O'Brien's neighbour threatened  to shoot his dog
They are both poor men
and cannot mend their ways

Each day he waits in his house
just two eyes at the end of a barrel
He has been reaching for a gun half his life
reading signs of death at target practice

Tonight the milky way is a white opal
the moon a Christmas apple in his hand
three  black swans on the glass lake of the sky
Next to them a voice trawls through space
                        Howdo singing to himself

Poor men always prey on each other

Patiently he has been dying since birth
                          with his rusty gun
                           his mortgage
                           silence tearing his old clothes

Names on the Monument - 1982

That wind
blowing across town
all the way from Madagascar
reads Braille on the monument

small indentations in stone
                                        Callaghan
                                         Hogan
                                         O'Brien

Last week
while armies slept
continents away
                                         it dried khaki uniforms
                                         touched battle jackets
                                         rubbed skins
                                         of gun barrels
                                         stroked rifle barrels

Not one safety catch woke up

Give Me - Charles Edward Mann

Give me a place where the toilets
flush with gusto,  that gutsy rumble

that informs me when they're done,
Give me windows that open,

not climate control, meters and switches
that tell you, in silver numbers,

the weather in your mortgaged knoll.
Give me coffee in a paper  cup

with cream that's seen the inside
of a Holstein cow; a steak

and real mashed potatoes,
gravy, wavy and brown with grease.

Give me a mattress of ticking,
a pillow of virgin down,

a view of red brick thick with light;
three hundred square feet of space,

a  woman--sometimes
a pad and pencil, a drunken night.

The House, the Hour, the Sea - Michael Mott
(O tempo pasa, a mare cresce)

When moonlight pauses on a stair
when the sea crests and all along the bay
the rollers breaking carry in her name

you walk from room to room
as the blind move who sense
the placing of each table, chair...

familiar things, familiar to the hand.
The wood gives back, however faint the shape,
the years there.

Night walks, night watches, with every instinct,
every footfall, you describe her absence
like  the half-moon perhaps
hanging above  the sea,  fishing the waters.