Painting from the shoulder

once you’ve mastered
the slow dance
attend
to your whirling dervish
your courageous
desire for more
even two left feet
can hold the rhythm
of the ages

write poetry because
nothing else
comes close
write it because you are in love
with the word

by all means practise
the scale and
how to breathe
but when you sing
better the voice
of an angel falling
than one who thinks
he knows his place

and if you must do it
by numbers
keep a room full
of blank canvases
for those rainy
wish bone breaking days
when you are moved
to follow
your own path
painting out
from the shoulder
every tamed
and learned thing

Thirst

having made it once again through the night
and into the morning after and her still with him
he tilts his head sunward looking comforted
even a little cocky outside the supermarket
where they could be any young couple
bold and full of plans and just starting out
she hands him a bread roll from a pack of six
licks the crumbs from the back of her hand
they both smile a little dreamily slide down
against the sheen of someone else’s car sit there
on the warming concrete in just another moment
they'll agree in half sated whispers that this
is the life that everything else is fucked
and he'll wring the neck of the silver wine bladder
and she'll rip the ring from the diet coke can
rows of empty shopping trolleys shimmering
in the semi precious middle distance

Valentines

after years of  careful selection
rumours arrived like owls
he’d become a collector 
of upside down
heart shaped things
river stones driftwood
the odd cumulus cloud
remembered her as
sensuous and soulful
the face at turns
beguiling and disagreeable
an overripe fantasy life
on the whole
she’d pulled her own weight
a hit and miss cook
the heart willing but infantile
not yet conditional
too much in the end
like the real thing