She is always there
Perhaps beyond the touch,
But never far from word
I smell her perfume in my dreams,
Her thoughts, forever guide my course
As mine both follow and enlighten hers.

She is always there,
Beside me in her choices-
Her smile-the molten softness of her hair,
Inside her, there no secrets and no guesses
I sing each night, into her hair, as I have always sung.
The stories she knows that no one told.

Her every victory and every doubt are mine,
Her pain cuts into me, as scythe cuts golden wheat.
At every breath of day and night, she takes
She is dew and spring’s water, too
Enigmatic, a mystery no one knew.

She shall now know love and loving,
And understand the truth of love,
Her eyes shine, hopeful, wise and ripe,
And in that knowing she was and shall be mine,
As I am forever hers across all time
She becomes the circle and I the line.

Walking carefully below the stars
In a night, nipped by frost
Past a Bank by the river’s edge
Moonlight pouring over motor cars

Saw a man at the station
Where the chill wind blew,
Around the eerie concrete
With his son and the scars on his hands
He’d fought on our side – not long ago
When the lights went out – for all but the few
Just the spivs and the bankers’ toys
Enjoying the power that money buys

No one cared, even as the sleet began
The man is bending, searching for tickets and food
In a chipped white metal bin,
Near a taxi-bay and street café
Motorways drift,
Couples with coffee text the boss, stupefied
Just like any other day

City of fires and tears and runaways,
Big red buses and dirty stations
Paving cracks refract off glass
As rain runs as rat-tails through iron grilles,
Embedded in oily roads

Office girls with ponytails and business bags,
Sensible shoes, white blouses, tight black skirts, scurry.
Morning commuters swarm, bedraggled and glass-eyed,
Like the remnants of some long-defeated army.

City of bans, grass, birdsong and bridleways,
Memories of laughter, clenched fists and stale beer
Tower blocks, fake tans, antennae and Blackberrys
Fake smiles too, hidden behind faded stucco fronts

On TV screens, placards, flags and tents,
Smell the sweet exhaust of taxi-cabs and fluttering hopes.
This City of stone and marble columns,
Monuments, tall and thin stand, plinthed, inside small spaces.
They record a time of greater glories lost.

The stores of the rich, Dior, Harrods, Gieves and Hawkes
Red-coated soldiers rub shoulders with nazi cops,
The cardboard lean-tos; cities in themselves
Housing ragged, ill-fed men and their dogs

Foreign tourists, largely obscured by baseball caps and massive cameras
Congeal blandly into the myriad assembled colours
All jostling with flower-barrows and hot dog stands
Standing, under oath form the muddied, timeless Thames

Glass table, standing proudly three feet tall,
It’s wrist-thin stainless steel pillar
Connects the top, a broad, blue-tinted, beveled plate of glass,
With its base, a saucer-shaped silver dome, inverted,
Set solidly on the ruddy- marbled terrace floor
It is unflappable,
Constantly assailed by winds and rain
As indifferent now to Sun or Moon
As to Careless drinkers’ boots or their smoke and crashing bottles,

It is and still remains elegant in fact
Within its budget range-of course,
It is well proportioned
Somehow reminiscent of the 30’s style,
And surprisingly, for glass, quite warm to touch


This table has seen and heard much, aside from various spills, threats
and crumpled packs of Cigarettes,
But judges not,
It breathes, the laughing happy faces of summer and their tans
The odd argument over changes, quickly done,

Many secrets;
Rendezvous arranged in houses for after hours
Away from other’s sight
It has seen deals done and cash change hands, sometimes over cards
And sometimes various other things

Glass table, standing near a pink-brick wall, as numerous cars,
Scud by outside, their tires whipping gently across new asphalt,
The table does know, nor care that much
Preferring instead to mind its business here
Observing, with its round eye-like top
All seasons of men and of the year