Poems
Ards
With nowhere to go, I get in the car
and veer downhill in a lowered-window
breeze, may blossom in the air
like a cure for the gripes or whatever
drives me through conifer-lined
roads to the glimmer of the lough
where I park to wonder where on earth.
Diesel after-fumes mingle
with nettle musk and furze-bloom
vanilla while the dusk-stained tide
gleans it has nowhere left to turn
but back. Elms shiver.
Soon all will come to rest
in Greyabbey, Clandeboye, Movilla.
From Over Here (2025)
reproduced by permission of the author and The Gallery Press
Walking Out One Morning
Darkness everywhere. Night pervades, then dies.
Now kerb sweepers, bread vans and early traffic
rumble by my window-side bed while rain-music
fizzles on slate roofs as dawn pours inside.
An alarm squawks that I must not lie
in my listening to telegraph-pole birds getting high
over elms and rowans, lifting into citrus-burst skies
like memories of songs, but rise
and walk the city with multimillioned windows for eyes.
Versions of the world and time are limned
through screens over-pinging with messages.
Data flutters through whatever dimension it is
data flutters through — the space within
space, as I open my door like a book
and walk past steam-wands stretching hot-foamed milk
in cafés, unshuttering shops, skinnymalink
cats curled under fenceposts, the lampposts’ travelogues
of scent casting spells over all-sniffing dogs.
Nothing feels real if it’s not on the net
yet nothing on the net feels real.
Now I brim with yesteryears, feeling virtual
on this thoroughfare, walking into carbon debt
and exhaust-brume on compact streets dwarfed on each side
by tall grey buildings so the traffic’s like a two-lane-wide
ant-trail up the deep crack of a rhino’s back hide.
And onto grass I go, over the sluice-sounds of drain-flow,
underground culverts, into the city meadows.
‘One thing is for sure,’ he said. Then he died.
Then another. And another. Such vast
scale, my mind miniature. I dreamt I was asked,
by a smart machine, why it shouldn’t pull the plug
on human things, and all my consciousness
could muster was spaghettied emotional mess.
Now ping-ponged between position and sense,
onto grass I go: as if the best way of honouring
the dead is to make the most of living.
A teen gobs a humongous bruise-yellow yinger
onto a tree-lined path, and onto grass I go
to sync with the time-zone of earth’s slow
verbs, dreaming names, faint signals, green whispers,
winged singers in sycamores, willows, hornbeams,
free park benches where a red-headed businesswoman
in an ink-blue suit eats a meal-deal Wiltshire ham
sandwich under clearing heavens while sad shadows
blend with the cherry trees’ ginger-tinged sunglow.
Onto grass I go, and I’ve made it to the meadows.
You’ll know, of course, I write this at my desk
in the night, these words already processed
by machine, as a cyclist in look-at-me lycra torpedoes
past a duffel-coated toddler who’s learning new words,
links with the living and dead, holding in titchy hands
a dandelion whose wind-drifted seeds land
their trance-like parachutes on bittercress and wild carrot
while a frisbee glides past like a complex experiment
on motion and grace. Through the tree-leaf-reeled
air come soft-pocked tennis sounds, and I can’t grasp
this slide between phantom and real, but want to ask
Hey there, smart machine, how do you feel?
Hey trees, what are you laughing at?
Two students in beanie hats with tote bags of books
sip from reusable refilled hot polypropylene cups,
sunlight on their faces, and yes, I’m in this, whatever it is,
this blue lift, this light page, this world-plunge, this …
From Over Here (2025)
reproduced by permission of the author and The Gallery Press
The Magus
Lead me, skulking, through the polyvinyl
whiff and fooster of High
Street shops, the tepid white wine swill
of another morning sky
until the fugazi colours, perturbing sheen
of one store’s
video advert on an HD screen
opens some inner door
within my hangover’s armageddon
and I enter a green meadow
with Charlize Theron.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow
of death, corrupt, weary and sore
I still seek gold, frankincense, myrrh, Dior.
From The Readiness (2020)
reproduced by permission of the author and Picador
To Be Young And In Love In Middle Ireland
The girl from the satellite
town holds berries in the fast-stream
supermarket queue.
