There he sits in hunting camp
in the background in a folding chair
while younger men stand all around.
His attention wanders off elsewhere

They all talk of this day's stalk
whether turkey,deer or hurtling duck.
He sits with hardly one spare word
thinking about his former luck.

'Cause in his mind he's far away
gone back to his younger days
watching squirrels as they'd play
stealing down a game trail's maze.

I finally told him,
sitting in
inevitable bar,
noisome with the
ever-present stinks
of spilled beer
and cigarettes,
the stale musky scent
of listless dancing women
thick upon the air.

He sneered at me,
eyes vacant,
mind stained black
by decades
of drink and hate
and said
“You can use her,
you can fuck her,
hell, you can
even love her,
but don’t you ever
bring that nigger
to my home.”

It was out in Venezuela when I ran into this sailor
He was sitting at the bar, right next to me
He was rugged he was mean and he wasn’t very clean
But I listened when he spoke about the sea

There were stories there were tales, of the hunt for killer whales
When his leg was bitten off below the knee
How en route to Senegal they were shipwrecked in squall
He survived for sixteen weeks, tied to a tree

"Shadows Creep"
4th January 2012

Night,
shadows creep,
clocks watching,
still,
breath its strange dance,
currents moving
slow,
window cracks open,
frost dried leaf,
twig,
breezes a lullaby
sleeping head;

when all falls, falling,
deep,
black,
great heaps of earth, mountains,
silent,
speechless,
dead,

no movement
seeming set,
such weight
not sinking, rising up
wedges,
ice on lakes, disturbed;