The English woman

There is an English woman who comes
to our flat twice a week to do housework
She has fallen on hard times, not for me to ask
She has five cats, and I think a man left her
She is publishing a book on Kindle when 
I ask if it is about sweet kittens, and she laughs
My innocence tells me it is about love
She likes coming here, because she is not
overburdened with ***** dishes, my wife
seen to it that I do the cleaning and empty
the bins
She has lived a long time in Portugal, my
wife and her sit in the kitchen talking

Wit

Where were you when I was arrested at a public toilet for drinking
of a flask of brandy- the man beside me was a police officer out
to catch people like me who needed a drink to survive the tedium of
living in a provincial town in the middle of a landscape of cows

Where were you during the court case when the judge said I was
a disgrace, a plague on the backside of humanity, drinking in public
It is a serious crime, the buffoon thundered, throwing the gavel at me
It hit a guard in the head, who was knocked out

Where were you when I had to run the gauntlet of jeering reporters
and people pointed me out in the street, and a hush when
I entered a café, and the waitress refused to serve me coffee
You went on holiday in Spain, drinking red wine.

a liter of wine

Some time ago, before Putin came to power and made Russia
into a modern state, many Russians came to Portugal, trying to find work
They were met with skepticism after years of propaganda about
Russia and communism had taken their toll
The locals offered little help
Every night, when the supermarkets shut, they waited for
the bins are filled with scraps of food, and one gathers rats
went hungry for a while.
One uniformed security guard got the idea of pouring bleach
on the discarded food, rendering it inedible
When people in
The town heard of this outrage, and people protested, demanding that the guard be fired from his job.
The guard's sadism made people look at the refugees with friendlier eyes, and they got temporary jobs here and there.
In front of me, at the supermarket, he had bought a carton of white wine priced at ninety cents.
Counting the coins in his shaky hands came to eighty cents; he looked crestfallen, the shame!
My thought was to be magnanimous and pay for his wine, but that would only make me feel good if he humiliated.
I slid a ten-cent coin onto the counter and said, 'Look, here is a forgotten coin.'
At the exit, he turned and nodded my way.

Woody sonnet


I tried to be a carpenter, soft wood
and a screwdriver to make shelves for
I have many manuscripts that I have not
the heart to throw into the flames
In case what I'm looking for is there
The girl in the shop said I could not
carve a name on the shelves, she 
handed me sandpaper to erase
The titles I had given the shelves
Failure one and failure fifty-four
She, the girl in the shop, gave me
a plastic hammer for free

The Battlefield of Survival

There is nothing that brings out our fragility
to surface like surgery, dreams one has of
success is laid bare under the well-lit light
of an operating table
First time I had one of those growths removed
was seventy-five years ago by our doctor
wearing a three-piece suit with a blue tie
My memory of him is that of a man who 
had a cigarette in one hand and a scalpel
on the other hand, during the proceedings
 he spoke to my mother about the weather
That was inclement, and the Labor Party
He and my mother were communists 
For a long time, I had to take blood tests
which I didn't mind, his waiting room was
full of magazines and newspapers
There is nothing to read in waiting rooms
anymore, apparently, it is unhygienic 
Not that it mattered, one has phones
The surgeon and his assistant spoke 
pleasantly to each other about their work
at hand, I just happen to be there
After the operation, I was led into a room
to rest and dress, no, there was no kind
nurse serving tea

A poet at the supermarket

At the supermarket, yes, we have one near Faro. I met a poet.

The mall is nicely built and has two bell towers.

From time to time, they chime to remind us why we are

Here, not sit on a bench in its courtyard looking up to

The sky is seeing mind-blowing cumulus configurations.

The poet I met had a white beard, wore an old black suit,

a tie with red wine spots on, a black beret that whiffed

Of garlic, I think. You could see that it wasn’t really there.

His eyes scanning the ground, he bent down, picking up.

Half-smoked butts of cigarettes. Ok, not so rich

So what? Haven’t you heard of a poor poet before?

They are not all idle sons of the rich, and with a university.

Degrees in literature. A notebook in the side pocket and

Two pencils in his breast pocket; so he was a poet, ok.

A sonnet to a friend

Lately, every evening, I listen to music on
short clips on the internet
I have not been taking this art seriously
busy as I have been composing unwilling words
trying to create art
How wrong I  was not to hear
It is all there, beautiful humanity
in classical form or popular
Suddenly, as my world is coming to an end 
the beauty I have missed by not listening to
the love expressed in an instrument or in
A human voice makes me long for more years