She carries her longing like a stream of song,
her melody
a body over the border
of what is solid and what flows.
The guys in the depression-hit
town are tripping in the fruit
aisle. Falling for her
berry lightness they slip out
from their outlines. One guy says
she takes the form of a dream
or the dream of a form.
On the page of the regional night
berries pulse
like the notes of a song
in the stream. The girl
who sheds the skin of her longing
escapes into more
longing.
In a dream on the margins
of town one of the guys
hears a girl sing, her voice
like violins,
a basket of ripe berries
floating into the night
on a stream.
Undressing, streaming
from their outlines
through the borders
of town wrapping around them
the scent of fresh berries,
the girl, the guy, in derelict
bedrooms hear lucent songs.
Fingers in dark berries,
ribbons of moonlight
flow, fall away, come along.
The girl dreams a form of dream
or forms a dream of form:
the song of the night
undressed as a stream in the morning.
From The Readiness (2020)
reproduced by permission of the author and Picador
The Interior
There is a bed.
There is a bedside cabinet,
a clock. There are no adjectives.
Whiteness is painted on two walls,
on two walls there is wallpaper
with boats on waves.
There is a window, a window
sill. There are no curtains
but blinds. There is a desk, a desk
chair. There is nothing on the desk.
There is a wardrobe, whose door
is closed. There is nothing else.
If we draw the blinds, open the window,
let adjectives in, we can see
there is not much bedness about the bed,
not much you might call beddy-bye
with sheets a bleached who cares non-colour
as if ironed by an enormous angry iron.
The whiteness painted on two walls is off-
white the way a joke can be off
or a person. The window blinds snigger
like blades, cutting the anonymous room
from the anomalous moon-shaped streetlamp
floating on the black sea of night outside.
The boats on the wallpaper fall
or rise on wave lines that peak
at intervals. I went on a boat trip once
and it was awful, the sea a grey soup,
sky a freezing fog. One might guess
that if anything was written on
that desk it might be gibberish but we
shall refrain from prejudicial speculation.
A lifetime of work to own a house.
A lifetime of work to find a voice
then you end up diminished by its
drone when you try to rise
to the occasion. Keener readers
will have noted there is no floor,
no ceiling. I recall standing, feeling
I was sinking, outside a bedroom
window one freezing dawn, the sky a grey
formless soup, having paced the night
to nowhere in particular — to this
window — I suppose thinking if this is home
then I’m at sea, at sea. At intervals
from then to now I have set out to find
walls, a row of rooms, strange worlds
within the wardrobe, whose door is closed.
From The Readiness (2020)
reproduced by permission of the author and Picador
August in Edinburgh
Not a cloud in the sky and it’s raining.
It’s the brusqueness of things,
and the drag of things, that hurts.
The most beautiful woman in the world
is in Edinburgh, at the festival.
She looks me in the eye and says please
move I’m trying to look at the artworks.
My doctor says the heart works
but don’t push it. I hear music,
long familiar songs, everywhere I go.
Pain is in the mind, someone tells Leonardo
DiCaprio in Shutter Island. Everyone
is rushing but the crowd moves slow.
Leonardo can’t get his head around it.
A man in costume shouts we’ve sold out here
holding his hat out for money and rain.
The mind is an island and everyone
is beautiful, looking for something new
again. But nothing connects, and it’s cold.
My son sticks my phone charger in his ear
and says I’ve got an electric brain.
I’ve been streaming old LPs I never thought
I’d hear again, never thinking the old songs
would not work, trying not to work the brain,
trying not to rise to the bait when that long
familiar voice rises from the damp and dismal
crowd, once again, to say hey, if we all think
hard enough, maybe we can stop this rain.
From Scapegoat (2014)
reproduced by permission of the author and The Gallery Press
Spring
You might have butterflies
for no reason, all antsy
as if in anticipation
of the leaves’ first look-and-see-me.
You might crack your nut trying to take in
the what of it, its here and this,
while it lifts its skirts to brush by you,
streaming past with one light kiss.
Bare-knuckled sycamores start wearing green.
