At night, smothered in darkness, it hunts
Its eyes burning like stars
Slinking through the air, searching
Soundlessly for prey.
“She is such a softee.” Esther sighs
Scooping its favourite food into a bowl.
“My baby. My furry little baby.”
Its claws sink into the wren, ripping
It apart in a cold deliberate frenzy.
Sodden bloodied feathers, slithers of skin
Like red glints in a killer’s darkening eye.
She takes the cat into her arms,
Cradling it and smothering it with kisses.
It purrs, dreaming carnivorous dreams of its owner’s dry flesh.

The Right Thing

What would you do
With a life in your hands?
Those begging eyes
Pleading for clemency
For an existence hanging in the balance.
So easy it would be
To let the knife drop
To let the bullet fly
Out of your control
Snuffing out another.
Would it satisfy you
To see the skin go pallid
The eyes glaze over
A carcass crumple to your feet?
Do you enjoy the thought
Of a mother weeping
A father distraught
A family rendered asunder
From your crime?
I pity you
The likes for which this decision is easy.
Just hope that if you ever find your life
In someone else’s hands
They know
The right decision to make.

By Garpal stream the young men came
Decades before the flood
On Garpal field they started the game
Quenching the grass with blood.
Down by the hill, near the copse, they lie,
The first to score was the first to die.

Every year the young men came
Where the roses and dandelions bud
Eager to play the game
Decades before the flood.
Beyond the hedge these young men lie,
The last to score was the last to die.

It rained before Advent, it rained after Lent
The rain fell on pasture and town,
The interminable water did not relent
But poured remorselessly down
By the end of the year, under the thundering light,
The world was a place of night.

A sodden land bereft of men
Garpal field was covered with weeds
As the women waited for the sun again
Spreading a blanket of seeds.
They waited as glorious golden rays
Fell during everlasting unending days.

The sprouting seeds grew tall and thin
Turning slowly into beautiful men
In a country filled to the brim
With cattle, wheat and fruit again.
Beyond Garpal stream where the rushes grew
The youths strolled over the grey diaphanous dew.

By Garpal stream the young men came,
Decades before the flood,
On Garpal field they started the game
Quenching the grass with blood.
Down by the hill, near the copse, they lie,
The first to score was the first to die.

What if my sight deludes my brain
And shows me things that cannot be?
What if my brain deludes my sight
With shapes and colours distorting light?
What if a chair is not a chair,
A sky not a sky?
What if my body belongs
Outside of time, in ridges, in riffs, in kaleidoscopes,
Pinging around or forever mute?
What if I die, but am not dead,
Having never been alive
That what was breathe was CGI
That what was a heartbeat merely
A mythological god slamming against a drum?
What if my words are not my words
But belong to speakers in the past
My thoughts not mine, nor yours,
But passing adverts in the electrified air?
What if existence is without shape,
Unseeable, unmeasurable,
A perishable vapour already dissipating
Unable to form and never formable?
What if none of these words were written
None of these words were read,
Nothing appeared here-
Nothing has happened, or ever does,
Except in your unquiet head?

The ruins peered out from behind
The blue-flecked crag
Where eagles nested.
Wind-blown, storm-tossed
Only the walls remain.
The turrets are now heaps of grass covered
Bricks, the keep a muddy mound.

Here, once were warriors,
Draped in furs, bearing swords
That glinted across the sea in defiance,
Defending the land from strangers.
Here, once were warriors-
All long gone!

Time itself has altered what once
Was considered unalterable.
When kings ruled from inland palaces
And long powerful ships caressed the jagged
Shore; now washed up on the beach
Like the kingdom they protected, flotsam:
Cruelly ruined planks of elm, distorted by
Sea and salt; masts broken and disfigured.

A once glorious people, now gone!
Palaces overthrown!
All hanging onto unforgiving Time
Like fossilised carbuncles.
Ripped from Time in a plethora of
Anguished voices dying slowly-
Calling out for resolution.

Head bowed, flowing across the water
Like an organic sepulchre,
Lost in the wriggling reeds
It raises its head once more,
Glancing mutely around
It sighs, its breath dying in the snow.
A symbol of light,
The swan is transfigued.

