Sky of Bone, Land of Stone

I can’t write another poem.

That’s what I think sometimes

I’ve nothing more to write

Just another poem for another place

Another fizzing morning

After a noisy night

Alone in Edinburgh

In a hotel with Perspex walls

A drizzle of rain

After the hot southern cocktail

Sky of bone

Land of stone

I wander the streets

By chance I glimpse a lap dancer

Through through the open doorway

To an empty bar

She sticks out her tongue

In, what I imagined afterwards

As I walked the half-familiar streets,

A come-hither gesture

Using reverse psychology.

Sky of bone,

Land of stone.

Do you know what I fancy right now?

A cigarette. A roll up.

If I were on my own

And didn’t have a loving wife

Three hundred miles away

I could do that so easily

Embrace the deathly cocktail

of chemicals and carcinogens

drawn them into my lungs

My friend and I

We’d would walk out into the night, together

Beneath the bone sky

Into the land of stone

Into the dancer’s arms

My friend would glow

With the warmth of human contact

And the glow would finally die

And the wind would obliterate all traces

Of his soul, his dying breath

And I would toss his empty carcass

Into the road

And only his shadow would remain with me

In the land of stone

And then I’d want another friend

Making Love to the Dead

Making love to the dead

It’s all you can do
Thoughts whiz round your head
Shed a tear
For the things that they said
They’ll no longer see clouds
The sun on the golf course
From high on The Downs, the views, the windmill caught in the wind
They won’t see the daisies, buttercups, hawthorn, the blossom
And they won’t feel the wind on their faces
Or the wind behind them
As they rush down the slope

Making love to the dead
It’s all you can do
Thoughts that dart in your head
The people you knew who are gone
Good times that are done, bad times got through
Can you dance with the dead?
Can you speak with the dead?
Sure, It’s a monologue
But you hear them speak back in the wind, in the traffic
Time races
You imagine the things that they’d say,
Each moment, each day, every week, every year
How long have you got?
Will you be next?
Your turn to be dead
And your spirit becomes the shadow of cloud that’s sweeps
Down the hill, filling the head of the walker
Still walking in hope
Making love to the dead

Cloud

When recently attending a wound

I was struck by how much
the cotton wool resembled clouds

Spaces

Where friends once lived

Friend-shaped spaces

Walking along Brighton sea front
A bag of fish and chips
A sharp sea breeze chopping up the past

An old train ticket to Rochester
found in a favourite jacket
Standing next to Lennon in the cathedral loos

A jacket, clothes, blankets…

Imagine a tent, caught in a ferocious gale
pegs ripped from the ground
flapping through the air

From school laughter
and the smell of paint and charcoal
to a hospital bed

And now, another space
that can never be filled in

How big is that space?
The size of a room? Of a stadium?
A planet’s atmosphere?

And these spaces clump together
like magnetic poles
into a huge emptiness
an enormous why

Can we ever know many holes it takes
to fill the Albert Hall?
You saw Clapton there…
Stray images fly
Caught in the sunlight, like dust
Dust to dust
Dust is never in short supply