THE GLEANERS

 

Leave the grapes

on the vine

for longer than the rest

labor has been overrated

hunger says it best

workers are the construct

of fat ones strutting sated

from the farmhouse to the table

leave the wheat

in the fields

to be picked at by the birds

the ones who burn the

construct down

are those who tend the earth

ownership is rape

peace is compromised

leave the grapes

they’re yours and mine

 

the gleaners will be heard

 

8.16.18

PHOTO: Tim Tapling Contemplating eternity : Flaybrick Cemetery : Bidston : Wirral : 01:Jun:2025.

before she reaches

the end of a thought

there had been no one she could speak of

working with the dead 

as she was

the shortened firearms still daunting 

unrelated matters notwithstanding

mischievous mispronunciation 

is acceptable now

to some this is fucking unbelievable

whatever happened to 

worship of the form

a roving eye on the oncoming storm

revealing the antidotes to heartbreak are

leaves shaken from rakes

curled and ready for war

ice cubes embrace a fever sore

blistered from revealing more thinking

a quite extraordinary skill

like a mayfly alarmed by less than a breath

when the "l" in "salmon" offers regret 

pouring over ancient scrawls

hand drawn revelations

burnt and wounded innovation

stumbling through the crowded malls of excess and delusion

the builder answered her confusion

our suffocated nation

our panic in time

our forced equivocation

our memory’s rhyme

when he could never bring himself

to a semicolon

smaller than the rhyme

 

7.25.25 nyc

PHOTO: Tim Tapling 

Reprise : Millers Quay : Birkenhead : Wirral : 30:Jul:2025.

 KIND OF BLUE

 

Late at night in a field of bad dreams

I breathe like a stallion
an old one it seems

I thrash in my stall
I shoulder that awl

Late at night in a field of bad dreams

scream like a lone one

grasp the last song line
and murder the rows 
with my awl of demean
Late at night in a field of bad dreams

I am kinda blue

and you know what that means

late at night in an crazy ass stream

I swim to you

and you know that that means

 

1.23.15 nyc

Photo: Tim Tapling 

Feeding competition on the incoming tide : Blue Hour : Hoylake : Wirral : 22:Jul:2025.

 

WE WERE CREATED

 

assigned to the future

tentative like furniture 

you haven’t yet bought

for rooms that are

silent as the drones 

you have

yet to drop 

slowly for a better view

when there is a story

we hive like bees among chapters

parsing a tale to suit

we straggle at sentences

like the time I dressed naked in your poet’s shirt

drunk-filled with poems

running from doctrine

misunderstood among the hoi polloi

we grasp what matters

parsing commas for relief

reasons for all this shit

suspended in disbelief

every mistake belongs to everyone

my love for him

is all I know

I mask yet I won’t begin to follow

we were created by our own kind

children are born free

a lesson unlearned for eternity

my love for him

is drunken sometimes

I grasp what matters

I struggle for the rhyme

we are created in evolution

greet the bastards with crime

signal the masthead

bolt from the line

my love for him

I roll like the credits

over a serial killer film

And then like the lottery

it’s ours in the end

like ours in the friendship

like ours to re-friend

I grasp what matters

my love for him has been in tatters

struggling for the rhyme

created in evolution

greeting the bastards for every solution

memory loss the time-honored escape

Being here is what matters

Being here is the rake

 

10.10.20 nyc

Photograph: Tim Taplin Last light over Nth Wales : Burton Marshes : Wirral : 29:Jan:2025

Click on art for full view

Glare

 

from decision

a revision

mistaken for benevolence

 

Glare

 

when the answer

reels up

smacks the heart with insistence

 

Glare

 

at the bottom of

the blood red glass

desk lamp the focus on the ask

 

 

Glare before fall

 

Glare when it ends

 

Glare will begin

 

 

like the poet said

in underground rhyme

this brutal heart with the hole is mine

 

3.24.17 nyc

Photograph: @Tim Tapling Sunset through the trees : Pensby Cemetery : Wirral : 29:Jun:2025.