How absurd to stand
On moving land,
To touch the sky
As planets roll by

To drink the rain
Knowing from where it came,
To eat fruit and corn grown
From dead flesh and bone.

To enjoy the heat of the sun,
A vast nuclear bomb,
To breath the air
That burning diesel put there!

Psychiatrists said my son was mad
But I only saw a child,
He needed to be locked up, he was dangerous and bad
They declared, but I knew he was only wild.

Psychiatrists have for decades employed
ECT, that damages brains, destroys memory;
With omnipresent power employed
The soul-disabling effects of SS-influenced lobotomy.

They prescribed (prescribe) addictive drugs
To all and sundry, on a whim,
Giving them to children, like street-wise thugs
Covered in expensive bling.

I took my son away
Protecting him from a psychotropic shower,
Until he’s strong enough to have his say,
Not silenced by mis-used power.

He talks of love and wondrous things,
Of things he’s read and seen
All they can see is a boy who stupidly grins-
Like playground bullies, ignorant and mean.

They said my son was mad
Needs to be drugged, pinned down, abused
But surely the world is worryingly sad,
Allowing people to be so used?

The curious activity of men/women

makes me wonder precisely when

both will learn how to conjoin

with rabbits, geese, bull and lion.


Talking incessantly like birds,

roaring like lions. However absurd!

snapping like crocodiles

or habitually waiting in human files,


torturing like cats

water-boarding rats,

rolling like logs

snarling like dogs.


snorting like pigs

gobbling up figs

In everyone an animal lurks

whether saints or jerks!

A rude dawn over the city
Where Pepys once fought with his beautiful wife
After seducing whatever servant-girl chanced
To be around, where kings
First ruled from cold castles full of cockroaches,
Murderous cousins
Lurking through the baleful halls of history
Eyeing the empty throne. The stinking
River long shorn of fish sweeps elegantly before
The crimson petticoats of multiple ******
Promenading along Thames Street,
Winking at under-washed gallants.

Vauxhall gardens a pithy cavalcade of priests and doxies,
Of flower girls, flaxen haired girls selling fruit,
Anxious to reach home before the ****** hour of early
Evening when beaus gather in alley ways establishing
A testosterone gauntlet in the dust-spawned gloom.

The road to Tyburn is littered with lost hopes!
On hanging day bodies swung like debutantes dancing
To jazz tunes-
Aristocrats quartered with precision squealed like common folk,
Bleeding as much. The city watched all this
And didn’t murmur-never complained-
Smiled, as only a city can smile, at gin-drunk matrons, pie eating aldermen
And the ****** activity in street shadows by relieved young women on
VE day 1945.

Deceit lies there, among the roses,
blooming in the weeds;
slugs sidle up the leaves
where the dormouse breeds;
and nothing gently lives here
where the sparrow haunts-
within the shadows that voles fear-
the breeze that whispering taunts.

In London-
a hollowed out city-
the fog
is returning-creeping
back-

A poisonous invisible/white
sheet
salivating over
supine cars, insinuating
its baptismal
seed
into open mouths-
sinking into gutters
emerging undigested
from empty drains.

it crawls around the Shard
clutches
each ancient bridge
yellowing
in its pilgrimage  

it has returned-
IT
The Thing-
ghastly
in its plans.

A resurrection
that requires no death!

How slow the swan glides
down the darkening river
twisting its sleek, slithering neck
away from the sunshine-
saying nothing.
In the morning
only ducks drive through the water
only voles snake along the banks.

I feel I have to make my defence
Regarding those who over several millennium
Believe they can speak for me;
I do not need to name names, do I? You know
Exactly who I mean. What can I do?
I speak briefly to someone once and, before
I know it, we’re ***** buddies-they claim to
Know my inner-most thoughts,
My opinions on every subject from what
Clothes to wear to who to marry.

Do I not have more important things to think about?
The well-being of an entire universe to evaluate
On a daily basis?
How you treat one another is your concern-
Just keep me out of your bigotry and spite,
My name out of your books, my voice out
Of your heads. I am not who you claim me
To be; I am far better and, at certain times, far worse.
I am both nothing and everything!

