Clive Culverhouse Poems

I can see on your lips
you have clumps of earth
from rubbish golfers
and the fact you celebrate dawn
...

we met in glass jars
on the Beagle in the Pacific
I'd never seen anything
like you before, your hair, your smile,
...

I shaved my head
and wore a robe
the mountain pass
I found at last
...

A brotherly jaunt through sinister mirth
behold the brothers Death:

gowned and guided, an ill century
...

what are poets

but those who
...

within a pock, a lonely copse
a one-time proudly standing duke
lay collapsed a pearly corpse
strewn, now stretched across a dyke
...

Aging man your shoes do not shine
upon jagged century's wooden floor
scuffed, swollen leathers, buckles
not laces, bereft of brush that buffed
...

they wanted my eyes
they wanted to see what I had seen
they longed to see what I had seen
to know how I laid bare my step
...

I knew a man once
who fell head first
into a vat of being
...

suddenly in a gap between talking, he was taken over
by a new page, turned mid flow, as he clutched his chest,
creases betraying a defeated face as a thousand thoughts
bottle-necked the wasp-waste of an end, the hourglass
...