I awoke in the middle
Of the night

Thinking I should’ve
Called home

To let you know
I was safe

I then remembered
That you weren’t

And that neither
Was I

I spent days
on that bridge

I cannot cross it
I cannot walk that parapet

open spaces
fill me with fear

Death looks as
My youngest sister did
A dark haired infanta
Before
The drugs bloated
Then killed her
Your job’s done
Brother
You can come home now

In the Park Keeper’s garden
Beneath Blue Suburban Skies
A deep trenched
Air Raid shelter
Dug for a boy
Obsessed with his father’s history
In the battle of Britain
As an earth-bound engineer

My father
Hating their bubble car
Remembering, perhaps,
Released air surfacing
from U-Boats below the North Atlantic
Forbade me to see him

I still have Ian’s present
A Ladybird book
‘The Night Sky’

Behind suburban lawns, neat flower beds,
In the no-man’s spinney beyond the garden gate,
Under tangled branches, brambles, and deserted nests,
I find a grave-like hollow in the shade.

With shelving sides, scooped clean and rough,
Some hands had dug a curved and shallow bole,
Just large enough, and small enough,
To take and keep, at eight years old, my soul.

Blue never-ending 60’s summer skies,
Of ‘Spectrum is Green’, and ‘Thunderbirds are Go!’
From a US base an F4 Phantom flies,
Our fields, our town, lost in the sun-blocked haze below.

As jets explode the summer Suffolk skies,
My youngest brother runs towards the house, and cries.

I’m doing my rounds as a postie
The Financial Crash is to thank
When I was released from my job as a hedge funding manager
By Lehmann Brothers, the bank

It’s the week before Christmas in Alston
I’m pushing my bike through the snow
This drizzle palaver soaks my balaclava
But my hearts got a warm inner glow

As Geoff whistles his dogs to the sheepfold
Thoughts of his missus is keeping me warm
Her dungareed thighs, and bonny mince pies,
Keep me pushing my bike through the storm

Please let me sit in the Dark,
Please let me sit in the Dark

I want to cradle
My grief
I’m not alone
I’m swimming
With the tide

I want to let it wash
I want it to drown me
I want to touch the deep
Pebbles
On the seabed
Only then
Can I surface

Don’t worry

‘Don’t worry
It may never
Happen’

I won’t
It
Already
Fucking
Has

Please don’t judge

The way someone grieves

The way someone grieves
Is up
Or mostly down
In my experience
To them.

Their way of coping
With their loss
Their emptiness
Their fucking Void
of Oblivion

(Now that’s a
Good title for a
Death Metal album)

Is not chosen
But is instead
A necessary
Survival tactic

Whatever helps
Them/ us /me
(Of course I mean, me, me, me)
through
We’re doing their best

Let them
I mean
Us
I mean
Me

Make our mistakes

We’re trying our hardest

Under very difficult circumstances

Why is every young man
A Lost Boy
Why do we have to go through
This Prodigal Son
I’m off on a journey
‘I may be some time’ kinda shit
Pissing away our inheritance
Emotional, cultural, educational
With the pigs

Why do I want to rescue you?
And why am I torn, desperate
That you swim to your own lifeboat?
Fighting the easy impulse to throw you a line
But I must watch, allowing you to sink
To struggle
To find your own depth
Deep inside
Your wounded
And waiting to be connected self

I don’t want to tell you
‘I love you’
I want you to know.
I want you to
Show me your life
I’m desperate for you to know
I’m listening

Away from home
In your new world
You show me
Your work
Your relationships
Your hopes and disappointments
How things could be better

They are better
We hug once to say goodbye
And then again
Catching each other’s eyes
To say
Those words
I’m too scared
To whisper out loud

In the forest a man is kicking trees
He tells me:
‘Not one escaped the toe of my boot’
I still see him now:
Man versus unmoved, unmoving tree

