This is the future, we are already there and it's the same as the present

A stray dream

It’s a happy dream though in it you were
Humping some dancer in a run down gaff

A seafront hotel out of season where
I’m in a kitchen on the single bed

I’ve pulled from a drawer like the silk scarf
Of the seafront carny man who’s filling in for

ManDuck The Magician star of stage and screen
I saw earlier that day at the end of the pier

I had sheets of Belfast linen but you
Had the dancer. And had her again

While the dawn struggled to break on the sea
And break on the quick and the slow and the dead

When I woke the next morning under the bed
Dustdevils, feathers and some child’s brown shoes

*        *        *

Old skin

staggering towards me
I’ve cast you off

years ago
shrugged you off

left you, put you down at the side of the road
for ravening

by any passing predator
old skin – when your face splits open

in recognition –
you know me now

but not what bar you left me in –
what else would you say but

‘how’re ya, me oul skin’

*        *        *

Ashes

The tide comes in; the tide goes out again
washing the beach clear of what the storm
dumped. Where there were rocks, today there is sand;
where sand yesterday, now uncovered rocks.

So I think on where her mortal remains
might reach landfall in their transmuted forms,
a year now since I cast them from my hand
– wanting to stop the inexorable clock.

She who died by her own hand cannot know
the simple love I have for what she left
behind. I could not save her. I could not
even try. I watch the way the wind blows
life into slack sail: the stress of warp against weft
lifts the stalling craft, pushes it on out.