1. By Dawn
A cockroach scuttles through discarded
tinned coffee, dead socks, feet departed.
Its eyes gaze senseless on a world gone still
and scarpers away on an old Valium pill.
This world still teems with life!
Beetles reclaim pyramids, the sea, rife
with revenge, dances over the rusting bridges.
Old husks, the last wave by, surrender to the midges.
Five million years go by, hours past
the night of mankind; a new dawn is cast,
its crepuscular rays sew constellations
through stars watching on in numb sensation.
All our memory, all our greatness:
a spark swallowed by a gnawing darkness
so that it seems we didn’t crawl at all.
Guilty Immaturity
I don’t want to see another photo-
-graph of a bisected child or a sunk-
-en chest of a man half-eaten, all-rot-
-ten and formulated in some tragic,
False arrangement, 1984
Warzones are shown in grey tableaus; grey black
grey steel grey crimson; harken to a dream-
-y true era where peace was the order
and war something Special. The children al-
-ways died, but this mag cover is
Gripping!, 1968
The bravest artform feasts on the lambs of
The Public, shears them of dignity, how
can we be good when there is so little?
When there is so much strife,
Aren’t we the cause?, 1972
If the capture disappears, will the tra-
-vesty remain? Will the bloodshed in black
and white, so hot and so crimson that we abando-
-ned mean the haunt of war & plagues leave us?
Leave us alone?, 1984
What will we be worth if we don’t see them?
The pain on my mind is a penance for
suffering abominations to live.
The world is fraught with death,
I must be deathly fraught.
We either sigh, avoid, close eyes, or o-
-gle with wickedly vexed fascination.
Still, that question hangs like a caption,
What will we be worth if we don’t see them?, 2025
3. Self-Portrait at 18 Years
I first let fall my hair, the unkempt autumn bed
descends to my shoulders and inevitably exceeds.
I start on the painter’s path with the challenge of the face,
pulling away from the page and glancing in the mirror:
to smile? Adopt a regal impenetrability?
Touch my hair or flare my nostrils? Put on a show and write
this for someone to see “me”?
Just be observant, that’s all the worth,
paint the body to show you the creases of the mind.
For now, the pupils, black pools that glint with all
the light passing through. We walk out, explore the turquoise garden
that decorates my yawning ponds; there, like crops of daffodils
sun rays beam back out, but then I ask myself,
who would watch a simile?
You, hopefully.
Further outward still, we arrive in the valley of death,
a recession of a shade darker than the surrounding
terrain, and sunken deeper than the eyes fixed there.
Receding, eroding, boring inwards.
The outline of bone that glides
up the street. Take cover under my hoods, sit
in the shadows with me and relax a while
by half-closed windows, staring out.
And then the face, my soul exposed,
I suppose.
Austere and proud at a distance, with a nose announcing itself;
a line sloping like a ski hill, on either side you fall onto my wan cheeks.
There, we trudge along over a marked minefield and through sparse grasslands of ginger hairs
(for now, restrained and stubbled,
though it grows to wild lengths where tigers and food crumbs dwell).
We climb upwards again, minding your step over the prominent cheekbone —
another bone, another memento mori —
to forehead stretching like a fertile plain: some shoots of pimples, patches of spilled oil.
The lines run like microscopic script detailing my exploits and fits of laughter,
fits of madness.
I’m sure by my next portrait the lines will fill
a desert of space. Hopefully a kind story,
or at least an engaging one.
I’ll toss some love on the rest of my head.
My ears are pinned back and unremarkable,
falling hairs run sparsely on the nape and
behind the ear squats a mysterious scab
(one that in a traditional portrait I would leave hidden).
Your eyes drift down the page as I draw down my torso;
broad shoulders (not Herculean);
a collarbone that would make a nice necklace,
and a pointed chest — ribs emerging
like prison bars, worn and rusted.
I’ve always been hairy, the million strands span like war paint
of a traded masculinity, a bygone token,
innocent but useless.
Then my arms where wispy hairs and cat scratches entrammel one another
down the length, thin as a celery stalk, to my marked hands —
freckles enumerate like stars in an unpolluted sky with the
sunspots, my time and country shown —
at the base of the middle finger on my left-hand broods a birthmark
the colour of a cold coffee stain joined above
by lined knuckles, a hangnail, and grit beneath the keratin.
See the other side, cuts and indents like busy foot traffic,
hundreds of naughts and crosses games, frustrations and vexations,
as a child I drew my hate there; I drew my pain there.
Did I draw myself, at the time?
Further down there’s less of a skeletal mien
with some pudge girdling my hips —
something I was self-critical of as a child —
but now I press and knead it gratefully.
My thin waist, I’ll keep this stanza clothed.
Trousers, always my covering, run over long, substantial legs
like pillars of a failing house.
Blonde hairs here, too, that run to my ankles then trail down the bone of my foot
and sprout on my toes like a dehydrated bush.
Nothing more.