I see a green skin bruised and gashed,
A fracture less than clean, that weeps,
Resin draining as lymph drips,
On dry leaf litter,
A soiled lint, soaked and spent

Unfelt brambles, snatching thorns
Draw blood, a craze of spraying drops
Like dew, a consumptive’s hacking cough,
or first felt beads of summer rainstorm,
speckle the soft green pillowed moss

I hear a quiet moan as wood rubs wood
Where churning branches stroke the sky
Boots hit a pathside birch,
steel toecaps bite,
A heel breaks another fallen twig, in three

His thrashing blur, too full for thought
A fog of limbs and mind swept clean
Stumbles, exhausted in its fight
Against unwanted growth and time

For now …

Alone …

at the kitchen table
Untouched fruit, his wife unmoving waits
Her own clock’s quiet tick
unwinding
As it slows to its own
inevitable
Escape

Thieves of sleep
Sweep through the night
Swag bags full
Fingers light

Pulling the covers off of your bed
Pulling anxieties out of your head

‘Depressed, suicidal?’
They’d love to hear you out

Bad Samaritans

By his raiment you shall know him

In the corner
The wardrobe waits
Storing black
Memories

Costumes from the past
Masks

Behind the coats
The jackets
And starched
Ironed shirts

The skeletons hang
Waiting to be discovered
And aired

Hung out on a washing line
Underwear
Flapping in the wind
For all the world to see

Give and take

Don’t give me
Anything precious
I’ll only lose it

Don’t take
Anything precious
from me
I’ll never forgive you

Pared down,
Bone dry
As a skull’s fragile arch,
The curved blue dome of sky.

Insects sip,
Roots cling,
brittle heather recedes
from the moor’s withered forehead.

Empty orbits,
pools of shade,
rock limbs
sleep
beneath
the land they made.

Waking blue, powder blue,
Colours lightly cut and flung
to where
High
a pale thin fingernail of moon
hangs
emptied of all fortune telling

A yellow splash of paint marks the head
a driven rivet in the road
a surgeon’s spray, now a sign
forgotten gesture of a long lost hope

A yellow flower decorates a fissure,
Overgrown, close-knit with grass.
The tarmac surface lifts and bends
four hundred warped and laddered yards

This buckled climb, once steep, now fractured,
Long off the tourists’ travel plan
no injected steel or pin will
untwist this broken high way’s spine

Mam Tor – not just a peak, but valley mother,
mastectomy of weakened stone
Is scalpel slashed winter by winter
Its flesh revealed, its muscles torn

I remember Mam Tor mists from way back
When in, my teenage cavern guiding days,
‘You can’t see ‘tor today Bettie’
Would stretch our coffee-and-twix tea-breaks

Today I climb high summer paths.
Heat lifting thermals of distant sheep cries
Flinging fine dust from Earl’s cement works
scorching into my swelling eyes

I now climb in sun
blinded not by tears from visiting
my brother’s grave in the valley below
but from the pulverized lime
carried in on the High Peak breeze

I can’t see the ridge of our hills, his valley,
Or the trains that pass his grave at
exactly twenty to the hour.

I can’t see the tor today

Water binds unconscious earth
At this the still-point of the year
With night-times long
And mornings numbing

Pulses slow
To count the hours
Fish, unblinking, face upstream
Scales poised against the current

Roots hang
Freeze and crack
Fingers crusty
Grunt with earth crumbs

Submerged pebbles roll
Sand grains, flakes of stone
Eddy upwards
Filtering the winter’s sunlight

Icebound soil shears from the riverbank
Set free by the thaw
Falling, an escaping prisoner,
Tumbling into the moving stream

As the earth turns to water
And water air
In the shallows where the trees sweat
I stand

And feel
Arms, hands,
Young as the melt
Dark, stained, veined with leaf-mould
Clasping, holding
Pulling me down
Bringing me
Into the dark
To the warm and waking
Slow, slow, heart throb