Three Poems

The Dice Player

I’ve had my nose in the ring since I was nine.
I learned those cubes fast: how to play a blind
bargain; how to empty a die from my palm
and beguile by turns loaded with prayers –
then sleight-of-hand. Ten or fifteen years
and you get wrists like a tabla-player’s, jaws
cut and edged by the knuckles and customs
of luck and deception. The fun’s in sham,
in subterfuge, in the eyes smoking out
an opponent’s call. I let my thumbs stalk
each die, get to know which edge might
damage probability’s well-worn curves.
See, all dice are cut on the teeth of thugs,
liars and raconteurs. I’ve concocted calls
those dealing in risk and perfidy, bluff or
perjury, would envy. But I’ve never stolen
or coveted dice fashioned from agate
or amber, slate or jasper, or from
the perfumed peach stones of distant shores.
Some think fortunes will be won with dice
made from the regurgitated pellets of owls:
or from the guano of seabirds that ride only
the loftiest thermals. I’ve always had faith
in the anklebones of goats, in the luxated
knee-caps of mountain-loving pugs. Look,
I’ve wagered all my life on the belief that
I can dupe the stars, subtend the arcs, turn
out scrolls, louvres, pups, knacks, double
demons – well, at least give a game rhythm.
I know there’ll always be an affliction
of black spots before my eyes, that my face
has its smile stacked slightly higher on
the one side, that the odds I’m not a swindler
are never square. But Sir, when some rough
justice gets me back again to the floor,
then watch me throw fate a weighted side.

Pedlar

Sure, I’ve haggled on corners with fruiterers,
barrowboys raising phlegm. I’ve gone on
day after day, putting forward a face I know
to be long ago cashiered of its gloss. Some
days I’ve buffed my face with a less penniless
tarnish, and walked out into daylight’s lucrative
polish. These days who knows what’s delusively
real from what’s genuinely ersatz. I’ve carried
the faked weight of my voice through these
streets, pretending it were one of time’s carats,
making claims not worth a tinker’s cuss, but
smiling as if all work were illustrious. I’m sick
of the moon whose far-side no gold can limn,
of the brass sales of my neighbours’ shops,
of tipping dreams into bargains and watching
the stars sharpen to jewels in the lapel-pins
of usurers, smoothing a look in the demoted
lustre of my pots; life declassed of its sheen.
But I’ll go on no matter how the world glints
my loss, or the spokes of my wheels mint
out their counterfeit suns. I’ll just spruik up
a mock brilliance, prink up another day in
the dull patina of my pots, and call out iron,
scraps – as if I still believed in my own finesse.

Saddhus

Some chew necrotic weeds. Some sleep
in charnel fields. Some are purified
by the putrifactive quality of time
and happily multiply in eternity’s folds.
Some dig ditches and like refuse
throw themselves in. Some don’t mind
the urine of town dogs. Some don’t
mind their buttocks becoming sharp
as heifers’ hoofs. Some are ever-walkers,
men of good sense but small gesture,
small-moment journeymen wearing
out their feet with stones. Some find
no answers in the ever-commuting sky
and lie still on bramble palliasses,
or they become ever-sitters and vow
not to straighten their limbs. Some
make leashes of their penises and walk
chastity’s heavy stones. Some are lost
to an ever-administered distance,
clouds and wind their error of alliance
and so they never find peaceful homes.
Some come down from the mountains
into the searing belly of the wind,
and sit between six fires, then turn,
already blind, towards a seventh fire,
the sun. Some live sting by sting,
ache by ache, and wait for the smells
the tidal breezes bring, still not knowing
what is gathered, what is won
beyond the vermin, beyond the dung.