Without so much as a thread of decency,

Antoninus Elagabalus, high priest

and mother’s boy, made biographers weep.

Proponents of discipline almost choked,

repeating the syllables of his name.

His sculpted head is unremarkable

and bears no trace of his supposed excesses;

the muddled genes of his outlandishness

those of a handsome kid who, like the best

of us, w...

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As over and over the same chords churn

your notes pour forth in spate –

sheets of sound erupting till harmony

is wrenched awry; and when you sweated

smack to cleanse your system,

you were hell-bent on an afterlife,

a body refreshed, believing.

You could call it Love, but sombre,

that force that drives you on.

Hearing you now, I feel reproved

for all the...

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for Joni Mitchell

Cactus Tree was our song, the one

that lit a flame, when I heard you sing

and taped you, bruised and plaintive,

on John Peel’s Top Gear. Straight off

your gift possessed me, too young

in sixty-eight for you to even notice

how I tagged along: the one face

in the entourage who really got you

and realized that other men

would leave y...

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It’s early evening and the TV is on.

You lay the table and children scream,

the frayed ends of day unravelling.

Through a jumble of bricks and cars

you enter the room with plates,

where sounds of appetite assail you;

while relayed at a distance

there’s news of war, its violence

annulling simple-minded schemes.

In a sealed-off quarter of a dusty city

...

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There are times your dancers undermine

the humanist in me. In that northern

Cockaigne, you viewed with a realist's eye,

their heartiness tramps to raucous tuning.

Unconstrained, the couples are blatant.

The heaving trestles are piled with plates.

Such carouses, what were they to you?

Did you celebrate, despise, or pity?

For there is shown mere lumbering daftness,

f...

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i.m. Seamus Heaney

'Away with the fairies' my wife will say

after we’ve been on a walk or I’m asked,

out of the blue, what I think of the dress

she’s spotted, when I’m only vaguely there –

pursuing the rhythms inside my head

and depriving her of my attention

as slowly, mysteriously, the lines

coalesce into 'another damn poem'.

And if at times I frustrate ...

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Imagine a world where pester power

rarely delivers the goods and a dawdling

hike to school’s the norm. You have fresh air,

your friends, and a small coin burning

a hole in your pocket. Spend it now

or do your best to make it last the week.

In class Rosanna Ferrario likes to sit

beside you. All the others make you blush.

They seem to know you like her too.

Give h...

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Imagine a world where pester power

rarely delivers the goods and a dawdling

hike to school’s the norm. You have fresh air,

your friends, and a small coin burning

a hole in your pocket. Spend it now

or do your best to make it last the week.

In class Rosanna Ferrario likes to sit

beside you. All the others make you blush.

They seem to know you like her too.

Give h...

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Mislaid for decades, I had never seen it

– the certificate they gave you the year

you finished school. Thirteen and biddable,

I doubt you had been much bother at all,

picking up quite easily the basics

prescribed for the life that lay before you.

Beyond the geography of small towns,

fields, and enigmatic hills, among which

your predecessors scratched out a  living

o...

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Outside in the street, where skies have opened,

a dingy curtain flaps across the day,

as rain beats down with blank persistence

on shining roofs of cars, dissolves

my windowpanes, bringing back to mind

for no apparent purpose a wet break

at primary school: how in partitioned rooms

with raggedy copies of Beano or Dandy,

we were fractious Bash Street Kids

with time enou...

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A small boy running, but not for his life,

as all can see in his fearless smile

and the sense of freedom

that lights his eyes. This is the day

he will always remember,

important only because of an errand

and the small coin he didn’t drop,

holding it up on tiptoes

across the counter of a baker’s shop,

disregarding for once

the glass-fronted shelves of...

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after Willi Ronis

She is like Eve in exile,

awakening each morning

when the sun has risen,

then rising herself,

shackled to the day’s routine.

She opens a shutter,

and the light sweeps in

across the uneven stone floor –

her summons to the tasks

that lie before her.

But first a strip-wash,

the astringent purity

of her ablutions. Leaning over

...

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The first car we owned was a 2CV

with no certifiable history.

The year we got together

we drove it to the end of its days.

With its tinny dinted roof

it had an air of slumped defeat

we rose above quite easily.

When summer broke all records

the windows that didn’t quite close

were an unexpected bonus.

Its mind-boggling gear stick

seemed set to leave its socket...

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for Ziyad

The first letter he has known for months

in zig-zag lines getting nowhere.

Turned on its side and crayoned blue

he can stretch it out like a river;

or if he changes colour can make

a mountain, some grass, a fire.

Cut back to its simplest form

and laid out in rows like ghosts,

he follows the dots over and over

before he does it on hi...

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The closest my dad ever got to poetry

was when he savoured some word

like pugilist, or the tip-toe springiness

he sensed in bob and weave,

his unalloyed delight in the flytings

and eyeball-to-eyeball hype

that went with big fight weigh-ins.

And maybe I should have been

a contender, when I did my stint

in the ring, my dad convinced

I had style and the stamp o...

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For Peter Robinson

I was listening to Dylan’s Time Out of Mind,

his late renewal after wasted years

– all simmer and wry despair –

to find that maybe he was rated again.

The voice was a wreck on a burnished track;

the songs a palimpsest of antique blues.

In the end the words will come

if they have to, like music that’s ghosted

by echoes stored in a phonogra...

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