You can nevertheless be assured-
I do not lead your armies, support your murders,
Sanctify your suicides, bless your hatreds.
I do not inhabit your words,
Your statues, your art, nor am I the knowing
Voice in your head or the gnawing pain
In your heart. Own what is yours!




Originally, I was a small-time local deity,
Lord of the mountain, brooks and olives.
Benevolent, ***** and shy.
Nothing special! One god amongst many
In and out of pantheons, attached to this
Goddess or that. Sometimes I was el of the
Desert, sometimes the family god in
The corner or staring out of the tent flap-
Inauspicious and insignificant!

I was happy then. I had none of the obsessive
Responsibilities of a universal god. I seduced
The local women, fathered thousands of mixed-children-
Part deity/part human-received the flow of eager
Sacrifice; the few remaining aurochs,
Bulls, deer and first born. The smoke always revitalised me!
Children’s flesh was always particularly nourishing!
For such extensive insurance for my continued interest
I protected each group who so honoured me, destroying
Their enemies, as well as their friends.
(But, oh, not now! I’m expected now to exterminate entire neighbourhoods,
Nations and cultures! Now I’m expected to be the murderer,
The sole master of death!)

I was without ideas! I accepted everyone, loathe to judge!
****** peccadilloes I found interesting, fun.
Adultery I saw as an aspect of marriage,
Homosexuality, the absorbing antitheses of the endless
Production of new life, from its sterile cusp
Seeping forth new ideas and artistic burgeoning.
I created beauty, adoring it. I danced to
Lively music, sang to beautiful songs.

In Egypt a disgruntled warrior-priest arose, preaching violence,
Preaching conquest. I trembled in his angry presence,
Shaken by his bloodlust. An excitable poet sang of his adventures,
Turning a 100 followers into thousands. The poets used my name-
One fashioned in gentleness-to encourage war.
Then, from the confusions of statehood, prophets emerged
Spreading their misery through my authority,
Grinding my benevolence under soiled sandals,
Telling others what to do, as if the words were mine-
Engaging in genocide with pitiless intention.
They flail my soul with madness!

And so on and so on; numerous messengers
Shouting of sin and retribution,
My voice reverberating with their words,
As I stand in the shadows like a serial killer,
Frightened of lamplight. With nothing
More to do, conforming savants
Described rules for life, a non-existent heaven,
Transcribed my thoughts from their own experiences
Created another reality, ignoring their own.



I am now terrified of my name
(EL, YHWH, Allah) Terrified of what it represents-
Burdened by its acquisition
By the bombastic and cruel.
I, who was once a god, now
Am captive, a prisoner of recitation.
Where once I had priests to beckon, they
Now beckon me. Where once I pronounced on
Goodness, I am now too alarmed to speak.
Where once I was the object of sacrifice
I am now the sacrifice itself.

Her leaving suited her
Better than her arrival,
Her returning
Better than her going.

As cold as another age, wracked with solitude,
A slow start to another beginning,
Unreliable cloud coats the sky
And the sea repetitiously roars in,
Cuffing cliffs,
Pounding rocks
With calamitous roars
Playing endless riffs across the sand.

We walked together down the beach
Troubled by the surf
Chewing on cigarette stubs, sullied by the wind
New ghosts in the half-light
Bearing years like backpacks.

Grown old in the gathering twilight
We chattered together, our footsteps picking
Wounds.  Barbed words
Like greetings, cheerfulness like an accusation.
******* a shared and interesting memory,
We cuddled together in the scouring wind
Enjoying each other’s casual warmth.

It was a time for reflection,
When love is a scab on evolving friendship,
Heartlessness the price of redemption.
The contrived book of your beauty,
The gilded ceramic of expertly rendered features
The undulating film of your gestures, coded and decoded
Through time.

Beauty is finite, crumbling to fleshless reminiscence
Fixed to canvas and celluloid
With tireless labour. In the end, signifying another thing-
Of little interest.
An artist’s casual thought, a director’s cut.
They barely remember your name,
Your laughter and wildness gone, missed by the
Senile artist’s transitory brush,
Clotted with hundred-year-old varnish.

