Poem - The Conjurer's Black Hole

The Conjurer’s Black Hole

Time stills; it pulls your train to thread and gives

you space to stretch your legs and be adrift.

Event horizon thoughts; the world must yield.

Matter conflates, a scream of brakes redshifts.

No end, no time to give an end, white pearl

the moon is stilled, the void is coffin-black

your thoughts likes seeds will scatter back to earth;

her eyes, her shape, the time you kissed her back.

We cannot get outside our time to see

not even light, near truth, can now be reached.

My mind, these lines, black rising rain can be

a medium for inky ghosts to speak.

The conjurer can block my teeming pen

But elements of life erupt again

Poem - Table

Table

An old table from the house squats in the garden now.

The wood has split, its sunshine yellow skin blackened

by bruising rain which falls and creeps within and finds

the sinews to plump and bow and leave a drunk face

against a fence looking on, its heartwood stopped.

There it crouches as if it waits to stretch and crack itself

to another shape, like the man of the house who knows

he must do something to wrest off the hunched muscle,

compacted by a life inside; as if it would walk to the window

and clack at the pane. A messenger strewn with old dead

spring catkins, awkward as an ex-partner at the door

at pick up time, and there it can see its replacement;

sleek and brown with a camber of exotic grain,

without stain and lying on soft carpeted floor.