Irish Town
I will go down to Irish Town,
where the old grey tower still holds
a barren watch for the shrouded ships
in the sea-wind's showery folds.
The florid men of the marbled heights
throw pennies at your pain;
in Irish Town they'll give you wine
as sweet as summer rain.
The haughty dames of Parson's Hill
have learned their love at school;
they feed their gallants perfumed cakes
and break hearts by the rule,
but the women down in Irish Town
were born with hearts that know
too desperately what wanting means
to think that love's a show.
So I will go down to Irish Town
where the river meets the sea,
and look for a little lasting love
in the grim grey tower's lee.
-- previously published in Grey Matter
(Newcastle-upon-Tyne)
Over the rooftops
When night came I rose and dissolved through the wall of my flat
and floated over the rooftops of the city, across the faintly
luminous band of the horizon, and into the world where the sun dies.
Forgetting myself I roamed forty days among pallid
smudges of hunger until I came upon one
brighter than the rest, who reclined in a honeyed song.
Drawn by that sweetness I hovered over her croon,
which seared my eyes blind when I knew it was not for me.
Angered I stung her womb and was slung in a web
of blood and desire where I grew on an infinite sea
of pressure and warmth until I cracked open the sky,
emerging into a place of rocky points
and gullies crazed with dry heat. The people I saw
in that land were born without skins and with fractured tongues,
so the tiniest nudge of the breathless atmosphere there
grated an arid squeal from their impotent mouths;
yet sometimes one was born who could speak, and his cries
of anguish maddened the others to tear him to death.
Leaving this desert of sterility and filth, I managed
to climb to a cleft on the mountain where a child was seated
weeping at his own severed heart that lay at his feet.
He told me, The wind is saying, the wind is saying;
and I listened to the wind but in its urgency
could not discover what message it had for me.
So intent was my concentration that I dissolved out of that world
and found myself floating back over the houses of the city of dawn
and into my room where I thought about these things, to tell them to you.
-- previously published in The Poets' Voice (Bath)
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