ON AESTHETIC PRINCIPLES

it’s hard for
a poet caught
in bed doing
something with
someone somewhat
illicit

should the full
weight of the
moral law be
forgone

and he, she,
be purely judged
on aesthetic principles

FISH (for David Butler)

FISH (for David Butler)

it’s just a fish

not like
for a dish

and it involves
a ship
we call
“craftsmanship”

a fishing vessel
we call
metaphor

David though
in a small boat, actually
more a coracle

somewhere beneath the surface
of that dark, rough sea

a bite
waiting to happen

to be
pieced together

frame by frame
bone
by
bone

moment
by moment

SAVING NINE

stitch together moments

let them mistake
time for
embroidery

too much trouble to
unpick the pattern
(art’s advantage
over history)

WINDOW

art is the
window to
man’s soul
she
roared (being a
Leo)

so we looked through
a window in the house
in the painting

and saw you looking
through a window
on the other side

MOUSE STAR

mouse star
spider star

it has taken me a life
to see you as you
really are
(let us not
speak of “lifetime”)

walking past a sidewalk cafe
(as I was, to be punctilious)
whorls of energy
spread across the galaxy
whose text
blue
and gold (whose code,
whose grammar:
who knows?)

stars of my childhood
why were you
as you were
when other configurations
could have been
so much better

but no
stars of
deep, death-darkest night,
even if you were
staring malignly
you would
have been invisible

for you
have holes to
burrow down into

webs to spread and
lie at the centre of
(and other lie too: about
your purpose, origin
and history)

spread your
net wide, dig
your hole deep

until you catch me
inside, outside
a poem
trapped in a
work of art

the paint still wet
fire

still
raging

thread
still unwinding

so good to be penniless, unknown,
standing outside the gallery
no access, no entry

absolutely, painfully
ecstatic
to be alive.

FATHOM ME

come
fathom me

see how deep I go
become the artist of
the sculpting
fingers

they feel
as if they know

CONCERNING SPELEOLOGY

CONCERNING SPELEOLOGY

I do not
adore caves

caves I
abhor

cannot imagine
the Altamira artists
crawling on
all fours, painting
on their backs

brains bursting, images caving
in, a
flood of
deep symbols
desperate to
be released from
millennia of
collective confinement.

IN GOOD TASTE

the rain fell
turned my
haiku into
a Jackson Pollock

and now I know
that the moment is
worth rejoicing

Sky
and Earth

in such
good taste

HEAVY OILS

I need to
shift from

water colours to
heavy oils

and adjust my palette
towards the darker shades

make gloom and
light-bending gravity
my edge of the spectrum

so thickly bleak
(with the weight of
all that went wrong
in the
history of the Universe)

that as soon
as the brush hits
the canvass

space folds and
brush, artist and

everything connected
are pulled helplessly
downwards and inwards.

CHISELED

your tall skyscraper beauty
legs up to
Heaven with
the head that owns them
up on the roof of it

eyes big as Bambi’s but
ripple with
a fiery darkness

and me
just the mere
mortal who

chiseled
this out of you