Waiting
(For Swan Hunter, Hawthorn Leslie, Palmers)

The bus stop has fewer passengers waiting
at seven o’clock in the morning.

More women now,
they huddle and flick cigarettes
that pin prick the gloom,
odd laughs hitting the silence.

The yards are finished.
Kids need to be told where the river is
and the cranes aren’t a fairground.

Some still believe
the river will return:
tankers and refits, the lot!

Delusions,
and fewer passengers are waiting.

John Donne in Jarrow

Not that long ago,
on my way to the pub,
I saw a man standing at his back door
looking at the sky,
examining early evening light,
flying past
into his dark kitchen.
I imagined thick grease around a cooker,
windows closed tight
but for that moment
he appeared in a great world of air and angels.

Faking It

My world was so small,
cramped in a matchbox,
made of poor egg shells.

Words were underlined,
embossed, still born,
disabled, broken:
aching desire,
rancid, shamed,
life there, faking it.

Her Mother’s Shoe

She can’t wear her mother’s shoes,
she’s outgrown them
by two sizes.

The shoes are squashed in a box
in a tight-fitting cupboard.

In some future
I’ll give her the shoes,
straighten them,
but they still won’t fit,
only sit on her toes
like a child playing mother.

Tom Kelly

These four poems appear in THE TIME OFFICE collection and in the American ezine Eye Socket Journal

http://eyesocketjournal.blogspot.co.uk/