Pearls of insight,
this morning dew.
The back lawn glints
like Indra's net.

Stutter-step spring --
green shoots
in the late March snow.

for Buttons

Time melts
like sugar on the tongue,
leaving these tracks
of your tiny paws
on my heart.

Is there no end

to this beginning?

Only the taste of truth

like salt.

In the midwinter night

I cannot see the dawn,

but these selected pieces

of my heart still remain.

Were I to hold myself open

to this promised light,

what would the morrow bring?

Poems unspoken.
Artwork unmade.
Novels unwritten.
A life unlived.

What is life
but the churning froth
of water washing over rock?

for Zoe, on the occasion of her 15th birthday


Only life can tell
what life will be.
If
in twenty years' time
we can still
take coffee in the park,
talk philosophy
and hobbits,
I will be a happy man.

Quiet on my heart
sudden slow-motion
juxtaposes worlds of now
and memory
constructed moments
that cannot exist

but for

but for