NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An eclectic, slightly overlong (eighty-odd) bunch of poems ranging over a number of issues and themes from murder, women, childhood, and mental health to war. Some poems bulge with reminiscence, as HER GREEN LAP where as an eighteen-month-old launched on a sled down a hill

	I laughed and strained to clutch the wary birds

	and offer them the joy of my first knowing
	of the first time of the world.

	Look down these forty years, feel the chafe
	of khaki cotton, the hot slabs pressing
	your unsocked sandals, hear your brother's pram
	creak on shushing wheels, smell the mingle
	of melting tar, bark and heated dust,
	your lolly sweet beneath the same limes.

			when you were ten,
	slogging home, ravenous for supper,
	from some small adventure,
	booty of a late apple, half-eaten,
	or clutch of slithering chestnuts
	forgotten already in your pockets.

						Retrieve,
	blushing, the day when mind and body baulked,
	sodden with spirits, pre-seizure, succussive,

	and at a small hour unknown to dawn,
	the toilet bowl received your brandy yawn.

				I offer you freedom,
	I can improve what you thought was perfect,
	preserve it in porcelain, rubber, cloth or bisque,
	hold it forever still at that defining moment.

	On my right, above the sine curve of her sleeping body,
	a try-square of light tests the curtains for ninety degrees:
	on my back, the up-light shade is the Universe's navel;
	on my left, the wash of speckled light on the wall
	is the Milky Way filling the plane of the Galaxy.

	patients are working through the stage of bed and drugs,
	but still veer from the fictitious norm of mental health —
	that majority opinion for which I can't recall the referendum —
	round which the staff cluster, the unit's minority.

	What was, where is, whose was my life pre-medication?
	Who cares? My future's chemical, perfecting re-invention.

	The sound of silence is you,
	whose listening's autistic,
	an event horizon
	where darkness and silence, endless,
	face each other down.

				he woke to a world that was
  							always dark,
	time having stopped. Distraught, he paced the room, the dead
									minutes
										crunching
	beneath his feet, their thoraxes striped yellow and black.

	My rod was packed and loaded,
	hard in its holster.