Blown cherry blossom froths and pirouettes
in a brook, trickling past these streets
and estates, sloshing beneath the tarmac,
visible here, underground there, everywhere
guzzling as the narrow-banked brook
burbles past scragged reeds, weed tufts,
cacked plastics, sewer scurf, beer-can stooks,
the green-glinted leaf-swish and ripple
of its petal-scented zing,
and with it goes all we can know and imagine
of the come and go of things.
From Scapegoat (2014)
reproduced by permission of the author and The Gallery Press
Down Through Dark And Emptying Streets
Open a new window.
Go and google yourself.
Open facebook and update
all trace of yourself.
While you search black holes,
enter the Times, the BBC,
blah blah on your blog,
stream and twitter, you see
such-and-such has got in touch,
requesting you as a facebook friend.
The name’s dawning gravity
widens the window, weirds and sends
you plunging into the déjà-vu
of a phlegm-skied twilight
with unreal soldiers on the walls
lit by fire-red and air-blue streetlights;
sends you trampling through the fank
and crumble and fag-packets
of your cat-pissed-and-prowled estate
in a tattered leather jacket,
flappered paisley shirt
and scuffed-up oxblood boots,
walking from your mother, the screech
of your sister’s wee black flute,
past the clanking monkey bars,
swings and roundabout of a dog-dark
dungeon of a playground,
through a sinister alder-guarded car park;
cutting to the main street through
the grounds of a windowless factory,
past the pock-marked and Jesus Lives
walls of the public library
while the sky turns to liquorice,
dull cardigan and tobacco fumes
embered with lipsticked blushes,
melon-flowers, mango blooms;
walking until you catch a hint
of her toe-to-heel click-clack
and follow her past scuppled shops,
dead-end alleys, hokey flats,
past hardnuts driving by
in Ford Cortinas and Capris
hunting their prey; and she’s driving you
doolally, knocked at the knees,
as you follow her past the bookies’
arcade machines and nudgers’
Fisher Price lights and beep-bop-bings;
past the queue of scratching pudgers
in the chip shop where a pouty girl
shovels cod with a lizard-eye
love bite, Princess Diana pendant
and powdered-over black eye;
past bars with ducktape
on the cracks of their panes
silhouetted by the awful size
and dormant metal of dockyard cranes;
and you’re all hearts and flowers
with each step into the square
where she turns so you can finger
her pampas bleached and hair-
sprayed hair, and she says Hey there,
in her clown voice, is that a spanner
in yer works? under the twenty-foot
high frown of an Ulster Says No banner;
and her rib-cage is delicate white
as flour on a fillet of fish
while her lips, hot with sausage,
salt and malt vinegar, mouth a wish,
while clarty newspapers carry news
of the weekend’s nil-nils
windblown with Special Brew
tins and Styrofoam cups as you thrill
to her octopus fingers,
the perfect pulp of her plum of a tongue,
your teeth and her teeth tapping together,
holding breath until kingdom come.
She asks will all this last forever?
against the dun Woolworth’s door.
Now your hard drive hums and haws.
You waver between Confirm and Ignore.
From Here Comes the Night (2010)
reproduced by permission of the author and The Gallery Press
from In Whose Blent Air All Our Compulsions Meet
XII
We take the air, it has no surface, it has no depth;
but the air won’t cease to put another crease
upon your changing face, in the corner
of your eye. As our cindertrack turns to twitch grass
and the pixel-rich sky thrums, we reach our tree
while an aeroplane cuts the mustard of the sun
in the song-stained air. With mayflies jigging:
this is your life. May bugs buzzing: no real
harm done. Ferns and leaves dancing. And your dress
is burnt sienna, you breathe the shade’s perfume;
a wren breaks free, your face lights up—a may-apple
in bloom, or an open book. With shadows twitching:
look, everything’s moving. Raw earth turning:
you’re not dead yet. The livid air laughing.
From Here Comes the Night (2010)
reproduced by permission of the author and The Gallery Press
Death By Preventable Poverty
Three seconds passed, another one dead,
I walked past violets and wind-flowers,
cowbind, eglantine, moonlight-coloured may
and ivy serpentine snaking as I railed
after the epiphanies were over,
reeled among white cups and clover,
flag flowers, riverbuds awaiting the hail
that will hail on oxslips, bluebells looking to stay
the west-blown cyclone, these galled hours
and phantoms, children, flustered in my head,
yellow, and black, and pale, and madder red.