A small house by the sea
Surrounded by flowerbeds sparkling with summer colour
Self-absorbed children, with whom we exchanged affection
And parted from, holidaying in Bangkok
With lovers of all sorts.
As the sea rolled towards us
And evening gave way to night.

He intimately coaxed the bomb like a lascivious lover
Passionate for death-
Carefully balancing out the ingredients,
Fixing the charge,
His soft-palmed hands caressing each part,
Beneath his unsettling gaze.

In paradise he’d spend his eternity-
Having killed his way towards god.

The crowds gathered in the boulevard
Arm in arm, laughing, relaxed.
He drove past them noting their joy-
Loathing their happiness,
An offence against his desire for death.
Turning his car sharply around
He slowly drove past them again.

In that brief moment, the wind
Gently rocking, his thumb pressed down.

The bomb blew, shredding the air,
Grinding his grinning soul into dust.
The blast ripped screams from each chest:
A world suddenly full of unbearable pain,
Blood crawling along the pavement,
Limbs in the gutter, leaking tears.

His road to heaven cost a hundred lives-
Cracked bodies, fragmented souls-
The squalid suffering of children.
Rivers of milk and honey
Thickened with blood.

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.*

W.B.Yeats




In a time such as this, in darkening days
        Without screeching witches
Frightened banshees, buggered old men
Searching for solace, eyes streaming with icicle-lust-
Gangrene facebook: torn-up, shredded twitter

The cries of the disconnected,
Wailing!
Wailing!

In a time like this, in darkening days,
The disconnections come in waves!

Searching for reason amongst the unreasoning,
Hunting for sanity within the insane,
Identifying the dead from amongst the living.

Wailing!
Wailing!

Email excreting venom
Internet exfoliating lies-politicians wrapped
                         In deceit-
A cold time of it, a wretched time of it.

Only within our hearts does hope lie.
                      Only there
Away from conflict and disorder
                             Away
From the capricious cacophony of biased debate.

Wailing!
Wailing!

When the sea rolled in
I knew we were ******!
It came in like an express
Snorting, snarling, inconsiderate
Blowing everyone away.
I survived. Clinging to a tree.
I watched my friends
Wallow away in sea-water.

It was the day the toilet broke,
the day the bank was robbed
when my wife walked out,
suitcase in hand. Her head
blown off on the pavement
in the gunfire between bank robbers
and police. It was that kind of day.
That evening I had the toilet repaired.

Perched on the wall, the Raven scrutinised the fields that stretched for miles
Studying the crows as they gathered together by the clump of berry bushes
Its gimlet eyes concentrated, waiting to strike.
Searching for weaknesses amongst its minions, a black-shirt, a minor deity made for death,
Skull’s head, ****, the demon of the dull cloud-dark skies.
An omen heralding star-snuffed, moon-ruined night.

The raven strutted into view-
Dissembling crows
Peered from the tangled grass lashed
Into solemn silence.
The raven assumed a coal-black authority
Driven by its coal-black soul.
Its beak stabbed out automatically
Bleakness of past; spectral futures
Like echoes. Its eyes were cruel drops
Of impenetrable night.
The raven possessed everything in
The imperious manner of a cut-throat-
Killing without fear, without conscience.
It ruled like the destroyer.

Cowering in the corner, the boy began to cry,
******* in the gloom.
Searching the room
As his father slowly went by.

His father’s reddened ******
Caught under the weak bedroom light
His genitals pink and bright,
Like a swollen crucifix hanging impudently.

“Out my boy.” He called
In a voice that to the child
Sounded like thunder, ill-tempered and wild.
“Daddy needs you.” The father bawled.

The father’s affection was a wound
That disfigured body and mind
Care sullied, love unkind-
First loved, made love to, then wholly ruined.

His father’s hand jabbed the gloom
And laughing cruelly pulled him out
“I knew you were somewhere about.”
Dragging him through the room.

The child at first whimpered,
Then was muted. As his father began,
Through his small body the pain ran,
Biting his lips, the boy quietly simpered.

