Selected Poems

I have had over 100 poems independently published in literary journals and books in 5 countries. Over 300 have been published in my own books.

 

This link will take you to a selection from my latest book The Effective Butterfly (2010)

 

The poetry below is from my fourth collection The Solution to Us (2008):

Heading into town first published in Wet Ink No.1 Summer 2005

Love is a Quantum Affair first published in Retort Magazine (archived somewhere)

Real Drone first published in Catalyzer Journal

An alternative life first published in Five Bells Spring 2005

Imagine the unthinkable first published in Overland No 181 November 2005

Middle Age Sonnets in SOFTBLOW

 

Heading into town

High energy physicists, colliding particles,

might generate a black hole to consume us

in less than the seconds remaining

to my bursting from the tunnelling bush

into mid-winter pasture,

sunlight skating off frost

then Bang! diffracted

by the dust-pitted windscreen

so that, at this time of year,

there is always a passage of faith

where I hold the wheels straight,

squint for animals and then

accelerate into the blindness. 

 

An alternative life

 

Every moment I am offered an alternative life.

Mostly my task is to stay on course

for that final buoy, out in the endless sea,

that has no known co-ordinates.

The waves are chaos, shimmering on a spinning globe.

Dependant for my independence,

my life raft's ballasted by documents,

but has no stern, no prow, no tiller;

the only compass in my head,

bobbing in a huge salt-water basin,

I cannot see which way the needle's pointing,

only cross-currents, counter-clockwise,

oscillations, gods, stellar and tidal motion:

one infinite, changeable ocean.

  

Imagine the unthinkable 

 

Imagine the unthinkable?

Don't you write another word.

The economy's unsinkable.

 

The beer will be undrinkable?

The possibility's absurd.

Why imagine the unthinkable?

 

The think-tanks too unthinkable:

give up now, follow the herd:

the economy's unsinkable.

 

The good ship Beer's unsinkable.

It sails the foam free as a bird.

Imagine the unthinkable?

 

The concept is undrinkable:

a drunken notion overheard,

the economy's unsinkable

 

my confidence unshrinkable.

The beer is good, and I have burped.

The economy's unsinkable.

Imagine the unthinkable!