The Weeping Traveller

Tonight, the feckless dreaming jongleur

pours wasted tears into his palms,

thinking of the dark peat-brown fringe,

combed, glossed, stitched and darned

to the iridescent spotless sky,

the brown barnet of a wild free youth

wavering above her ashen face

shaped by the brutish hands of Zeus

and the jongleur's seas of tears fill

the Earth's oceans empty floors

when he is sure he never wanted

anyone so much, so long, so more.

J.P. McConalogue was born in Essex in 1979. For the past five years, he has been working in the editorial departments of various publishing companies in London and Essex, in addition to studying political thought at Birkbeck College (University of London) and the University of York. He is currently a postgraduate student at the University of York. His poetry publications include: the chapbook 'Terra Incognita' (2003); 'Rhodian Moon Night' (www.hauntingspectre.co.uk, 2004); 'Restless' and 'Romford, Born and Bred: The Politics of the Human Species' (Open Wide Magazine, 2005); 'The March of Night' (Aesthetica, 2005) and 'Of stars that do not give a damn' (in the anthology: The Shape of Tomorrow, Forward Press, 2005).