Sometimes the dead come back to say goodbye,

like you, just now, your skinny teddy-boy tie

and guitar tie-pin slightly askew.

Here, let me fix it. You’ve lost weight.

You showed me how to do the Windsor knot

and the half-Windsor, before you were shot.

You won’t remember the summer of punk in Amsterdam -

Marnix who cocked himself up and whatsisname,

the tongue-tied dark-eyed boy from Surinam.

Runaways. They could be middle-aged by now,

haunting the canals. Sometimes you don’t know

they’ve died and say: long time no see.

The gung-ho dead will chat you up the way

they did in life. Are you gay? they say,

or are you going to the disco on Saturday

or who’s your little friend with the earring?

They stand there flexing their muscles, gurning

at the light. One old fogey kept repeating

do you remember back in seventy-eight

you stole The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

from Shakespeare & Co? You should set that right.

Those whom the gods love die young.

You make allowances. You bite your tongue.

Once my mother turned up pleading: son,

I taught you the twist when you were only four.

I taught you the hucklebuck on the kitchen floor.

Would you not dance with me once more?

winner of the Listowel Writers' Week Single Poem Competition Spring 2012

        Ėmile Friant, Les Lutteurs, 1889

Two scallywags are fighting in a field
beside a stream that’s deep enough to swim in.
The blond boy grips the darker boy around
the neck and shoulder, tries to make him yield
and whispers in his ear: Submit! Submit!

But darkie’s having none of it and knows
within himself his friend’s uncertain balance
will bring him down and end their sudden fight -
and knows the deeper truth that started it.
And under arm and shoulder love and lust

and carnal knowledge of the struggle grow
to fill his heart and cut-down denim pants.
While darkie quickens, blondie needs to win.
Long ago that fight was fought, and lost.

published in The SHOp Spring 2011

A bar that used to be a laundromat
that used to be a chipper with a Wurlitzer
in the times when - imagine that.
Or a Wurlitzer in Lucy’s Tiger Den,
the last of the Nam bars holding out
in the City of Angels, can you hear
that lit-up Wurlitzer playing tonight?
Or remember Cindy’s diner in Duluth
that overlooked the Iron Range,
where you turned up in dungarees
and donkey jacket, tucked a Lucky
behind an ear with ink-stained fingers
bitten to the quick, and mimed a Little Richard
hip-gyration that didn’t quite come off?
Imagine that winter of fifty-six
lost among the mining towns where
a sinkhole Wurlitzer is holding down
a vinyl payload sunk beyond repair,
or better still a Wurlitzer that spins
and lifts and drops and plays that thing
like copters in the jungle, like whirligigs
letting go their load for Charlie.
I offer you tonight a Wurlitzer of air
where once the Border Ballads were,
where vinyl spins and plays that thing,
a Wurlitzer of song and times gone wrong,
of times long gone on the Iron Range,
of Vietnam jungle and Annagary chipper,
a Wurlitzer in 1967 when I was eleven.

published in The Captain's Tower, Poems for Bob Dylan, at 70 (Seren Books)