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The Bee Hut

                for Robert Colvin

There is a dark place
on my friend Robert’s farm
that thrums
with the nectar smell
of danger.

A swarm of bees
has taken over
a dozing old shed
and no one
has the means
or guts
to move them.

I think of slaughtered
Mycenean kings
entombed in their brick
hive
glittering as they lie
golder than honey
in the old blood
dark.

Entranced
my bare hand
wants to plunge
through a hole —
now a buzzing lethal
highway —
in the shed wall.

I love the bee hut
on my friend Robert’s farm.

I love the invisible mystery
of its delicious industry.

But do I love the lesson
of my thralldom
to the sweet dark things
that can do me harm?



Ode to Agatha Christie

Is this the crucial clue?
The bug-like trilobite
I bought from a slippery gypsy
in Prague,
still staring through its crystalline eyes
from the floor of an extinct sea.

I am spooked
by the abysmal depths
of my own life’s mystery.
Like a  belly-up Christie village
I’m nipped by the red herrings
of every pyrrhic victory.

Can I pocket and know this sunset
flaring over the rollers
of the cold Bass Sea?
No photograph, no poem
will make it anything
but a still-born cliché.

Is murdering time
the most true and convincing
perfect crime?

I tangle in the plot
chasing the hit and run driver
of my careless past tense.
Why does my childhood swimming pool
now stagnate darkly
behind a high wire fence?

I rub my clever egg head
and show off my waxed
moustache.
O Agatha, what fun playing
Poirot
to douse my fear in farce!

But how can I make
my solution ship arrive?
To what shimmering port
will it take me?
Or is it just an easy exile
from blind faith and wishful talk?

Death Comes As The End —
Agatha, you threw out cosy
when you served up dread.

As surely as my trilobite
with the right time, place
and gritty clout,
may I be preserved
as insoluble enigma
when a killer comet snuffs me out.



The Hampstead Heath Toad

                     for Roger Deakin

It was one of those
beautiful
English summer nights.

The lilac shimmer of silent
lakes.
The whisper of ghost fox
through your heartbeat.

But the toad in the hand
stank real.

Stank through his palpitating
skin.
Stank of  fear.

Is the fabled hallucinogenic
touch of toads
just as Macbeth
witnessed
a hypnotising snare
of toxic apparition?

What thrilling doors of perception
open
to the musky ooze
of panting paralysed
terror?

Of course
intoxicated on moonshine
you wanted
and will always want
the toad
to calm down
smell sweet
and give up his phantasmagorical
secrets
generously.

But the toad in the hand
protected himself.



The toad in the hand
stank real.



The Ninth Hour

The ninth hour
is here

The ninth hour
makes no sense

The ninth hour
rises up wearily
in a freezing mist.

I have come to a river
of blood and vinegar

I have come to a river
where only pain
keeps its feet

I have come to a bridge
of dissolving bone


I have come to a place
of burning cold

I am trapped in a space
deformed
by my own
leprous fear

have I the strength
to pay suffering its due?

...............................

There is a calm
that is no cousin
to courage

There is a calm
that sits
like a quivering ape
under the python’s
hypnotising eye.

Everything makes you
shiver

The hot wind. The rank river.
The poisonous euphoria.

But it’s your shriveling
flesh
that has the whip hand

Your flesh
has its own tumorous
will

You may think
you have been here
before

You may think
your quicksilver spirit
has your furtive flesh
licked

But darkness
is stronger
than light

The flesh knows best
who’ll win line honours
in this fight.

............................

The ninth hour
is here

The ninth hour
makes no sense

Don’t pray
for a flash flood
delivering miracle
or clarity

During the ninth hour
reason dies of thirst
Your blood stagnates
stale
as a base metal
in your mouth

You dangle
in a cacophony
of retching noise
with no grandiose riffs
of heroism

You will never forget
the foul sound
of the ninth hour.

............................

I have come to a river
of blood and vinegar

I am here,
ninth hour,
I am here
stripped and shivering.

But listen, ninth hour,
listen
and pay heed
to a new sound
in me

I am not here
silent and alone

Do you hear
the fighting hiss
of this geyser
in me?

I stand my ground
in the undaunted spray
and company
of my own words.