Black crows,
smothered jackdaws,
obsessing on religion-
******* on ancient ideas,
drowning in gloomy words.
God made the world to be lived in
not to escape from-

I watched the fox, rat held firmly in its jaw,
Trot across the street, lithely avoiding the cars,
Ears pricked up.

It slithered under a fence and weaved through the undergrowth,
Not once acknowledging my presence.
Disappearing in the night, it yelped out its echoes in the wood
Licking out worms.

The shadowed moon slung down its light
Like weak silver bristles from the back of a carved out hedgehog
Covered with newly deposited fox saliva.
It had screamed as it was consumed-unable to die!

The crow stabbed at a newly dead rock pigeon
As the stalking cat pounced......
Death mingled!

Joe, who lived near me, waved:
I waved back, wondering why he saw nothing.

Incandescent, the mystic sign burrowed into
Their untarnished consciousness
Depositing meaning where before,
In related specie, there’d been none. Ok,
At first it didn’t seem such a big thing but
Later, much later, it was.

Creating an object d’art is one thing
For a man wearing animal skins but an entire
Nation is another matter. It took time.
That said, going back seems like just another way
Of going forward.

Out of the encroaching sands crept a single idea
Made out of many others. A pyramid rose out of smaller
But more elegant definitions of power. The greater the power
The vaster the ****** pyramid became,
Enclosing space with a giant flat footstep. Khufu
Lay within, disintegrating slowly,
Convinced of his godlike nature-while minor royalty
Found cheaper ways of preserving body and soul.
Sand covered the Sphinx for two thousand years
Alexander’s body disappeared, Caesar, a manipulative bald
Headed coot ended up under a memorial stone,
Equally godlike and dead.  

Cleopatra may not have been hot after all
But having powerful lovers and dying gracefully
Did wonders for her profile. Long dead,
An icon of femininity and ****** allure, she lives
Forever in a world that desires both.
Quin **** Huangdi surrounded himself with lifelike soldiers
In a bid to recreate reality, as if
Death could be touched by an illusion. Surrounded
By a mercury lake, buttressed by an unmoving army
His bones are as empty in their fashion
As the peasants he ruled over. Can’t cheat it, or
Beat it. Can’t ignore it either.

The personality continues through
Memory aids. A huge gravestone serves as well-
As Khufu discovered. Deeds recorded in
Verse works, but in both methods
The myth becomes greater and the real person,
The one who cried at funerals, failed during ***,
Gets forgotten. Might just as well
Do nothing. It takes less energy, leading
To less disappointment.

The desire to extend privileges into death
Where nothing exists
Is the fantasy of the spoilt for whom life
Must be eternal. An Australian aborigine who
Rallied his people in overdue rebellion against
The European hordes bringing sheep and planting grass
Was killed, stuffed and displayed in an exhibition.
Khufu had himself stuffed and displayed. All famous people
Are stuffed in time and displayed like curios
Dying again and again throughout eternity.

I snatched at her soul,
grabbed it and held it to my chest,
a beatific grin upon my untruthful face
glorying in her spasmodic transmutation-
her monotone vision
beset with confusion
her gender breaking in my grip.

Loping footsteps over taut, troubled seas
spawned secretions ejected
like flame-
her sighs, a storm
her cries subsumed in sanctified fire
without worship.

Dressed in black,

What can you lack

in a monochrome world?

Your eyes weep glass

As your lovers pass

What you remember you dread

Inside your throbbing head!

What now, the loss of limbs in a distant conflagration?
The seeping brains amongst poppy fields?
The myriad nature of violent death, outside of journalistic imagination
A grind of experience on which the lost youth builds.
What now? Within the shredding blasts euphoria
The élan of a soldier, in memoria

Downing drinks in the Stag and Hare
After a tour, ordinary actions reek of tedium
There is, in the conviviality, no rush of adrenalin there
Fermenting trouble establishes a happy medium.
Quarrelling with a man who wears a business suit
Is displaced adventure, smashing his face in is a hoot.

What now? A mate, a favoured friend, dies in the dirt
When whistling a tune, recalling the holiday in Spain, the family,
A shot coursing through his unbuttoned shirt
Deflating his lung, another shattering his knee
When he died, his platoon died too,
Metaphorically; the snipers aim was true.

