almost hopeful in a bad dream where you were long dead.

Like This

When you die in the city where everyone was young,

at the end of the dark, drunken years that kept you there,

old friends walk up through the wild streets

to the alehouse, whose watery, yellow lights

are a faint, hopeless beacon in the night,

and, nearer now to you, they get in the rounds,

the solemn, slow, ceremonial rounds which soften their tongues

to speak brief epitaphs of love, regret; meanwhile,

you lie in an ice-cold drawer, two postal codes away,

without recall or recourse, although you had both,

although you are not yet old, although a woman is crying

in the big house on the park where they carried you out

for the last time, where you were told how it would end,

how it would be like this unless, unless. And it is.

Who Loves You

I worry about you travelling in those mystical machines.

Every day people fall from the clouds, dead.

Breathe in and out and in and out easy.

Safety, safely, safe home.

Your photograph is in the fridge, smiles when the light comes on.

All the time people are burnt in the public places.

Rest where the cool trees drop to a gentle shade.

Safety, safely, safe home.

Don’t lie down on the sands where the hole in the sky is.

Too many people being gnawed to shreds.

Send me your voice however it comes across oceans.

Safety, safely, safe home.

The loveless men and homeless boys are out there and angry.

Nightly people end their lives in the shortcut.

Walk in the light, steadily hurry towards me.

Safety, safely, safe home. (Who loves you?)

Safety, safely, safe home.

Two Small Poems of Desire

1

The little sounds I make against your skin

don’t mean anything. They make me

an animal learning vowels; not that I know

I do this, but I hear them

floating away over your shoulders, sticking

to the ceiling. Aa Ee Iy Oh Uu.

Are they sounds of surprise

at the strange ghosts your nakedness makes

moving above me in how much light

a net can catch?

Who cares. Sometimes language virtuously used

is language badly used. It’s tough

and difficult and true to say

I love you when you do these things to me.

2

The way I prefer to play you back

is naked in the cool lawn of those green sheets,

just afterwards,

and saying What secret am I?

I am brought up sharp in a busy street,

staring inwards as you put down your drink

and touch me again. How does it feel?

It feels like tiny gardens

growing in the palms of the hands,

invisible,

sweet, if they had a scent.

Girlfriends

derived from Verlaine

That hot September night, we slept in a single bed,

naked, and on our frail bodies the sweat

cooled and renewed itself. I reached out my arms