From Hawks and Doves (2007)
reproduced by permission of the author and The Gallery Press
Among The Barley
I
We met at the tail of a check-out queue,
and when she turned her head she spread
like blood through snowflakes, all melt and fire,
as my ripe tomatoes tumbled to the floor.
And when she bared her chamomile thighs,
her red-toed sunblaze, my body became
barley fields on fire. My frazzled ears roared.
My old house flared to fizz-burned bananas,
red meat frizzle-zings, the attic razed to hell,
and I knelt at the doorway singing High Hosannas.
II
After she’d cut her doorkey and laid out
blueprints of her kitchen cupboards’ insides,
I felt deep-bosomed, big-bellied and wide
as a turnip field, days before harvest.
I bought walking boots and walked through river-
wound groves. I bought allegories of birth
and death, framed them, and drilled them to
her wall. And how they fell. When she entered
a room eyes swivelled and bulged for her,
red crab-apples craving for the earth.
III
For you, I wanted to leaf and take root.
So I stood firm and pulled my lips full gape,
wanting to mouth apples. Uaugghh. I uaugghhed
nothing until it hurt. And then I surrendered.
Orchards of apples began to appear—
pear-shaped, plum-coloured, pineapple-dappled.
My eyes turned seed, my veins fructosed,
and my mouth bloomed stem-twigs for sound
and wounded fruit for sense, gulping forth
a juiced-up speech, or merely talking apples.
IV
I slap a second lick of banana dream gloss
on the back room’s walls while you measure
the cove for hanging your unframed mirror.
Soon we’ll discuss diaries, looking for
windows when we can next DIY together.
The forecast is for spells of lower pressure.
I finger-slick sweat from your pent shoulders
as the sun leaks onto the living room floor
and trickles down our thighs and thrawn limbs—
barley sheaves waiting for the thresher.
V
We walk a line that curves from day
to day, often squiggly, higgledy-piggledy
as if etch-a-sketched by a sugar-rushed
two year-old so that I find myself
rushing through a maze of malls, esplanades,
restaurants, barley fields, beds, lakeside
pathways, garden patios with sundials—
meeting points that blend and deepen
and brighten and bloom the way a room
looks bigger when you’ve been in it for a while.
VI
We meant to make love on the stairs,
the deskchair, the windowsill, the throw
your sister bought back from Brazil.
Now we zigzag and busy-buzz by
one another like honey bees sniffing
pollen in the autumnal dusk-lit glare.
So let our love be watertight and let
the breeze blow through it. Let us be solid
oak and fluid. Let us be truth, let us be dare,
the swallow’s dive sculpted in rock, and air.
From Hawks and Doves (2007)
reproduced by permission of the author and The Gallery Press
Progress
They say that for years Belfast was backwards
and it’s great now to see some progress.
So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes
from the earth. I guess that ambulances
will leave the dying back amidst the rubble
to be explosively healed. Given time,
one hundred thousand particles of glass
will create impossible patterns in the air
before coalescing into the clarity
of a window. Through which, a reassembled head
will look out and admire the shy young man
taking his bomb from the building and driving home.
From Somebody, Somewhere (2004)
reproduced by permission of the author and The Gallery Press
The Ulster Way
This is not about burns or hedges.
There will be no gorse. You will not
notice the ceaseless photosynthesis
or the dead tree’s thousand fingers,
the trunk’s inhumanity writhing with texture,
as you will not be passing into farmland.
Nor will you be set upon by cattle,
ingleberried, haunching and haunting
with their eyes, their shocking opals,
graving you, hoovering and scooping you,
full of a whatness that sieves you through
the abattoir hillscape, the runnel’s slabber
through darkgrass, sweating for the night
that will purple to a love-bitten bruise.
All this is in your head. If you walk,
don’t walk away, in silence, under the stars’
ice-fires of violence, to the water’s darkened strand.
For this is not about horizons, or their curving
limitations. This is not about the rhythm
of a songline. There are other paths to follow.
Everything is about you. Now listen.
From Somebody, Somewhere (2004)
reproduced by permission of the author and The Gallery Press