We will accept our feelings
& live with pale hopes of a
chance – one more chance –
to right things – not capsize
this craft of love / Pull back
before we’re wrecked / Our
eyes no longer work as well
as young ones – sight is my
luxury & hindsight my curse
We have forgotten our arts –
we have written off our pen
& ink capture – I rarely cross
hatch with Peake-aspiration
in my hand [but I do share a
way with long-dead Mervyn]
I will sit in a meadow near to
Lewes & gauge my painting –
I will cram a final canvas – so
be spent – no more creations

Also on Medium

L. RIP

Let me push a pin
through your ignored Torah
and hear you read every
mounted page about your
butterfly death

You will not

Let us escape from shuls
with my love-foolish help –
you as another migrant –
you beautiful Jews are artists
too with guilty divisions

My choice

of this avenue with no shade
It is scooter-and-horn split
from Miaara’s left dead
Let me bury myself in you
instead

If you must

Thank you, KP

We were sent down by a tipped sign
along a flint-chipped footpath
on Seaford Head’s composed arc

where we were done – smothered –
along with other unwary invitees –
by crowning flights of insects

which stuck to spitting tongues
and set knots in our tousled hair
Another small equalling by nature

We could only escape that plague
of on-the-wing silent irritants
by upping our uneasy walking pace

Then driven salvation from behind
And a car’s slammed-door
for our shutting out of flying ants

We were ferried down – in his Subaru –
by our grinning artist on his return
to a gentler swarm at that Cable Hut

‘I paused feeling exhausted and leaned on the fence…
My friends walked on and I stood there trembling with anxiety’.
Edvard Munch

There is a new exhibition
We should go
but Edvard’s far away church
and distorted pier will be unreachable
in my time of heightened anxiety

She had me put my own hands
to my head to mute her yawps
as her tirades lined the air –
set parallel under nature’s law

A coil of white flesh rolled back –
all of an inch – as deep as the edge
of steel that had lifted my skin
My wrist did not bleed – not at first
There are my insides
said in my as-child voice
And then the bloom exploded

That scar is a faded masterpiece
from my repository of old times
of innocence by slowness –
before this acceleration of fear
coiled me up in her homely asylum

We will travel up to London Bridge
on another day
and move through huge galleries
and then find a coffee shop
where we can sit without speaking

Arrows still fly at Battle – spiritual ones ..
against Anglo-Saxon self-satisfaction* –
as if The Bengal Colonel had then leapt
from the stretched canvas into Ninfield –
and prowled around the village green

set to devour their war-won remains –
that pyrrhic victory over downed fascists
who were set by the Sussex gravediggers
Look inside its mouth to find meaning
said Grace – to anyone who would listen

to her – and Richard – and Reuben – they drew
from the post-war rationals against hate
and conjured up creatures and shapes –
As if Terry Gilliam had sucked the oily teat
of these artists’ bared brushes of surreal
extractions –

as if colour and lines were not rationed
and all of Picasso’s art was lost to Bexhill
And I see Scarfe and Steadman in the ink
of cross-hatch – etched so hard it scratches
the paper into furrows of staining –
the future will be saved from the past by art

(*Reuben Mednikoff)

Across the radiator-hot pavement
is his greatest work – ever –
under the gawp of holiday kids
and the blind-sided motorists

They will not know how much
the snapping sticks of chalk
weighed in his eye-in-hand –
even on such days of sunlight

The pain in the painting is his
to hold – briefly – in his quick grip –
to get the artwork down and out
before it is worn away by use

You are
that small detail
which a true artist
includes
in his landscape

in his space

in his brush’s
unlettered exposit