Like an Edward Hopper

Like an Edward Hopper

Being out of pain by nightfall and taking
a cheap room that overlooks the market,
foldaway or empty stalls, seats for drinking
and the sound of raised voices, clash of laughter
in the warm air – the night’s not over yet –
the sound of a game, wood counters clacking.
Life’s pre-presented in a set, and stripped
down to inessentials like an Edward Hopper:

The glass of wine, the meal I require
become the mind’s main focus – here, or here?
And if I talk to someone, I wonder
Whether what I say is pivotal, or

whether it’s true you call the things, where
what you are could alter what you were.


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Incompleteness Rises

Incompleteness rises



It’s what we don’t know, crowding in on us,
That heals by not making sense:
The books we haven’t read, the tense hiatus
In a film’s dialogue; our own silence

That works better for us than a slick bonmot.
Incompleteness rises as if by deception –
The hero meets a girl he doesn’t know
And follows her to make a strange confession.

They fight on a beach; stones rain from nowhere,
Falling in sand create a random pattern;
And the soundtrack is a jazz trumpeter

Sweats on a solo, prevaricates the turn,
So that we don’t know which way, or where
The climax comes – each moment crazier.


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silk bus, stone world

silk bus, stone world..

Like a silk-sailed bus on a Sunday route
sticks to the frozen flux, a moment in which
a flower overflows its trough of stone,
stone basin in an urban park – orange
flares across its petals like a sun –
so much stone world, I stoop over its little form,

my good old camera stuck with masking tape,
the sense of being watched – is it their rigor or their torpor
that affects me like the closing of a drape?
With one colour it has done so much,
like a promenader with a yellow head-scarf;
and its beauty is set off by a fault
like a cigarette burn near its centre,
and at the centre a bit of stone shows through.

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