I happened across his latest collection, ‘A Book of Lives’, at the library and stayed up that night reading it through. Some of my favourites:

_{Touch
Touch is everything or nearly everything or it is nothing. Crocodiles mate, after all.
The Devil’s swedger at minus a hundred is as cold and as ruthless as the Pole
And only the most despairing and abandoned, female or male, could take it in their hole
Or so we were told, or so they were told, when wretched creatures were taught of the Fall
Of Man instead of the Rise of Man and hair-shirts and chastity-belts were thought to assist our feeble but our dearest soul
Which struggled, crying, to be free
And use its body to be
The means of greatest grace, frolicking and fucking in the tropical throbbing unstoppable waterfall.}

_{A Birthday: for I.H.F.
It is no use offering the gatekeeper a garland of seventy-nine
rhododendron petals. He can count.
Do not waste your time showing the guardian of the grove a
pretty pretty book of eighty-one amorous pictures.
And as for that album of seventy-eight famous executions,
keep it for the next bonfire.
If you are ever tempted to photograph a convocation of eigty-two
midges thin with hunger and thirst, forget it.
Or if the cosmetic surgeon from Giacometti & Co. promises
to make you a new man on payment of only
seventy-seven pounds sterling, turn your pockets out
with a shrug.
But when at last you come across a ship with eighty
sails, oh what a sight that is to take to heart, with
the white canvas flapping and the rigging snapping as
she churns the ocean through a stiff breeze, and the
sailors sing out their seemingly inexhaustible store
of shanties, and the dolphins slice and gleam
and are ahead of the prow like protective things
from a world that is not quite ours, and the
playful captain out of sheer joy blasts his
horn eighty times into the misty morning, and
then with his blue eyes glittering he bangs the
rail – ‘Steady as she goes!’}

_{Old Gorbals
Old Gorbals in his long black coat
muttered and stalked from room to room.
He kicked up dust, dead flies, newspapers,
a crumpled envelope or two.
There was no news, there was no message
in the stillness, no cat, no dog,
no voice to his ‘Anybody there?’
Of course not, they’ve all gone, gone where?
He’ll never know, the thread is snapped
that he held fiercely all these years.
He shakes his head, crosses a window
like a shadow. There was so much life!
He can’t believe it has disappeared:
he hears the children running, shrieking,
sees the TVs glowing blue,
marvels at the rows, the language,
crash of bottles, slam of doors,
car-doors too, oh yes, look down
at taxi after taxi, all piled full
with the raucous hopes of a Saturday.
The lamplight in the street looked up
at many windows bright at midnight,
and even the curtains were snatched tight
you felt hearts beating and lips meeting
as private twenty storeys up
as in any cottage by the sea.
Old Gorbals flicked dust from his sleeve,
sighed a bit and swore a bit,
made for the stairs, out, looked back
at the grand tower, gave a growl,
and in a spirit of something or other
sprayed a wall with DONT FORGET.}