Alone at Grand Canyon

and something in me, reeling, snapped abruptly
at it's beauty. In my shallow mind, it broke.
A suprise to me - a shock - a new figment, colour,
fragment, pigment, shaking pageant-object for my reality.
There - I was broken down, so now when I close my eyes
that intense suspense groaning sense of vertigo
hangs around my head. I whirl - beauty makes me scared.

And reader - this is true - that view I saw
made me think of you your naked body
glory in glory of -
i didn't know this could happen.

New Orleans Sequential

Scrap metal-paper - blank slated -
plants genuinely exploding happily through
only-creased-concrete. Parade -
parade; shining free business'
piled up with money - then littler
business' all lookings, like cardboard
half-peeled away- which we all know so well
and like these people lurking - beautiful though -
in dark-bars with

______________John Cleese socialism
in the windows - then mcdonalds - then
French gates: this place is historied like
imagined red ribbon, ripping - french
spanish french - cornrowed, photographed,
painted, keyhole ghosttoured, upside-down;

Shangaria Chasset; gates of mercy;
mango MANGO brew-pub pizza
daiquiri cocktails; pray for my soul
sweet-little-sailship! A little slip.

Hit from the side, then; slight in enormity:
a sheer marble slap; steps sat-upon
by a man black with a newspaper seat
to provide-protect from the shock-contact
the wealth of the place would provide -
or supply.

I am, of course, fine, but the world
is too tired to explain to you why.

__And then, walking home,
we are all mugged - by the night -
in the most beautiful, many-leaved way.

__---

__(analysis:)
Cut into this, like a slim pack of cards,
just as you knew, and you always know,
as it should be but isn't,
are the houses rowing away, slipping or shattered,
or bent with destruction; or halved;
ripped; ripped; ripped; ripped; ripped;
like blacks into reds,
as it should have been here but wasn't,
and all this leaning dangerously in
through the opening-windows of the tram-ride
this stuff - really just stuff - is away,
__I feel I am as guilty as the sea.

Valentine

Light through attic window.
A new day - sunday - has come into play
and we greet it with small, stale breaths; then rise, and move
down into the yellowbrown kitchen of a shallow sunday morning.

Our mouths kiss the lips of coffee cups,
and, tasting smoky, I ignore you for a minute,
preferring the papers and their printed human weakness,
then return myself - like small change - to you.

Now the light is angling, from outside, for us
to curl up again, and be coffee:
mixed and warm; essential in routine.
It wants us, already married, to fall in love.

Paradiddle (abbreviated)

Day. A get-up; the wind-chime only
saying good-morning; breakfast; snacks; what -
if anything - lacks? So strange to sleep; but Night.

Day. Just the same I know; go to
to work; find the legs for another fifty laps;
the doctor cruelly has no name; Night, and
__I might not hear from him

again; Day. This is this, that is that; all grey;
grey socks. first; pale feet; then darker
concrete, smeared with light; run my hands along

the wall - no-one's watching; fight
nothing, hard; fight what's overheard
from the gaps in the happy people holdinghands; Night.

Day. Before I've noticed; I should
see someone; I should be absolved, in
blinding light; one-thirty-five a pint; people suffer
__delight; and endless cat-fight keeping me awake; Night.

Day. Day; another day! One of those times
one sees the line, or lines; day; day; day; each re-called
by that damned wind-chime; Such a circle; I say I'm fine;
__Such a circle.

Sketch

A short walk down the beach; a stone's throw
(for all its predictable trajectory)
between the sea, its stilling waves,
and the lonely roughened tree.

It is as simple as this: the wind
(which is circumstance) lifts a leaf
(showing life) and carries it (living)
to the sea (which is death).

and the tree (happy mother) has
a thousand still left.

The Escape

I. -

For a moment, I loved my country,
and smiled as I broke
though the low roof of the city
three bus-stops from town -
smiled as I saw England. Smile
__as I see England, and
it's dark green and grey,
but it stretches and rolls
like the laziest day
in bed with a lover
when it's raining outside
and it's good
to be alive.

II. But

Nothing, ever, is straight.
This iron-scented, gilded yellow
rail-track, here, begins direct,
speeding from under my feet, at my command,
but soon makes for a break
in the hills, where the final sunlight
falls, in curls, somehow shaped
by the calls of the birds in the blues
and greys of early evening.

And breaks into shadow,
as night falls, now, and me
still travelling, away.

III. And

I'm lonely now, like stone,
with only this hard-soiled country to love;
(and only coiled lines to speak)
a chance, only too much chance, to
stare at the still ground
between and beneath my feet.

And now, though I'm still,
there's a rush all around me and
I'm stopped. But I'm only train-station stationary,
like closed down machinery in a
working refinery, making only
reflections, now.

And even then reflections of one thing,
and only one thing.

IV. So

Three bus-stops; ceaseless trains;
silent towns with different skies sing by - in repetative refrains;
I changed my name. It didn't help - it seems -
but to better let me see me - tripping past -
hardly stopping but to rearrange these painted scenes;
__(the sane must be derailed and made deranged
__to suit my eyes - my eyes, my love, the same)
I must move on; the escape must be complete:
and some-thing must be changed.

The Crossword Setter

"One thing that is in my power:
I can see further into things than most,
even than your father. Even the father
idealised solid as memory in you. I knew

that - just an example. I've lived
the long life, by now, you know,
and am well pleased, at last, with
£25 for two sets of clues.

I knew - another example - for years
of the men my wife met
quietly, delicately, in dark-red hotel rooms
unsettling the very streets outside, so

they made me naseous; a sensation
later familiar almost to a comfort - the fear
of a soldier. This thing I knew well - the only
I wished I didn't - and all this not unlike

the lumpen, uncomfortable feeling of
that false, bronze perfection of your father, that character
these days behind you always. He - Him - so easily
answering the crossword clues of your youth;

questions in youth set by anything:
steam train-stone-lover-stray dog-white
china dishes - it was really a hopscotch of questions,
and wishes. Some hoped to be answered, some painful

when made simple by an adult answer, like
the one I've been avoiding, sickened, for years, or
like the crossword clues I store in overflowing racks,
that lord I know are only really facts
applied to other facts, and nothing more."