let my leaves turn in their timeto the fading or evening sunand when winter winds

have blown me bare,

let the world knowby my stark silhouettemy seasons work is done.

first published in Revival

8/6/2019 Recently Published Magazine Poems

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A CURSE UPON BAD BUILDERS

May you have hornetsdancing about your head

like the nails in my loftdanced around mine

may thoughts like rubbleof glass and rusty screwsyou left behind in gardensfor my children to findgather in your empty skull

may every thought

your children have be crossedas wires you failed to fitwith no regard for safetyin my home untrue as linesyou failed to plumb or divinewhen building my bathroom

may you suffer from constant lackof pressure in your wrinkled membermay your sphincter do the same

job as a cheap and brittle washer

may your ardour be firedand overheat like my immersioneach and every occasionyou press the wrong buttonon your wife may she hate youfor it on a daily basis

and may all your lovemaking

be lukewarm tepid and greyas bathwater with an oily film deadskin cells and scum floating on top

first published in The Left Tribune

8/6/2019 Recently Published Magazine Poems

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KEITH DOUGLAS

Its a chill that sets him apart,that gives rise to the airs

on which great eagles soarfrom his bristling heart.The chill was with himwhen he first emergedfrom the warm and pleasant dark.

It is to this he returnsin arrangementof ribcage, spine and skullwhere strikes an uncommon spark.

It is here where the unknown partof him may be limned, flesh and eyeof a noble horse drawling its cargoof brain, muscle, sinew,the great pumping heartthat rolled his blood in one direction,service of freedom, countrymen,Oxford, the Classics, Art.

first published in Cranng

8/6/2019 Recently Published Magazine Poems

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WILLOW PARK

Views fixed as the angles of windows,mute as blinds drawn to the dark,

roofs harbour their secrets cries flutterin eaves, smothering tears in pillows;chimney-smoke stories choked by soot,hardened coals blazing their lives away,secrets too fine for shredding beforea backdrop of black, watercolour of grey.

first published on the Cork Spring Literary Festival blog