poetry pRO
Daniel Thomas Moran
Here in the Afterlife, CLP/Integral
ppf SHOP ONLINE
MEMBERS’ EVENTS
MEMBERS’ COMPS & CALLS May25: Frogmore Poetry Prize
see/hear: BBC (you will need to sign in) – Alison Lock reading her poem Lure
let’s go hear voices down dusty alleyways
where ‘have you the time’ is asked by girls in red skirts
and replies echo long in cracked pavings
come let footsteps clang on outside stairways
before sunset from across town districts
to outdo onion sellers on bicycles
come see the tired lame at ease with themselves
as they raise pastis and double espressos and
the Marseillaise trickles over windowsills
some recall promises made under gunfire
another hides Mona under his unmade bed
smiles at an old lame dog down by the Seine
in dusk stilled to be reborn in empty streets
three in doorways offer Gauloises and talk
of fresh young men washed in Eau de Cologne
so they will walk pitted cobblestones
to reclaim what maybe time was in stairwells
so might have been is left to silhouette
them enter the wayward other streets
into inner rooms as if they still matter
as their lips resist the taste of other
‘oh my god what was the point tell me that’
yet their soft hands maybe reach out to brush
against inner elbow skin, exclaim ‘yes’
as in a basement window a mannequin
abandoned lolls against a cold pane