E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

  POEM FOR MY MOTHER   I have not done justice to my mother, The sweep of her life, How when young, she was young, In a country, on a farm, and other children, And I will never know their names, I have forgotten to ask so much, How lazy have I been! Now that she is going, Out of this room, where we can see her, Where she can be talked with, now that she is Leaving the scene of all our disputations, All the tomfoolery of this world, and the music She listened to, her cooking, her reading, Her studies at McGill, those meticulously marked Textbooks, the kisses, the childbirth, the sons, Jordan, the colds, the flying to China, The mourning, lovemaking, waking to make instant Coffee, the long discussions about serial killers, About our ancestors, about Uncle Sandy and Port Daniel, the summers, the winters, the cross-country Skiing, the wedding photos, the modelling career, The rages, the laughing, sometimes, the criticism Of certain TV ...

HOT ZONE CONFESSIONS   ‘Thomas and Lowell made themselves the metaphor of their poems’   1. I am myself the quarantine. The garden spreads children In summer clothes like sores   On a lip. The world quivers, All arrows locked and loaded To overflow. I don’t quite explode.   2. Writing has never been bomb squad To the great squatting missiles below Our skins; you don’t avoid   Volcanic eruption with lava postcards. Words hurl microbial aerosol Across the lawn to sicken, invade.   3. I’m only paper, metaphor, inky myth. What’s made isn’t mine or shrapnel to own, Contains pandemics in its sly mists.   Controlled explosions like punking steam? All dreams are engines to the minefield Mind we try to civilly distance from, or collide in.   4. We’ve died in rhetorical verse too often to see The trees burst from it like shells out of Burial mounds; all’s fecundity, even dross,   ...

CICERO UNLOCKED After  W.B.Y & D.T. with love   Cicero knows a soul is there or isn’t there And neither bandage unbreaks the fear; My cat’s coalfired sleeping in a fiery pool Put out in purrs sleep derails, his fur The kingdom of panthers all breeders confer Ribbons on; in heaven the dead move too – In puzzled sleep, at their side some owner Scribbling also of the worried times: half The world is half apart from half the world’s Other part – the solid heart has come to know The dialogue of self, and loss, and selfless loss; As Plato told, and Aristotle tossed aside, in scorn. We’re divisions of an army made up of us Alone; the hill-town’s been cut off from its face, To save the sloping nose to keep the mills alight. Economies of scale collapse   like climbing bibles Tipping off a feeding beltway to appal the stars. It is dust bowling as dollars fly like mice Out of the cat hospitals to die church poor In single pairs o...

On the value of reading during a global pandemic Though it save no life passes time that could be wasted w ith Money Heist or Tiger King on Netflix; or fear or breaking the law with walking twice the same day. To read is to return to somewhere never gone or only in memory; it is a home abroad, a power without pain. Libraries are banks that never drain away their fiscal strength; a book is a mile of miles at a single length. You may start Sir Browne and die before the Urne ; no holiday ends too late; life is brevity, reading infinite. We skim the stone of ourselves upon the surface of time like a meteor burning as it skips the skin of space. We hold a place to return again. But even entering the waves once permits the wetting sea to begin.  Death is omnipresent, gasping at medics like a vicious shark; they lean in to serve, are swallowed themselves by dark. Though lovers break orders to couple danger in the park. Open any volume, intak...

I am exploring a neo-romantic style of poem, simpler and more expressive, of late, partially inspired by recent German writers, and the events that have changed the world as much or more than the French revolution. Here is a new poem in this style. I saw my first flower today not only of this spring but ever as this time my eye saw at once what might never be seen later if I might die the next day as the time is fast coming of a blight so the red rippling flew out at me like a wild thing so enraged with living it seemed no cage could keep such a tiger in. ts 26 March, 2020 London

THAT TIME REMEMBERED Something about duty, about going into the sun As if it was rare; something about not enough Of basic things, too much information; A recollection of locks, distance, and crowds In parks as if they were safer. A sense the young Were careless, indifferent, as they always are; The old preparing for what they knew happens; A time of waiting, as if the air raid sirens Had just begun, but the shelters hadn’t yet Flung open. Something else, connected to being Apart, a decision we made to come together, A grander union, after division bells, local anger; Seriousness at a level you could hear in a stadium, But they were shut. The image of someone holding A pint glass, laughing at the figures on the telly; Stocking up on boxed sets, brown rice, macaroni; Wondering if the straps of your mask were right; That clutching in the chest like holding on To your last belongings; a gust of fight or flight. More ...

I first published this 15 years ago on this blog (in 2005)… eerily prescient... The Shape of Things to Come Resembles a triumphant trump of doom; Is like a hollow room; a horn of plenty; A ballerina’s shoe; a house in Hooville, Like a devil’s mouse; a bang- Drum, a pirate drunk on deadman’s Rum; like a broken broom used to brush Away the webs from day-dreaming boys In a math exam; like a rack of lamb; A donut convention; a depleted pension; Like the sort of position churchmen don’t Like to mention; is shaped like a poem, Mute and dumb; like a big bronze bell Held by a handlebar-moustachioed strongman Working for Barnum; like a circus tent; Like the hole rent in just such an umbrella; Like a sausage and some French mustard; Seems to be hoist on its own petard; looks Like rain; is infinite, so will and won’t come again. Is shaped like love; is shaped like a question Mark and also an exclamation mark and also A period. The shape of the terrible future Is a sonnet and a no, looks like a ...

Day After Election Day poem there’s no Heineken language that hits all the spots - it is sad great news - one nation’s landslide another seat’s crushing defeat; who can speak for unintelligible masses except a monoglot despot or popular turn of hate; December is bitter and bright - election day darkens like paganism into night. The wolves that bay are starving brothers. We must lie to one another to make even marginal gains.  14 December, 2019, London t.s.

POEM ON READING DENISE RILEY'S LATEST COLLECTION It won't be when it is; it, it - identify the culprit. That's mystery, not this: we know what does the deed; deeds are legal instruments also; no day is quieter or more sad than a May Bank Holiday Monday when it is about to pour down or the rain has just barely ended. Gloom. The day presents badly, won't look us in the eye. Don't say autistic.  Closing down the long weekend, time like a French Play amuses with doors. I have no business (being an I) intruding or hiding here. To conceal is to claim I am a thing worth keeping from someone or some thing.  Some body. Bodies are extended metaphors for extension, just as bank loans are tropes for needing money. It is all the same to me. This landscape is a painting in a gallery wandered about in by lawyers here for the wine and the chance to hit it off with someone for a variety of reasons, not one remotely to do with the art. Wh...

On Reading Derek Mahon I wonder at how often and when these poems so well-wrought will earn the readers in the coming years of digital concupiscence and onanistic thrills. A Chinese wall is built around the fire wall, and that is ringed by weird indifference to anything too brilliantly said. There is a formal way of being great that has the fate of being misunderstood. Experiment and hate together pull down the banners of a kingdom built on the quaint ideals of elegance or chivalric poise. The noise we intake instead is the bread of ignorance we break with ourselves. Our brains have softened as our tongues harden; citadels are closed; we’re bored and boring in equal measure unless maintained at a pitch would kill Darwin or Churchill; Mahon’s style is beautiful, still, serious, and makes an occasion of the flow and spill of words into a vase; a frame. There is an object to the art of poetry, it is that spoken song in itself is less wro...