Ian Keenan

I don't dislike them,
The tombstones round
The church,
Of Woolscombe, and Tebbit,
...

Asked to talk of you
I find little to say.
Not that you are perfect,
Grumbling as you do
...

Winter turns leaves swish
Like corn flakes kicked around,
Frosted paths moistened by the snow.
Straight stark trees,
...

Parking by the pub,
We walked the grass into the pitch,
Sitting far from our numbered seats
In positions you viewed much better.
...

I sit here
eating Pecan Plaits,
uploading some old party pics,
and feeling guilt.
...

What's the point
Of poetry? ;
How can the sun on this path
Be conveyed,
...

He was always smoking,
Afraid of what our
High-up bosses might be thinking
Of our skills.
...

George, George and David were the top
In my first job,
A chemist in the lab
To make more of
...

Somewhere,
Underneath it all,
But I can't get there,
So here I sit,
...

When fires were lit with kindling wood
And knotted paper wreaths,
And Dad prepared the toffee sticks to see us
Four so pleased,
...

Your fires, how they brightly burned,
My father;
Timbered by the straining
Of your back,
...

In the thin-veined glimmer of his skin,
Grey-skeined like the rain's myriad
Tributaries part and join and switch silently
On the window's pane,
...

Wing, wing, dark rooks,
Slow climbing the pigeon pair,
Preening in the bare, beech tree,
Scudding the winter's thin clouds
...

You cannot help yourself,
Can you,
Liking as you do the rules
Of living safe and tidy,
...

After the summer break,
Back home while others work
Or meet their friends,
I, pathetic, stay
...

A green door,
Just past the strawberries,
And inside
Dad’s metal last
...

I hear the makers of thunder
Fly unseen,
Drumming rows of
Dumb houses
...

I see bits of pumpkin
orange on the wooden floor,
the knife still wet with juice,
a small sock fallen half-way
...

It was a long walk from
Home to the Glen,
The park and across the river
At Cumberland Basin bridge,
...

Elvis is the clock face
by my bed,
near the leaf glazed and sculpted
by my son’s
...