Columbian Eden;
In an October descent:
Yesterday we're innocent,
Then time is rend.

Consecrating her lips
with another crimson layer,
A red-stained cigarette
and fiendish black hair.

This place is our day,
Eternity
does remain.

Rapturous Olympus;
On skin droplets of water caress:
"Some people feel the rain,
Others just get wet."

Standing shirtless
his declaration was blessed,
As water fell
on his demonic chest.

Doomsday kiss,
Infinity
and other stuff.

Neoteric Paradise;
Exile Vilify the individual convergence:
Unhindered by the precipitating blitz,
We're lost in the drizzle of descending mist.

The outcast crowd know
a different kind of bliss.
The overcast cloud shows
context is all that ever is.

"All those moments will be lost in time
like tears in rain."
Ion chaser ate a hurricane.

Your name means nothing to me
I let go of all the bad
Yet all the lessons remain
You taught me not to trust blindly when in love
And to not love blindly when you do not trust
I'm trying to start over
But your lessons remain
Should I thank you?
Or are they just another one of your curses?

The first time I saw
Betty Grater swoon
and heard Ms Arnault sigh
in expectation
I knew I had found the answer
that all young men seek

Instead of good looks
and the scent of money
I realized that the tippled sound of Thomas,
the piston drive of Cummings,
or shroud and mystery of Rimbaud
could accomplish what fumbling
postures never could

They could make a button come
undone and stay that way
part a leg and have it
remain languid
see an arm brushed
and not pulled back

Ah, but women are not
so easily wooed
You see, poetry is but a beginning
once is never sufficient
and Cyrano found
he was forced to return
and return
to keep those fires burning

Soon you discover it is not enough
to merely sing another’s tune
and you  must learn the art
whose muse is not so
easily tamed

So the new poems to Emily or Mary Lou
are steeped in ignorance, stumbling tongue
and emotion that knows only extreme
a Dickinson hodgepodge of flowers,
spring-rain and metaphor trampled
by testosterone expectation

And as these women grow
you discover the magic is fading
that they have learned these lures
and their virtue will not part quite so easy

Ah, but art is ever inventive
and for those hard to dissemble
there are the more obscure songs
of Baudelaire, Jefferson and Yeats
these will free even the firmest
of corset-strung objections

But to truly reach the promised land
there is need to create one’s own
to wrestle the evening with nature’s muse
and tease a line between the sheets
Then, if you've still a mind
you can glance to see
if her clothes have been shed

But the sad and beautiful truth
is that poetry’s muse will suffer no others
rarely will that graceful form stay the course
she will leave to find yet another
that can keep them
coming

January Colours

In the winter garden
of the Villa del Parma
by the artist’s studio
green grass turns vert de terre
and the stone walls
a wet mouse’s back
grounding neutral – but calm,
soothing like calamine
in today’s mizzle,
a permanent dimpsey,
fine drenching drizzle,
almost invisible, yet
saturating skylights
with evidence of rain.

February Colours

In the kitchen’s borrowed light,
dear Grace makes bread  
on the mahogany table,
her palma gray dress
bringing the outside in.

Whilst next door, inside
Vanessa’s garden room
the French windows
firmly shut out this
season’s bitter weather.

There, in the stone jar
beside her desk,
branches of heather;
Erica for winter’s retreat,
Calluna for spring’s expectation.

Tea awaits in Duncan’s domain.
Set amongst the books and murals,
Spode’s best bone china  
turning a porcelain pink
as the hearth’s fire burns bright..

Today
in this house
a very Bloomsbury tone,
a truly Charleston Gray.

March Colours

Not quite daffodil
Not yet spring
Lancaster Yellow
Was Nancy’s shade

For the drawing room
Walls of Kelmarsh Hall
And its high plastered ceiling
Of blue ground blue.

Playing cat’s paw
Like the monkey she was
Two drab husbands paid
For the gardens she made,
For haphazard luxuriance.

Society decorator, partner
In paper and paint,
She’d walk the grounds
Of her Palladian gem
Conjuring for the catalogue
Such ingenious labels:

Brassica and Cooking Apple
Green to be seen
In gardens and orchards
Grown to be greens.

April Colours

It would be churlish
to expect, a folly to believe,
that green leaves would  
cover the trees just yet.

But blossom will:
clusters of flowers,
Damson white,
Cherry red,
Middleton pink,

And at the fields’ edge
Primroses dayroom yellow,
a convalescent colour
healing the hedgerows
of winter’s afflictions.

Clouds storm Salisbury Plain,
and as a skimming stone
on water, touch, rise, touch
and fall behind horizon’s rim.
Where it goes - no one knows.

Far (far) from the Madding Crowd
Hardy’s concordant cove at Lulworth
blue by the cold sea, clear in the crystal air,
still taut with spring.

May Colours

A spring day
In Suffield Green,
The sky is cook’s blue,
The clouds pointing white.

In this village near Norwich
Lives Marcel Manouna
Thawbed and babouched
With lemurs and llamas,
Leopards and duck,
And more . . .

This small menagerie
Is Marcel’s only luxury
A curious curiosity
In a Norfolk village
Near to Norwich.

So, on this
Blossoming
Spring day
Marcel’s blue grey
Parrot James
Perched on a gate
Squawks the refrain

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!

