There is no question of choice, but it takes a long time. Love’s vacancies, the eye & cavity, track back to embraces where the spine bends & quietens like smoke in the earth. Your tongue, touching on song, darkens all…

something that someone is saying no louder, Pip, than my ‘goodnight’ – words with a tune, which outstaying their speaker travel as far as that amazing, vibrant light from a long-extinguished star.

My habit of late-light walking will mirror my life, how in its twilight I’ll rush out saying, how beautiful – has it been like this all day?

  I want the slew of muscle, a less cerebral meeting place: no word but your male shout, the shirred unpublic face and honest skin crying to me, yes, the mouthless, eyeless tenderness crying to be let in. Unbutton all…

'I think I'm going to have it,' I said, joking between pains. The midwife rolled competent sleeves over corpulent milky arms. 'Dear, you never have it, we deliver it.' A judgement years proved true. Certainly I've never had you as…

  At Robben Island the political prisoners studied. They coined the motto Each one Teach one. In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners Address them always as “Profesor.” Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I Am a…

  i You are the generosity of wings, opened into the recent sun, the inner ear of heat-weltered corrugated iron, a vast that yawns through the flower’s nuclear mouth. Your five moods, unspoken, remember on someone else’s lips wheels of…

  The jaunty crop-haired graying Women in grocery stores, Their clothes boyish and neat, New mittens or clean sneakers, Clean hands, hips not bad still, Buying ice cream, steaks, soda, Fresh melons and soap – the big Balding young men…

  Eyes panda-blacked from a ten year boozecruise. Shelled & contused – which is done-in to you. One clean day back when, took a picnic to a park in a place called Tuebrook & etched immortal Doherty into the bark….

  In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs, in the green that would balance on the wide green world, air filled with flux, world-in-a-belly in the blue lilac weather, she had written a letter: You…

‘Opinion is not worth a rush’ – W. B. Yeats Who cares what the poets think? Shelley said they were ‘unacknowledged legislators’. He made paper boats of his thoughts and set them sailing on the Thames at Marlow – much…

  It’s not a machine unless home-grown. It’s not a phone unless it types by horse. It’s not a hearse unless you get out born. It’s not a greenhorn unless it blows. It’s not a rose if it smells like…

  He knew he was asleep and was dreaming Of a beautiful poem. It seemed to be singing Itself in the night, and he woke In a bed in a room in an old hotel And lay there, hearing the…

  I left my life, held captive by a dream, and stood in the middle of the Californian Spanish Mission Revival beachfront learning how to build cumulus clouds. I saw Napier’s blue sky pour it on in the high noon…

Legion is my most recent collection of poems – it was published this year, 2005. It’s divided into three sections, and the title sequence consists of voices from a fictitious war zone. These poems ambushed me; I’m not a public…

Incessant urging, curt, peremptory: Write what you will, in verse, or otherwise, Intelligible, using simple metaphors. Address a reader not just hypothetical But flesh and blood in no need of harangues. The time has come. We’re on the very brink…