Bottled up in Basra, aimlessly wandering in Helmand
A shrill event on News at Ten between politics and football,
Another death, another iconic face, the catasphropic end
Of a youthful  life.  What now? The swift end to a morning stroll
Amongst watching villagers in dry breathless mountains
Empty streams and florescent fountains.

In the terracotta dirt my soul leaked away
My final return was like a funeral celebration,
I said nothing anymore. I had nothing left to say.
I’d given my youth to a sniping cynical nation.
What now? It was over for me in a grasping world-
A gooey puddle spread beneath me as my soul evacuated.

SHADOWS.
Sunset shadows creep across the wall,
Memories flit through the mind
Coagulating into an unlit pool
Where dissembling thoughts unwind.
Then all is utter darkness,
Opaque, a descent into barely contained distress.

Thoughts lay dormant
An incantation in a poisoned sacrament
Waiting for the moon to wane, sun to rise,
Excoriated by refreshed light  
Burning into the mind’s dull eyes
Destroying the mind’s dull sight.

The sun exposes every cranny
Evolution of moss and vine,
Lucidity shuffled aside to free
What lies behind the surface shine.
Once exposed, what can we know?
We cannot illumine the mind’s cavernous flow.

An untended wall will last fifty years
And then break apart and fall.
Destroyed by fears
That over time weaken and spoil.
Within each of us there is a roughly built division
Turning our forms into dust, blown into the sky, by demons driven.

Long ginger muzzle
eyes burning
through the copse, fixed upon
the snuffling vole eating
grubs in the moonlight,fangs
like stunted darning needles
revealed in its widening jaw.
hunching in the grass
it crawled cautiously forward
and pounced
like a god on an acolyte
quenching blood-lust-
the fox ate again that night.

It beats into my body-


ramming,

I lie twitching


My body is subsumed within the pleasure...........................

Ripped out of the night,
pulsating cruelly,
passion spawned

Reaching out, all is changed,
the crow darkly wanders
stars fizzle away into transmutating haze
and dread comes
walking like a bony corpse.

1
The surging water threw strange shapes,
Waiting crows with stabbing beaks
In the sky and in the drowned souls,
Festering in the swell.
The huge irrepressible waves
Spread wings flattening houses with a single downward swipe.
It was a sudden death,
They died screaming-avidly watched by millions nestling before TV sets
Unmoved if sympathetic.
They had watched enough CGI
Not to be bothered by such drama.


2.
The girl quietly combed her hair,
Bitter black in the lamplight,
Watching the snarling fox shoot from its lair
Slathering with fright.
As she lifted her arm again
The salt spray struck her, flattening her face
The wave soothed where her smile had been
Her limbs acquiring a greater grace.

It ****** in cars and houses, gulping down
The unresistant landscape with unforgiving speed,
Turning the living green into regurgitated brown
Digesting  the landscape with ******* greed
It drew her little body back into the equalising sea
Just another bit of debris.

Dull pattering through agonised woods

fumbling winds, serrating storms

animals vanishing into the undergrowth

scurrying beneath the ground

birds huddling under leaves.

The river breaks its bank

water spreading out like *****

villages swamped with infestation.

The storm batters and bruises,

bellowing through the night like a troubled god.

Crushed leaves in an old book

Squandered memories;

In the dark, an old woman speaks

Softly

Through cracking teeth

Of an ancient fast disappearing love

Looking for the light.


‘As my future is invisible

I live in the past,

Scrounging memories

From fading dreams.’


Her words gently rustle.

Reconstructing the past

A straddling child

Mimics her toothless sounds.


‘I remember ***

I remember caresses

I remember coition’.


The rambling hours end in a sigh

The quiet voice in a whisper.

Time is a walk away.

Beneath the water lived a nymph, beautiful as
A flower, if you like woman with petals
Growing from out of their face
And lips adorned with myriad metals
Moving silently with infinite grace.

Fishermen who caught her, in alarm
Tossed her back with dismayed cries
Fearful that she would do them harm
When she exposed her fangs, darting from her eyes,
Forked tongues from each palm.