June

Thrownware
earth red
thrown off the hump
the Japanese way.
Inside hand does the work,
keeps it alive.
Outside hand holds the clay
and critically tweaks.
Touch, press, hold, release
Scooting, patting, spin!
Centering: the act
precedes all others
on the potter’s wheel.
Centering: the day
the sun climbs highest
in our hemisphere.
And then affix the glaze
in colours of summer:
Stone blue
Cabbage white
Print-room yellow
Saxon green
Rectory red
And fire!

July Colours

I see you
by the dix blue
asters in the Grey Walk
via the Pear Pond,
a circuit of surprises
past the Witches House,
the Radicchio View,
to the beautifully manicured
Orangery lawns, then the
East and West Rills of
Gertrude’s Great Plat.

And under that pea green hat
you wear, my mistress dear,
though your face may be April
there’s July in your eyes of such grace.

I see you wander at will
down the cinder rose path
‘neath the drawing-room blue sky.

August Colours

Out on the wet sand
Mark and Sarah
take their morning stroll.
He, barefoot in a blazer,
She, linen-light in a wide-brimmed straw,
Together they survey
their (very) elegant home,
Colonial British,
Classic traditional,
a retreat in Olive County, Florida:
white sandy beaches,
playful porpoises,
gentle manatees.

It’s an everfine August day
humid and hot
in the hurricane season.
But later they’ll picnic on
Brinjal Baigan Bharta
in the Chinese Blue sea-view
dining room fashioned
by doyen designer
Leta Austin Foster
who ‘loves to bring the ocean inside.
I adore the colour blue,’ she says,
‘though gray is my favourite.’

September

A perfect day
at the Castle of Mey
beckons.
Watching the rising sun
disperse the morning mists,
the Duchess sits
by the window
in the Breakfast Room.
Green leaves have yet to give way
to autumn colours but the air
is seasonably cool, September fresh.

William is fishing the Warriner’s Pool,
curling casts with a Highlander fly.
She waits; dressed in Power Blue
silk, Citron tights,
a shawl of India Yellow
draped over her shoulders.
But there he is, crossing the home beat,
Lucy, her pale hound at his heels,
a dead salmon in his bag.

October Colours

At Berrington
blue, clear skies,
chill mornings
before the first frosts
and the apples ripe for picking
(place a cupped hand under the fruit
and gently ‘clunch’).

Henry Holland’s hall -
just ‘the perfect place to live’.
From the Picture Gallery
redolent in portraits
and naval scenes,
the view looks beyond
Capability’s parkland
to Brecon’s Beacons.

At the fourteen-acre pool
trees, cane and reed
mirror in the still water
where Common Kingfishers,
blue green with fowler pink feet
vie with Grey Herons,
funereal grey,
to ruffle this autumn scene.

November Colours

In pigeon light
this damp day
settles itself
into lamp-room grey.

The trees intone
farewell farewell:
An autumnal valedictory
to reluctant leaves.

Yet a few remain
bold coloured

Porphry Pink
Fox Red
Fowler
Sudbury Yellow

hanging by a thread
they turn in the stillest air.

Then fall
Then fall

December Colours

Green smoke from damp leaves
float from gardens’ bonfires,
rise in the silver Blackened sky.

Close by the tall railings,
fast to lichened walls
we walk cold winter streets

to the warm world of home, where
shadows thrown by the parlour fire
dance on the wainscot, flicker from the hearth.

Hanging from our welcome door
see how incarnadine the berries are
on this hollyed wreath of polished leaves.

An Arab Poet, Elya Abu Madhi (a born-Christian), not long ago expressed his uncertainty about the purpose of life in his Arabic poem Al-Talasim, He says in his poem:

I came not knowing from where, but I came.
And I saw a pathway in front of me, so I walked.
And I will remain walking, whether I want this or not.
How did I come? How did I see my pathway?
I do not know!
Am I new or am I old in this existence?
Am I free and unrestrained, or do I walk in chains?
Do I lead myself in my life, or am I being led?
I wish I know, but…
I do not know!
And my path, oh what is my path? Is it long or is it short?
Am I ascending in it, or am I going down and sinking?
Am I the one who is walking on the road,
or is it the road that is moving?
Or are we both standing, but it is the time that is running?
I do not know!
Before I became a full human, do you see
if I were nothing, impossible? Or do you see that I was something?
Is there an answer to this puzzle, or will it remain eternal?
I do not know ... and why do I not know??
I do not know!

Am not surprised
If you were to let me down
I am just a humble man
Seeking for a companion
To grow old together
A lifetime desire
I humbly ask you again to please reconsider
My small wish , only a small hope

In the meantime,
Lets be the best of friends
And understand each other
Lets god decides the truth
The real meaning of this friendship…
I hope we remain friends
whatever decides….

To God I will pray that you'll remain the same
Through the dust and empty wind of desolate heartbreak
Darling, just remember neither of us is to blame
I remember when you went away, shrouded in shame
Just a scared little boy lost in one big mistake
And to God I will pray that you'll remain the same
Handsome dark locks covered eyes laced with pain,
Eyes that knew too much for one man to take
Please darling, just remember that neither of us is to blame
You came to me with roses while you were covered in rain
Upon my doorstep with a sadness that your eyes can't seem to shake
And to God I will pray that you'll remain the same
Your kisses taste like heaven, but your words feel like disdain
But sometimes you're a dream from which I never want to wake
And darling, please remember that neither of us is to blame
I remember all the hours spent trying to tame
The passion inside us causing so much heartache
But to God I will pray that we'll remain the same
And darling, just remember that we were never to blame.