And thus she went
Leaving behind her the many kind words
And lingering hopes that make all good things seamless,
But which fade like her perfume in places she slept.
When I saw her face disappear
Behind mirroring train reflections
I saw those who stared when we waved
Caught in the crossfire of our connection.
They should know, as all should, how
Our iron-clad love is feather armour
Marking a true knight of the cloth
The world's spasms worn about our backs with many gold brooches.
Such it is to be anointed, to filter all out
With your inestimable standards
Held high for those to see
How much she loves me.
Nov 12, 2023
Nov 12, 2023 at 7:25 AM UTC
The bright moments of the past do not die
They do not lie idly in the earth, buried beneath unpassable tombs
Their beauty does not fester or languish
Their times come again
They are reborn, are the bright things that come
Those jewels dug up by autonomous spades
They do not die, they are reborn
Our excitement like an old friend reunited
Do not mourn the past, it did not fall
Left to rot, mummified in worms
As a child when we picked it up, as an adult when we carry it
Those moments live on with us
Again
Oct 25, 2021
Oct 25, 2021 at 2:21 PM UTC
I found a pool, small
Of tepid waters, shallow
Left imprinted by the things
That long since grew big, climbed and,
Sought the ocean
I know the pool, I grew tall in it,
Know it for what it was, once
It seemed deep as the seas, wide as the horizon
Brimmed with life a thousand-led
By all the verdure of many beasts
Each began as tadpoles, swam from their sacs and
Knew magnitude, kept to the shallows
Looked on at the lurching fish with,
Fear. Met a generation in those
Huddled beside them, scared.
Growing, their arms and legs,
Uniform in formlessness, ill-defined but
Excited. Each learned to swim and laughed at
Each other. Spiralling, gangling, twisting games
Were played on shallow borders.
Our bellies touched the silt, our eyes turned out
And we flicked our feet to find the open air, and
It wasn't so scary, terrible not, look at me! Look
At me! I can go see those dark holes, hiding
Nothing, I'm sure. Let's go.
As we lost ourselves in the growing dark, we
Lost sight of the other tadpoles, and
Grew faces, eyes, mouths, antennae, or
Unsure, we grew and each became streamline, in
a thousand different ways, we swam to the centre of the pool.
And met each other, as if for the first time, but
Saw no similarity, saw only our differences, we
Smiled and looked about, and each, in our own way,
Discovered the light. We did not stop growing, did not think to,
Knew no fear, saw no dark corners, scalps touched the open air.
And we went, each found the same certainty at the same time.
We must leave, a fish, a salamander, a boatman, a snake.
Shed the oily waters and explored the fresh air. Some,
Found they could not breathe, some found themselves prey to
Unknown evils. None stayed, none I knew.
I am back now, face weathered by winds I knew not were
Out there, hands pricked by something called thorns, the
Waters so small, tepid, stagnant, shallow from all the
Absence, those things that now walk, or lie, or fly, I
Know not why I came back, or why I look now into the puddle
I see only frogs. I hear only croaks. Old things living in a drying world.
Leathery, cold blooded, oily,
Speaking only of the times when they were tadpoles,
Thinking only of the time when they were new. I
walk away, and shed the thoughts that link my path to them.
I face the wind, I face the thorns. I feel my neck and
Hold closed my gills with thumb and forefinger
Forgetting...
Croak.
Oct 25, 2021
Oct 25, 2021 at 2:17 PM UTC
I felt her on my belly
A well fed boa
Squatting for the day
She writhed as my heart beat
Drawing tighter to my
Pinched breaths
I saw wild eyes, glancing, prancing
Sprites, friends of the serpent,
Laughed, for I had fallen mute
To the forest floor, and lay poisoned
Shrinking before a gleeful crowd
In love with an animal.
Oct 24, 2021
Oct 24, 2021 at 9:55 AM UTC
Embarrassment
The first x on paper
The first glint of gold
The first step to success
Embarrassment
Oct 24, 2021
Oct 24, 2021 at 9:47 AM UTC
What's the point of the stars if they only fly to mock us
To tell of a world beyond that thick blanket of night
A moon victory above them all tells of coliseums of the cosmos
A giant in a game we were never asked to play
The sun burns itself to nothing
And we catch the ashes, plant fields with its offcuts
Never tasting banquet, never knowing super nova
Alone in the dirt beneath life
Currents blow overhead, pushing ice and rock
As balloons let adrift, finding freedom in emptiness
While our feet only know tracks and fields, grass and mud
Life with food and sleep, not soul or poetry.
Crooked grow our limbs and we think ourselves mighty
Gangly forms dancing tiny
While great domes of landscapes given face
Smile at each other and speak
Venus, Apollo, Mercury, Hades
All principles in the sky, too graceful to be understood
And not wanting our foul tentacles of knowledge
To grip them, happy to keep away from
Us oily things.
