Dead of Night All that is good in the city sleeps While I try to work out a way home. People without homes, or with homes They cannot go to, watch my frantic hand Hail escaping taxicabs. Is this what anchored them, I wonder, That here on nights like this they drifted Into doldrum streets where people languish, hopeless, their expectations Crawling into doorways out of days Lethargic nothing? Disappointed, Not surprised that somewhere concrete craves Vengeance; captures wanderers and makes them try To live where it was poured on living things To make them die and sprout no more. Spring cannot Bud in this place entombing Nature's things In smothered soil. Phone booths, shelters fill with soup-stained squatters. I move. Night people stir Entreating hands that will allow me pass If I can buy my way. And they have no change But will accept credit cards. Or I can find myself a morning.

R.M.A. Some have meat and cannot eat. Some cannot eat that want it. But we have meat and we can eat Sae let the Lord be thankit. The Kirkcudbright Grace (also known as The Selkirk Grace) There were no hamstrings in Ireland before R.M.A, (Red Meat Alert). I was a gate the day our heroes danced in my story pages. Rough-grazing livestock separated from meadow by me and my book in the gap. Captivated by stirring deeds fuelled from meat-lined coddle pots. Real Meat Action. Deprived anaemic bodies crave the grit that proper feeding brings: a kitchen with aroma of real meat, iron in the gut, strength in the loins powering the surge of life. Irish meat, sap to the tree of life. The very thought of you springs saliva, juice of truth that will not dry under lies; Real Meat Alternatives. Real Irish people espouse the right to hold opposing points of view. And some good comes to hard-pressed doctors and chemists from purveyors of R.M.A. But I prefer my Irish meat from a grill rather than from a pill.

Treasure Touch She knew what she was looking for in the auction rooms, but could not say precisely what it would be. The piece would let her know, she said. On the first floor she was still waiting for the feeling. On the second she knew it would be lustre, a gilded vase inviting eyes to behold mere clay outshining ornamented bronze. She held it in her eyes and did not notice other treasure until she found it. In her hands she held a story of wildflowers hand-painted to life beyond seasons before her grandmothers were born. In her hands it became her own. She breathed on its sheen and wiped her happiness around its face. With fingernail she traced each still-green stem and white and red and yellow petal delicately hearted, as in her summer garden; finger-tipped the gilded rim, while I enquired about the price her thoughts were on its place at home.

Perspectives Do I feel a breeze where Art and Commerce veer when they meet on their opposite ways? Sandal-footed creators, and well-heeled purveyors of profit look up, look down, look out and sometimes in at their mutual perspectives. And then entrepreneurs pick up surviving work of striving prophets and convert it into assets in a value system foreign to the creator's dream.

Snatch of Beauty He sings, trills a sweet intricacy of music, lilting, teasing my heart, he soars. A tiny throat, in a little speck against the sky, claims and takes the moment on wings. He lures my eyes to the firmament from nesting spouse Giving his heart as nature orders. A falcon swoops into territorial innocence, plundering song from heaven's music. He dies. Serenade reprises in the feathers rising, falling, billowing, A breeze whisks my anguish into realisation that predators have an eye for beauty.