David Morgan


A Chinese Puzzle

The future’s secure, fearfully and wonderfully made,
Rainbows are day glow, DNA unravels
10,000 times to the moon and back. Breaking out
For a few timeless tocks before oblivion,
Tying us endlessly as kindly as chains,
Dreams drift away through a far window.
What can we do but advance in love, or expectation,
Or indifference; Taking one another apart
With a type of ritual elegance?
With loved ones and enemies, eternity slips gently off.
Each lack of original thought hunches, huddled in its
Brown anorak, watching incomprehensible trains of ideas.
It’s balance and vertigo in almost mandarin proportions
Until all the puzzles end in kisses or screams.
Give names to sensations, colours to feelings,
Sounds to a word we cannot recreate-
Like swallows feeding their dead young,
Ghosts brass rubbing themselves in silence.
“It’s all worthwhile. “ Laughs the voice
That no one anywhere will ever hear now or ever.
Between each breath, each heartbeat, each soul’s flutter,
Something interesting forever labours to be born.
And somewhere in this poem there is a round of applause;
But not here … not here …………………………………


A Sense Of History

They say,
It is quite something to lose.
It is quite something to be wrong;
To give one's precious life to the passing gale;
To forsake all but the distant hosannas of the unseen stars
And still then to be one's own.

They say,
Such a being may stand on the high hill called Hero
And shadow the bland blue sky
With the back of his rightness-steady hand
And for him,
As for the headline glory of a terrible victory,
Ten million men shall die.

They say this
And smile satisfied as some worm presses the final button alone;
And no mouths are left to speak of legends,
No hand to write the great book of records...
And all the jolly journalists catch fire before they use their phones.


Cupid Painted Blind

Women dating on the Internet, if anything,
Are far more manipulative than men:
Curvy (tubby), Cuddly (a huge thing),
A cat lover (desperate for offspring).
Traditional homemaker you said
(You’re looking for a meal ticket),
Fun loving (drunken, possibly a crack head)
Adventurous (will do anything in bed).
Scatty (bonkers), rugby loving (dominate me),
I’m from St Petersburg
(For God’s sake marry me, British Nationality),
Right wing (You’d better earn a superb salary).
I will send a photo privately today
(I’m married, don’t want hubby to know).
Favourite things: DIY, football, Internet play
(Can’t think of anything … oh, I’m gay).
Men dating on the Internet each day
Are much simpler and straightforward,
No matter what they seem to say,
They seek sincere companionship… and sex, ok!


The Hunger Of The Olds

God knows, Cupid’s a funny little bugger;
Perhaps he suffers from indigestion,
Because love doesn’t make arrows any easier to stomach.
Two people slicing a melon precisely
And sucking the same flesh together… hardly ever !
So young she loved soft French cheese, German wine
And curiously cabbage with vinegar and cashew nuts.
He liked a pretty girl, a nutty pint and
“You can’t go wrong with a nice thick steak.”
They have been married for 50 years.
For her so many choices, for him two –
Shirts need mending, meals piping hot;
Meat stuffed pastry with salt soaked chips.
No preserved lemons, sin-ripened Queen olives,
No imaginative continental buffet lunches.
Cupid’s arrow so thin at first can penetrate a world;
Candle flames of crocus hide memories of snow.
They ate together though they ate differently
As three children grew riddled with liquorice,
Steak puddings, Moules Mariniere and Tarte Tatin.
Two daughters married, the food was kindness itself.
Their son died in a car crash conferencing,
The moblile phone still talking
As they cut his body from the car.
The cold funeral food was sandwiches.
She offers meals and mendings to grandchildren
With hands of double patience,
Although soufflés now sometimes fail to rise
And meals increasingly are imperfect doppelgangers
Of ones served years before.
Black and Deckers aggressively compete
With bleeping textphones deriding language,
Where once careful conversations were well fed.
Dying flowers are haunted by butterflies;
Crocus candle flames can no longer hide the ice to come.
They have been married for 50 years.
Love and God constitute more questions than answers;
This world is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Now so late so old at night they sleep hungrily together,
The bedroom echoing with strangely rumbling stomachs


Full Catastrophe Living

In a car called catastrophe he comes calling,
A figure carrying a sawn off shotgun,
Ghosts engraved into its barrels;
Through a mist of headlights footsteps sounding
The squeaking of abandoned gallows,
He approaches the moment’s auditorium
Amidst a tumult of nameless pasts and futures.
This morning he pissed piss grey as graveyard dust
And shaved without reflection, violent half moon
Time after time finding too much its mark.
When he turns the driving mirror slightly
He catches this stranger, unsmiling,
Face caked with blood; moonlight grey,
Metal magnifying destinies of rust.
Fingering the triggers now, two painfully pulled teeth,
His grip turns knuckle white on the stock.
A memory whipping slantwise suddenly raps
Resonant as a spade ringing on hit stone.
“Shut it!” He hisses under broken breath.
Stepping from the enclosure of evening
Moonlight cracks concrete as his grey shadow stalks.
In a car called catastrophe he comes calling,
A nightmare from two thousand dreams ago.
He offers release soft, as rest on a child’s eyes
Who wept so long then fell asleep, or harsh, sharp.
All over the world, each night each day he calls,
Waiting still as the caught breath,
Listen he may be coming right now … or just arrived.