(The Toilet Attendant Writes Home)    Taana boy, how you do?  How Shanti stay? And Sukhoo?  Mosquito still a-bite all-you?  Juncha dead true-true?  Mala bruk-foot set?  Food deh foh eat yet?    Englan nice, snow and dem ting,  A land…

Ruby and me stalking savannah  Crab season with cutlass and sack like big folk. Hiding behind stones or clumps of bush Crabs locked knee-deep in mud mating And Ruby, seven years old feeling strange at the sex And me horrified to pick them up Plunge…

VII    I had forgotten the years, now wakened  By the creature that washed towards me.  Yet another ship passed, familiar sails stretched  Upon racks of wind, ropes taut against spars,  Enough to rip a man’s hand trapped there.  Careless…

When they raped me, they said I was second best. All along I knew it was him they fancied, my young husband. Our host wouldn’t have it. They could take his virgin daughter instead but not a man who’d shared…

(for Mar, d. 1985)    Now that peasantry is in vogue,  Poetry bubbles from peat bogs,  People strain for the old folk’s fatal gobs  Coughed up in grates North or North East  ‘Tween bouts o’ living dialect,  It should be…

On the Inevitable Decline into Mediocrity of the Popular Musician Who Attains a Comfortable Middle Age. O Sting, where is thy death?

  We need another monument. Everywhere Has Tommy Atkins with his head bowed down For all his pals, the alphabetical dead, And that is sweet and right and every year We freshen the whited cenotaph with red But no one…

  Fog forms a wedding shroud in the trees, the spindrift spun is the spendthrift sea’s. A standing army of raindrops casts its pall on islands where sometimes rain must fall. Gentle pianissimo, pizzicato, snare-drum skirls, then a headlong orchestral…

  Place is bottled lightning in a shop, or in a chandelier’s glass tear-drop, or in a glow-worm’s low watt grot, or in street neon’s glottal stop – wow-eh  wow-eh  wow-eh Place is the moulded face of a hill, or…

  Shoulders up to the hills, the spirit of great-great- granddad slumps staring at the sun, his stumps gnawing fat of the land, side of mutton in hand, the blow-me-down windbreak around his heart still fit to beat the band….

  The complainant is a big man in his own goddamn front yard in a wheelchair, his voice as high and highly offended (but only half as loud) as the dogs barking on his porch. His goddamn neighbors (a young…

  To the students of anatomy at Indiana University That gaunt old man came first, his hair as white As your scoured tables. Maybe you’ll recollect him By the scars of steelmill burns on the backs of his hands, On…

  If you’re caught in the open In an exposed position, alone, Disarmed, and certain you may be Attacked at any moment, you should settle quickly All your differences with whatever lies Around you, forcing yourself to agree With rocks…

  Que scais-je? I wake up to the sound of music played on pipes or strings ? my father’s whim, not mine. He believes my tender brain might bruise if I wake too suddenly. Saturnine cows orbit his estate and…

  Vertigo begins in the groin: which is why space carries on below us in empty strides, we the umbilical astronauts tumbling up in blue. From the bottom of the gorge, a thin roar of falling water tempts us with…

Jasmattie live in bruk –  Down hut big like Bata shoe-box,  Beat clothes, weed yard, chop wood, feed fowl  For this body and that body and every blasted body,  Fetch water, all day fetch water like if the whole – …

  This is where I come from if it’s true to say I come from somewhere not just anywhere south of the imagination like warty hills of the Monaro or an Irish quag. It’s Lagoon with wind-tussocked, wrinkled hills worn…

‘I can use any one of the nine God-given portals to slip inside the old bitch, catch her dozing on the settle, knees at a bawdy angle, her hand still clutching the bottle, then wake her and take her out…