No, I don't like being human
I don't like being
greasy
Oct 22, 2021
Oct 22, 2021 at 11:16 AM UTC
Sorry said the merry man, adjacent on his way,
I've gone and ticked you off while I've been out tramping today
And in my careless frolic I seem to have stole your heart
What brutal lust you blow towards me, gushing like a ****
But I'm not la-da-dee-da-dee, a manly bearded sprite
Jingle though my stirrups do like dormice held too tight
I'm a serious enterprise, a man deeply invested
In stacking stocks and picking prices, if you're interested?
She danced reluctantly to him, unnatured to the rhythm
But with a wink she start'd to slink and jim-jam along with him
The two then picked their sandals up and shuffled down the street
And drank and laughed amerrily at all they chanced to meet
To the bank they wandered, legislating they did go
In government, in finance, in high station to and fro
Each day they yawned and gargled on a fresh new tonic smell
And went on down the street to make a fresh mismanaged hell
Soon agiggling and adultering they fell down in a mess
Holes and tears ashaming his and her once modest dress
There they lay and blocked the road till bobby picked them up
And once they'd laughed their fill of him they bribed the greasy pup
He took them to the city square and let them borrow his hat
They gave out fines and sentences for being thin or fat
They stood on boxes, had ideas for rent for half a pence
And sat gracefully cross-eyed on the splintering picket fence
Then donned a mitre, did a dance, their pageantry displayed,
They became gods, just for a laugh, the vicarage dismayed
When down from heaven lightning bolts, shot with a holy hum
Came buzzing like a hornets' nest and shocked them on the ***
A **** of smoke, a whiff of cheese, the townsfolk breathed release
Gone at last those terrors past, they could return to peace
Then up from high a saintly sigh two angels billowed down
Golden halos greasy and no pants beneath their gown
The townsfolk wept and cried aloud, their stomachs plopped and churned
To see the pair of villains there, so gracefully returned
Blessed be the kingmakers the two of them agreed
Until next weekend, Duw my dear, and until then, God's speed.
Nov 28, 2020
Nov 28, 2020 at 10:00 AM UTC
My tongue sharpened today
Angles fell off it like classroom fancies
Rationalised to a point, its first act
Was to knock out my fangs from behind.
I stumbled about the house
Slopped through the bathroom door
And foamed at the toilet seat, a
Wave broken over a rim of briny coral.
My salt winked about the walls, around the tap, between the wiped tiles
In the shower head of porous sponge
The seaweed in the pipes crawled up
And drowned me in the sickly sweet.
Downstairs smelt the same, logically the sea dumped down
Underwater fish glided past my window, all with the same
Grim face against the mirrors, aping the ocean
With me trapped inside.
I turned on the same song, fifteen times,
The sound tried to reach me with such ambition
But it floated to the top, belly up in its bubbles
Ridiculous, I scratched the date on the seafloor and entered the kitchen.
Drips everywhere, grease stalactites, from the tiles, the yawning oven, the spatulas
A Cretaceous museum where savagery is kept
In little plastic boxes, with clear peelable lids
A fresh, messy ****
In the hall the grey light descends through slit windows
Colour settling at the bottom like grit, all the greys so tall
Give the narrow rectangle an aftertaste of dust
Just one keeper before me
It devours my key, hacking as it gobbles
But it does not anticipate my twist
I gut it from inside, it spits its meal back at me
And I swing its limp, dead frame 90 degrees.
Stepping out feels like a moonwalk, with Houston's neutral formulas
Unheeded in my ear, finally I can greet the clouds, that probably escaped,
Like me, fumes from the chimney
Pale and fading away from lack of auspicious sun.
Nov 10, 2020
Nov 10, 2020 at 1:15 PM UTC
At night the stars seem far away,
But through the dark is light and day.
Nov 9, 2020
Nov 9, 2020 at 7:17 AM UTC
My poem's salt comes from the sea
Awash with flailing kelp
And absorbed light, hidden and sweet
Like me.
It rakes the gravel with its fingers
Cooly rushing over its skin
Absorbed and intended back again
When the sun blushes ruby red.
Little seals dot the waves
Mirroring the clouds
Chuckling through their whiskers, beckoning
At the dogs on shore, faithful cousins
To these rotund sprites.
The dried up fields are far away
They gasp for the rain that's closing in
With the prettiest grey clouds
Crickets jump from the Terra Cotta
And spill the Summer air, little breaths.
While ores seep into the mass of blue
Rather than be claimed, and turn the bottom muddy
In pinks and oranges dulled by the jealous green.
The fish enriched begin to talk
And their blessings pip pop upwards.
I think it's beautiful that air goes down down deep
and finds the things that need to breathe.
If only I could follow it
And be consumed by some crease
And become the ocean too.
Sep 12, 2020
Sep 12, 2020 at 4:38 PM UTC