NO SHIRT

Peeling off my anorak
underneath is skin

blistered and blotched
numbers tattooed in ranks

caved chest
breathing a little

human being
being concentrated here

concentration here
on skin

anorak back on
going, going on

Colin Morgan 

DEATH at my BIRTH averted

had i been allowed to die i
would have been there,
an extra at heaven's party,
pure, perhaps a little slow on the uptake,
but warm and cosy with you all.

but i lived by decanted blood and '60s tricks,
and becoming divided by trivia
am a lost dead soul among the living now,
committing crime in suburban banal precincts
and a blackness covers me.

so does fire await me on that
dawn when satisfying
the final
call?



Colin Morgan  

CAROUSEL

                                                                                                                       

When you contemplate ending it all – where do you see yourself?

Away on a rock with sea rising and the wind tugging at your clothes, sucking you over that edge?

Or perhaps you are sidling into a mirror lake, cold as fingers, slippery as phlegm, to slide from view - to gasp and heave to nought?

Or looking down the long, so long tracks, to that vanishing point, as a bright one-eyed mutant bears down blaring?

Or quietly in the bathroom, the door locked, the water brimming, the razor kind on the shroud white towel?

Or perhaps in the kitchen, the small bottle hard clicked open, the contents scoffed in fistfuls?

Or – I know - in your garage, with water on the floor and a screwdriver in the plug socket?

When you conjure a scenario to do yourself in – when do you see it?

At a brisk dawn, stretching and yawning to meet you half way?

Or as a lobster broiled in the heat of the sun at the noon of the day?

Or at the night’s gate where you fade together into the softest bed of dark?

Enough.

Enough.

All is sweetness now I hear your voice again.

Clear, and the lark is rising, the moon held still in her arc in blue.

The children are fed and abroad.

The river is deep but steady.

The fish are hiding.

Bring me a flower from the garden and I shall rest a while.

Colin Morgan  

How are we to remember?

The silence roars in every space

The cold

The abandoned relics of civilisation passed

The desert where the bloated corn ripened once

The river bed with bones where the spawned shoals wove their dance.

How are we to continue?

Our actions of our own bidding

The ease

The silence beckons but does not insist

The empty rooms collecting the unheeded light

The darkness of evening spreading into walled-in night.

How are we to love?

The distance has stretched the tendrils

The gaps

The goodbyes at train stations

The visits at the heavy points of the year

The tiny call from dots on the other side of the world.

How are we to settle?

The need has drained dry

The edge

The home waiting vast

The fridge stocked against an invasion

The beds sleeping undisturbed for a season.

How are we to grow old?

Anno domini is relentless

The clock

The lines creep ever deeper

The children approach their middle years

The body leans a little to the wind and tears.

How are we to be remembered?

The house was made a home

The days

The smell of bread

The piano and the clock ticking

The summer cat and the winter garden.  

How the family lives on

In the closeness of years

The blood

The additional loves

The new beginnings and growth

The long shared kinship of the precessing now.

Colin Morgan  

Discovery of a 1936 Riley in a Suffolk Garden

‘Even now there are places where a thought might grow...’  Derek Mahon

Behind the thickened yew hedge of an abandoned house,

among the skips and the scaffold poles,

a family of voles crowds inside the back seat of a 1936 Riley Merlin.

Their horsehair nests lie within a metallic world,

warm among the dripping toxins and rust.

Why should they crave more?

The generations weave among the jagged steel,

while far outside, wars roll on and civilisations rise.

Their tiny ways are honed to their dark deprivation,

held safe from the kestrels patrolling the morning sky.

Many are the generations, their small bodies mummify -

their home born of neglect in the Macmillan days,

when the slam of a door spelled the final departure

of the aged motorist and his veil of woodbine smoke.

He passed on that night, leaving all to slumber,

except for the voles biting through the leather, the stuffing crumbling.

Now woodworm and nettles prevail amid the general collapse,

as occasional sounds reach the dusky inside from afar -

a tractor’s throb in the field nearby, the tripping peel of wedding bells,

or the double crack of a shotgun in the distant wood.

Even now there are places where we can lose a treasure -

African wells, dried and neglected,

filled with death and dust,

a sharp smell lingering in the air, and wire grass

rustling fluid as fire on the dessicated banks;

In the village clearing, where sand trickles into tins,

a dry wall tumbles with a resigning sigh,

a hyena skull bakes dry in the sun,

a bottle winks half buried in the sand;

  - and a dilapidated motor car in Lawshall, Suffolk.

Forty years, undisturbed, without even starlight -

no expectation of the ripping back of the door -

until the sudden crack of timber.  Explorers, cameramen,

inhale the quiet remnants of pre-war peace.

With furious scurrying, like bullets through cobwebs

and holes, a culture shatters

in the sudden sunlight of discovery.

Meteoric boots land, dispersing these cloistered lives.

Grown away from the hedgerow, living free from fear of the hawk,

their eyes stare back level and expectant from pockets of gloom.

They would wish, of course, in their tiny hearts,

for us to leave them, to abandon them to their warmth,

to close the door and walk away.

Lost species - stuffed dodo and harpooned whale -

the silent island forests and the empty oceans.

‘Leave us be’ say their eyes. ‘Do not rip out our homes -

we that have lived here so many generations.

This is all we know.

Close back the door on our precious space

And let us prevail in our world of peace.’

Colin Morgan