Perhaps Winner of the EditRed.Com 2006 Writer’s Choice Award for Poetry
Perhaps a string of kisses would drape the tender nape of your stretching neck framed within an auburn pillow; perhaps we could turn to yellow in this crystal sunrise, a golden nest around our bed praising the wisdom of our slumber; perhaps the world will thunder to arouse this pellucid girl and boy; caught adrift their morning love: the deep embrace of each other; perhaps they could be lovers.
Peeling: Egg from Southword Journal, Issue 30, Jul '16
The first crack is a misplaced key against the symphony’s roundness, liberating crunch, bringing malleable edges to a fortress of geometry, finding crease in the pool surface, rippling throughout all degrees.
Take away the tawny layer to let white ring out: remove fawn, tan, beige and taupe, mushroom rainbow arcing out, fibrin strips arched between fingers.
Ungloved, it is a perfect marble: pick it clean of hard spots, tiny triangles of candied remains; a sugar-coated almond sucked clear, rubbery boiled bubble of odd flesh.
The Night Birds from 'left of soul'
The flutter of nearby cuckoos merging into swarms, streets echoing with their cackle: coarse, rough banter, a pumice stone against sleeping skin turned into sound; noisy scribbles against urban papyrus.
There’s the shriek of the female battling it out with the woof of the male; mating calls, battle cries, whooping and looping past traffic lights at green and poorly situated town apartments.
There is no sleep in the hunting hours of the night birds.
Rotoscoping from Snapping Twig, Jan '15
On waking, the rotoscope turns to grey, as tumblers falling in a safe, and I remember nothing but confusion: outlines of a bewildering stranger, some old street plucked out of childhood placed within two points of chaos, an argument, violent, often with a close family member. I tell myself: it is only the mind’s way of keeping busy while the body sleeps, that these reels mean nothing, the end credits never shown, a silent movie.
Blue Autumn from The Honest Ulsterman, Jun '14
September coming down as a spider web across the eye of the bay, slow nestle of dusk filling everywhere with shadow; the day narrows, the world drops still.
Even the sea appears to be sleeping, hypnic twitches of waves rustle under the land's nose, fallow breaths taking nothing and leaving nothing.
The island stays afloat as some small god, impermeable and eternal, where mountains never rust and tides are made passive, put to bed by giants.
Cinnabar from And Other Poems, Apr '14
Going to rinse the saucepan, I spy a rose petal in the sink: bent purple, withered in this high-seventies weather, most unseasonable of seasons.
Somehow circumvented angles of back yard, oil tank and washing-line, through kitchen window, onto an irregular place of rest.
Leaning in, I find its being: a red cabbage leaf from last night’s salad, a beauty non-transferable, utterly throwaway.
A Fusion Winner of the Glebe House Harmony Trust poetry competition 2015
In dreams, I am often a child again.
In reality, I tug at my fantasies, trying to strap them down against the sides of life; pull the centres towards each other, to create an object akin to life. It teeters for a moment then drops away from me. I'm always on the wrong side of the see-saw.
Yet, it isn’t the merry-go-round, looking for balance, or the swings, oscillating towards inertia. When the pendulum stops, the ride is over, the park closes, then I and my counterweights camp under the stars until opening time. I'm hydrogen dreaming of helium, knowing that sun and gravity will come.
Dōji's Puppet from 'Dōji: A Blunder'
Dōji truffled out a corpse; he knew nothing of limbs, of lungs, of brain. He saw a puppet,
so Dōji picked at the stuffing and pawed out innards onto the soil.
Mud was formed from thick remnants of bladder-spill and intestinal slop. The earth grew warm from the foraging.
Dōji poked his head into the shell and laughed; the rain came, as Dōji pecked and clawed, fitting the skin over him. He could breathe, he could move, he was dry and could not be seen.
Dōji kajawed; he had found a new game.
Harvest from Abridged 0-47: A Many Splintered Thing, Jul '15 We group instruments of sleep about us: gum shield, throat spray, ear plugs, bodies given in set agreement.
In Summer, we require less than our skins. Dreams ruptured from the heat; stray images, kindling for the stars.
Come November, additives of blanket, socks, pepper the bed with one poppy red hot water bottle.
We take up our positions, defenders to each other's rampart. Security of unified arms.
Soon, you are drowsy; I begin the slow pilot of my torso towards the moon, moods tucked around us.
We go to our little deaths together, awaiting the morphine touch of Somnus. These are our soft times.
Mountaineering from Causeway | Cabhsair, Issue 6.2 , Dec '15 shortlisted for Dermot Healy International Poetry Competition 2015
Once you learn that grief cannot be shared, the mountain shrinks a little.
*
Nowhere, her body, lost, frozen, unable to boast of adventure.
Nowhere, a map left in an abandoned hut.
The birds don’t fly this far down.
Your world is dizzy, oxygen lost of taste. blows full of sleep.
Pitched in the same place for half a year, the rations blundered.
*
Months of snow forming bedrock.
Fix your guide ropes to its shale.
The object is not to reach the top but to drift down to the bottom then run free.
