So let us sit a while in the space left between ending and beginning

So let us sit a while in the space left
between ending and beginning

Here where
Nothing grows or ever
Dreams of living

There is a silence here that sings as sweetly as any song
And says that
Love has passed through these fields;
Has passed through and moved on

Here lies a land owned by neither bird
Nor flower -
Beauty has no place here,
Time holds no hour

And so let us sit a while in the space left
between ending and beginning

Here where
Nothing grows or ever
Dreams of living

Spanish Bluebells

Those weeks when the Spanish Bluebells came
As quietly as starlight pouring blue
And brilliant upon
The small bank of earth before my window
Have now passed.

So then the earth is back.
The bare earth.

Between scattered weeds - that I've not
The heart to move -
Crisp packets hunched as old women
Twitch in the late evening wind -

And how the wind howls across this sorry patch of England!
If the rain falls - and it does fall
How the packets crackle like fire!

But they bring none of the joys of fire
And sound as mocking and as uneasy to me
As the forbidden laughter of strangers.

Dalston Night Song

And so it's midnight
outside the Tesco Express
on the Kingsland Road

A man kicking at the wind
the rain
red lights from passing cars

And you have your hand in mine beneath an
old umbrella -

No, let's try not to think about the morning darling

For now
All that matters is
huddling from the rain and that
I've your bag and a bottle of wine

And that in half an hour we will be home

Night Poem 140212

You were there

And then as a
Tube train screaming
"Rush!" into the tunnels -
Lifting old newspaper
And unresting hair
You were there

No longer

Night poem: 180112

In a yellow memoryless room
Beneath the ghosts of underwater voices, the
Coackroach creak of my neighours
Cars come not as a river tonight, but
Stopped and hollow as screams against the window

An empty wine bottle
And a dead radio
A vase to piss in
And loose thoughts on civilisation
And of progress

Then above me, the voices fall silent
Somewhere beyond their howls lies sleep
And in the morning darkness
And in the evening there is the room again
Yellow and alone

How lonely! Tonight beneath this
electic light
There is nothing but the cry of
passing vehicles
And an emptiness where no clock strikes

What a desolate banshee cry!

If you were here we would drink the bars of kingsland road
And in brotherhood, raise a glass...

Christ! D H Lawrence is dead. I only realise now the weight of those words
Auden
Dylan Thomas
Miller and Verlaine
All Dead!

The evening is buried
All sense stopped
And i try to call but..

When i think of everything that has ended in the last five years...
When i think of cool evenings in Buenos Aires
Or by the shore of the hudson, the salt tinged air and tango music and
my father driving away alone into the rain of kingsland road

And this cripling lonliness

If you were here i would
talk about the night poems we wrote on the roof
In the west village
The electric buzz of cockroaches
The river of traffic

When i think of Harlem Night Song, Langston Hughes
The fairy lights amongst the trees at Columbia University
Of buying bubble tea, hiding in libraries, or sleeping on college fields.... Oh! The bookstore on the corner of 115th, gone!

The light across the roofs of cornelia street, the sun dying -
Searching the corners of the room and dancing
Curtains sailing pinkly in the evening light
A stranger's piano
Carrying a painting the length of the 1 train the night after the bar

You gargling vodka the night before getting your tooth filled
Arriving in greenpoint on a summer's evening - children screaming from the park
Beer on the terrarce of Enids
Carrying furniture from an apartment on west end ave
Arriving home to find everything
So beautifully arranged on Prince street

Buying pizza near a plaza in mendoza
Stopping to picnic with our bikes and looking out across the fields

The henry miller museum

All cut short. Sudden as a breath.