cars around eyes broken
chain and crumpled bike
with bars the wrong way
and people saying Are you okay?
and one You’ve dropped your money
and collecting it from the road
and the X-ray next day and away
from A&E with a lucky break
and a box of painkillers
first published in 2005 in Fire Poetry Magazine: http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=16775
Who is Felix Dennis? / Unseen / cars around eyes broken / Home for the Games / Modes
Home for the Games
I have thrown one-arm giants
Around asymmetric bars
And landed pike somersaults
On the edge of crash mats
With no idea of place
Silent clutter fills my head
On the tram back into Manchester. Stop.
Listening to voices, varied tones,
Faces coming to terms with mobiles
Through a -scape of chimney spires. Stop.
From the city of revolution. Stop. That foul drain -
I see the Pennine spine -
Of gloom at the heart of History’s trade
Down channels of uncommon wealth
Now recreational canals and cycle paths
first published in 2005 in Fire poetry magazine: http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=16776
Who is Felix Dennis?
One free drink torn from the news
into O’Neil’s for a Guinness,
turning along Carnaby Street
and back to see what changed.
Beautiful women giving out flyers
for a Felix Dennis do, inviting me
to free entry, wine and food,
so I leaned on the wall of Liberty
and started this on the reverse.
Modes was first published in 2005
http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=16777.
Modes
Barging by on the canal reflecting
walkers through peak flats wearing hats
over ears, the ice striking through jeans
and the time on the watch the same
as a woman scans from the tram past flats
made from mills built with cotton flags
that might have been learnt at school
sometime between the world wars.
Unseen was first published in 2008 on the Guardian website:http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/15/fred.daguiar.poetry.workshop.kubla.khan
Unseen
A week is no river to learn what
flows two centuries guarded
by some knowing incomplete,
out of fashion for a change
like intentional clichés.
My face in the river, I see
my own face in the river to me,
yet progress talks here of a habit
making me seem somewhere else.
Less than a week - no time to finish
what I began five days before I imagine
I imagine my reluctance to submit
after a dream I remember being
somewhere in an army I was
and inside a party room of odd numbers,
which next day became a chemist.
A poem is time enough to leave
unfinished, fragmented as it was
or even as it could be.
So with the adding of a reading
followed by my writing beside other words,
I walk away from another river
and reflect upon a vision I cannot see.