But apart from all that, she was a delightful creature
As proud as a catwalk model
Sexuality impressed into each feature
Death in each cuddle,
Poison injected from each freshly opening suture.

At the sea’s dark bottom lived the nymph
Devouring fish raw, terrifying sharks and barracuda,
Dining on shellfish and prawns for lunch;
Darting amongst Angel Fish and eels, a hungry aficionada,
Tearing into shreds what she could not crunch.

Gentle with her own kind until coition
Was complete, when if hungry she devoured
Her temporary mate without undue consideration,
No please or thank you. Feeling duly empowered
By her actions, as confirmed by her explosive, acrid indigestion.

No longer young, her children dead,
She glides through the water from China to France
A preposterous seaweed hat upon her head
And in several places, impaling her scaly flesh a serrated coral branch.
Her sartorial taste filling even the sharks with fin-quaking dread.

The last of the kind. The others are (literally) toast.
Protected by animal charities here and abroad
She gladly subsists on ambitious swimmers who venture far from the coast
All she can now catch or afford.
A capricious tyrant until the last, when, victim of a fisherman’s boast

She was hoist up like iniquitous cod
Out of the sea, paraded on the deck while she struggled for breath.
Shot at. Abused. Poked and speared with a steel tipped rod,
Dragged into the harbour, pummelled close to death.
Screaming out, as she in unexpected agony died: “I thought, I truly thought, I was god!”

It was our final day together
During an awkward time, strolling purposely in the woods
Beyond town, sheltered by the interconnected canopy
Of colluding beech, joined in suppositious intimacy.
Pausing where serried rows of heavy-leafed fern gathered
Around a half-hidden stream,
And we stopped, lying down to make love.
In the cold fading light.
Fox and badger shuffled anxiously away, spooked by our jerky movements and unsteady moans.
We parted as the moon began blooming in the dark sky,
She returning to her husband, I to my wife.

I saw her again, I, an old man in a ***** coat fluttering in the wind,
Snatching at dying memories, remembering
A hundred other women in a hundred places,
Their features in lustful heat evaporating like water.
Seated on a park bench, a grandmother with a swollen leg
Bent over and senile, I, in a momentary, flashing epiphany, recognised her smile.
Her eyes, that once I loved, shrivelled by cataracts, she bellowed
At ghosts in the sunlight.
Identifying her long-dead husband in the gathering shadows.

Our frequent copulation had always been long and energetic
Enough to light up half the town, our laughter lighted
Up the rest. Walking through the fields or sitting in modest
Restaurants, our conversation roamed from favoured food to preferred, most stimulating books.  
Mutually absorbed, we happily exhausted our youth!

Fifty years later, dribbling through
Pavement traffic, a strange, erratic
Coalition of people, bikes and mobility scooters,
She ****** out a shrivelled arm towards me,
An exclamation mark on a memory of soft bleached skin
Dripping with love,
Vaguely recalling me as a shade from a more
Hopeful time.


I shrank away from that shambling, once beautiful, form,
Refusing and betraying her,
Our lives and bodies once gloriously entwined; her fate also mine.
I remained unalterably committed to her altered end,
Minds fading gently together.

When the light went, a cold wind blew.
An accumulation of warmth
came from copse and hill,
cheap spawned and self created,
as the night renewed.
He walked home, careless of his stumbling steps,
and softly threw his bags to the
floor, demons on the hearth-rug,
coiling snakes and insects everywhere.

It was all behind him now.
A sullen fist of half-remembered regret,
the weather-laden wood carrying his dreams
in each silver flaked leaf.

A half-remembered face, an
age destroyed beauty.
It was time to go now!
Time to go!

The sunrise burns the sky
A carefully coloured explosion
Blooded light flooding the low Kent fields that lie
Before Maidstone, excreting soundless motion:
Yellow carnation shards sway
With this violent advent of day.

In Hucking Estate diaphanous bluebells nestle
Beneath the groping canopy
Of Ash. Oak; the encroaching stinging nettle
Shields the frequent woodland scree
Covering with a verdant flush
Brooks that through the stones invisibly rush.

Within the hour, the Gorgon-headed sun
Sweeps aside the cloud-
The red into blue and orange has run
And in Lower Fullingpits Wood the increasingly  loud
Shuffling of badger attacking vole, fox strangling rabbit,
All compounded into daily habit.

