I have often rippled those waters with tears of frustration,
my whimpers drowned out by cries
Of those fresh to their plight.
The blind, the lame, the paralysed –
We lay there as casualties of a war
in which we'd never agreed to fight.
We gathered in hope,
we lay there in expectation
in fear
in desperation.

And then we heard of his approach.

Was it he that had turned well water into fine wine
at a wedding, a while back?
Hushed rumours of his powers had reached us before,
but I wasn't buying it.
I've seen others like him come and go over the years,
promising it all
but, like us, helpless in the face of brokenness.
Forgive me for not holding my breath
when the whispers started
but I'd rather place my faith in a swirling pool
than in one of God's bearded politicians.

Despite misgivings, I admit to being struck
by this itinerant preacher;
he saw us with different eyes, I swear I could see
a storm of anger brewing
under that compassionate gaze.
Countless hours spent at the water's lip
now blurred to nothing,
and like everyone else, I pleaded with him

for consideration, for mercy
for whatever he could spare.

No-one heard him stoop to ask,
without the cadence of irony
near-mocking words: 'Do you want to get well?'

Does the starving man crave food?
Does the barren woman long to give life?
Who looks upon a helpess cripple and asks callous questions?
Here, we sit and endure,
rejected and degenerate,
awaiting redemption only death brings.

'Well then, get up! Pick up your mat and walk!'

But still I lay there, watching
in wonder, in longing, in jealous rage
as the cripple did just that -
thirty-eight years spread on a mat,
now he stood up and skipped away.

But why not me?
What about the rest of us?

Labels: poetry, submissions

Labels: poetry, submissions

Finger the dust off the old photos
And remember friends you vowed
Never to forget, to love
With all your heart. Contrary
Concerns, jobs, the Tube
Put tearful promises
Earnestly made in drink and romance
Into a dog-eared box in the attic,
Squashed by the children’s rugby socks.
You said you’d protect them;
These ones you cooked with,
Cried with in the calm,
Through the storm of life.
This is the promise you made,
That every phone call
Would be a prayer to the One
That would never leave them,
The stopper in the skeins that
Hold us together.

Their names are the scrawl on yearbooks,
The accessories of the happiest memories
From when you were young, attractive.
These are the men you swore you’d
Drink with in twenty years
In suburban cricket clubhouses,
These are the girls in silk dresses that you
Promised your heart to, show me them,
Give them this message:
‘I have not forgotten you,
To me you are beautiful.
I have lived because of you’.

Sanjay

Labels: 13 songs, poetry

Labels: 13 songs, poetry

Cock-o-leekie, a dram, the blessing
Of spiced sheep entrails. Oriental, alien,
I celebrate the poet's death
In Mughal sequins and tartan socks.
"Should auld acquaintance be forgot" he muses

Over ancient whisky. "It's good to see you":
Honest sentiment whose glass words lash my throat.
How I cut you in days passed! shameful
Insults over your clothes, dismissive reproofs
For stuttering through a familiar page.

Yours was a silent suffering, a martyr's fate,
The most painful kind. On cruel April days
Muddy-kneed cherubim cursed your cricket:
Bowling like a spak, batting like a prat.
When I hid in darkness, did I hear the cries,

Exasperated, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabbachtani"?
Surely I saw a boy, crouched under a tree,
Clutching a clarinet, composing songs for distant God?
So this is grace: a party for a bully,
A calf for a fugitive, a life for a death.

Sanjay

Labels: 13 songs, poetry

I am, I suppose, guilty
Of Pygmalion's vice; giving licence
To my eyes - impounding reason,
Reality. This is the truth:
A darkened room, a minor chord,
A handcuffed voice. Downstairs
My weeping statue into whom
The gods breathed life.

Is this Galatea the reward for my prayers?
Create in me a pure heart
That does not crave her kisses
But lives to find a love that passes feeling:
A Truth on which I can depend
And build a faith.

Sanjay

Labels: poetry

Labels: 13 songs, poetry

Writhed and rusted,
she stands for now.
Spent eyelids, ice blue,
stuck on sullied skin;
this dun visage is
the colour of vice.

In the shallow pocket
of a threadbare ruffled jacket
cower the two sweets which bought this child.
Robbed of life by eager hands,
she is barely human - a collage
of bone and dirt. Outside,
she gazes at another stranger
and seems to say, with a prostitute's innocence,

"Come on"

Sanjay

Labels: poetry

The sky arched about my head:
A dome of blue sitting upon Murcia's dust
Cradling life in atmospheric hands,

As if protection from the space's chaos,
A cocoon, a casque. It takes me back
To the Baker Street planetarium,

The painted ceiling an illusion of eternity,
Every star just the speck of a brush,
Every nightfall the touch of a switch.

Sanjay

Labels: poetry

And all the smoke of the polis descended
Onto the band: synthetic drops and screeches,
All the hiss and creak of the city
Burnt onto a CD. Yours is the music
Of cigarette ash on a sterilized floor,
The concrete, balconied Babel
Calling back the peoples of the world
To a place that will never be home.

A man looks to the heavens. A plane roars
To God knows where, but here, on Earth,
It is silent, air has stolen the sound.

He is another man. It is another plane.
This is another tower, and our language
Is a machine screaming in the dark.

Sanjay

Labels: 13 songs, poetry

Turning
Right where I should have held firm,
The car stereo's chime recounted
A long forgotten story. I headed west
Towards a doleful road;
Its single carriageway piercing
Dead, February-ravaged elms,
A world cast in frost.

The soft call of the xylophone
Played hop-scotch with my journey home
Home, rejecting order
To tread lightly on foreign memory.

Midday
Of song, my headlights,
Full-beam, stab the dark of night.
Light falls on your face:
Welcoming, among a crowd
Of pained statues.
The darkness will envelop again,
My dear, and again you will disappear
Out of reach.

This feels like the beating heart
Of a vascular emotion, its destructive vein
Etching a valley into a reluctant range,
An unwanted trailblazer. Rust streetlights
Mark the end of this detour. Ahead,
A familiar road - well trodden,
Fallow - and a red light.

Sanjay

Labels: 13 songs, poetry