A selection of poems

 

from Safe House

Proverbs For The Computer Age

An Apple a day keeps the hacker away

Baud news travels fast

Better to light one Intel than to cursor the darkness

When the mat’s away the mouse will play

Necessity is the motherboard of invention

Every blog has its day

Fight virus with virus

All that twitters is not scrolled

Let sleeping laptops lie

Beware of geeks bearing gifs

 

The Joey Trinity

for Una

 

There were three budgies in one Joey

co-equal but not co-existent:

The first taught wisdom through experience

seizing the chance of an open door

to ascend into heaven;

The second took after Father Peyton

setting up a crusading racket

joyful, sorrowful, glorious by turns

during the family rosary;

The third mirabile dictu learned

to say his name, the word made flesh

and had the courage to crash-land

on Dad’s bald head, occasioning

some tongues of fire.

 

Give & Take

for Eoin

 

What would I give

To hold you again

In the crook of my left arm

And have you hold on for dear life

To the lobe of my left ear?

 

What would you take

To hold me again

In the crook of your left arm

And have me hold on for dear life

To the lobe of your left….

No, I mean the right….

The one that is not pierced!

 

South Island

for Peter Kuch

 

Contrast “one country, two islands!”

with my “one island, two countries?”

When, in the murdering seventies

I finally put up my hands

(having lived it, in Mahon’s gloss,

bomb by bomb) and went south,

I was homesick, twisting my mouth

to chew on their soft vowel blas.

 

The sign at a Christchurch store -

Just in, Midget Gems! – greets

me kindly, calling me forth

to a home-coming, glen to shore

and the hamely tongue’s wee sweets:

South Island, peaceable North.

 

 

from The King of Suburbia

 

Seasons

 

When spring blew scuds of foam in from the bay

and ferry foghorns lowed far out to sea,

we kept your bed-sit, stayed in bed all day

and schemed a future laced with Duty-Free.

Then summer warmed us in the new estate,

the wedding portrait proud against bare wall

and, scuppering the plans to decorate,

the baby crawling backwards down the hall.

Now autumn finds us in suburban bliss,

two candles twinkling in a turnip head,

we spend our passion in one goodnight kiss

and put an extra blanket on the bed

to dream the nursing home we’ll winter in

and wipe the dribble from each other’s chin.

 

 

The Bony

 

When I shared a bed

in nineteen fifty-two or three

with my bony father, I was led

to believe that we

were alone;

 

now I can own

that when his bony frame

closed in upon my back

and he whispered my name

into my bony neck,

 

behind him

lay his bony father and, behind,

his bony grandfather, his bony great-

grandfather….all that long-lined

boniness, lying in state,

 

their collective bony weight

pulling him down, but slow,

a little heavier each year

until he finally let go

and I fear

 

he’s here

now with the same bony crew,

light as a feathery ton:

O they have a job to do

but not a word to my son.