The Kent Downs rise and fall
Like resurrected earth-bound music from a time
When hill, wood and pool
Emerged from unfettered chalk and lime.
Before the Cantii hunted in ancient Wents Wood,
For deer and boar, spurred not by hunger but for the love of blood.

Above the sparrow-hawk attacks the sparrows
Claw enmeshed in feather,
Beak unravelling neck. The unalterable sorrows
Of nature and weather.
Cruelty never ceases, but just gets more efficient-
Kindness remains deficient.

My mother sowed seeds from dawn until dusk
My father kept sheep-
My brother tended pigs in his backyard-
They all attended church every Sunday.
My sister was a *****.

All had busted backs when they were fifty,
My sister had a big house in New York.
All had religion,
But my sister had the money.
At ninety, with everyone else long dead,
She lives in glorious luxury
Smiling gently at all those hard-working people
Who believe in god
Her ageless insouciance worn like a pearl.

I buried her beside the clematis
Before the old untidy oak. The sullen wind
Began its circuitous hiss
A mocking presence. A cruel portend.
With fevered brow I pressed
The dark soil down, my quaking hands
My anguish succinctly expressed-
Stubborn fingers torn into blood-red strands.
Putting the ***** away, I went back indoors;
Her corpse still fixed in my sight, I made tea,
Sweat seeping from my pores,
As I drank, my hands again shook visibly.
A storm broke over the nearby hills
Roaring rolling sounds of shame,
Walls of rain thudding on my window sills-
The resonating thunder repeating her name:
‘Lucilla! Lucilla!’
Came each profound clap
Her voice within: ‘You killed me. Murderer!’
Long after the lightning’s crisp rap.
I had loved her with my infinite core,
Her screams scoured my teeming brain,
It pained me as I smashed her beautiful head on the floor,
Her rapid blood fading down a drain.
I died inside as she died my hands upon her neck,
Panting, protesting her undying love,
I gave her cheek a tender peck
Crying that the disinterested gods above
Knew I loved her too.
But, when a woman cheats,
What could an honest man do
In the face of numerous public deceits,
More so when his avaricious friends
Sample her like old women squeezing
Oranges in the market place? She trends,
Or did, for only one, distasteful, reason.
I did what I had to do. I had no alternative!
As was my due, I punished her with death,
And now subsumed in grief,
I strangle in my own dark breath
Now, each night I watch the clematis climb
Study its coiling struggling vines
Fixed in that cold, cold time
And the shallow grave on which the cold moon shines.

She came into my bedroom
                                            one winter's day
                                     silhouetted by the moon
                                           and chose to stay.


                                    By summer she was gone
                                          -figment or fey-
                                I waited for her return all autumn long
                                  wondering why she went away.

In the morning I walked out

leaving you like a

crumpled sheet, slumped across the bed.

It had been fun the night before

but sunshine cracks open the mind

and slaps the fertile brain

into consciousness.

I knew we weren't made for each other

By the curve of your lip

and ***** sink stacked with food-caked plates

the music you listened to

and the photograph of your ex.

Of terrible storms that broke through the town
Strangling, uprooting trees, slicing away
Homes, a gurgling pulsating fury of air and rain
That lasted four days. Unremitting,
It brought huge waves in its wake
From the tormented sea. All along the assaulted
Coast people choked and drowned,
Their corpses tipped
Onto beaches huddled between ravaged furniture
And drying plastic shopping bags,
Swollen limbs nibbled at by fish and *****,
And scattered throughout the streets
Picked at by dogs,
A feast that set them up
For the coming cold weather. Fleeing birds
Squalling overhead in clamorous flocks, plucked
From the sky and shattered on rocks;
The cats had a field day until
Becoming engulfed too in marauding waves
Deluging the land. Foxes screamed from the hopeless
Shelter of water saturated dens;
Only jagged ruins remained,
Futile gestures to a once-only god.
Towns inland were wrecked by the hurricane bursts
And all fell silent as the storm
Fled like a Viking raider back into the sea, dragging its
Spoils.