Long queues snake in the heat
Choosing life consciously
Outside the turnstiles of Wembley,
Red and white wrapped around
Faces bright with sun and expectation
As though the whole island had stopped
For an endless summer bacchanale;
And the half-empty high streets, sun-faded
Signs above Woolworths and Smiths
Boys in baggy jeans booting *****
Between parked Escorts and Cavaliers,
The electric low culture
Cans of Tango glinting, and the pubs
Still wide open all day
And some countryside unchanged regardless
Of its verges blurring into new-builds
And Satellite dishes gazing heavenwards
Where field mice once lay snuggled
In England's deep time, and
Czech au pairs and Polish builders
Awake in big houses with small attic rooms,
The lights blinking off modems;
Never such innocence
Never again that edge
Of unexamined certainty,
In history being at an end
Without a word - ravers
Were brothers, fields left untidy
The endless encounters
Dissolved within a moment
Never such innocence again.
https://allpoetry.com/Mcmxiv
1d ago
Jun 2, 2026 at 4:08 PM UTC
The sea speaks of longing
Songs from lost navigators
Echo in the cadence of dreams
Stowed half-known within.
Perhaps the rain has made it so;
Slanting across vague light
Recalling a memory of itself
Having fallen there before.
Desire is that wind somewhere
Blowing the hair from your eyes
Agitating damp leaves away
From a child's tree-house.
Only the dreamless forgo
The pain of things that will never be
As stars give out their grave glitter
In otherwise boundless dark.
Aug 28, 2023
Aug 28, 2023 at 12:49 PM UTC
Hunters from the dark
dancers in tight bunches
consolidate together as shadow.
Waiting for first light, they wait
to see what becomes.
Hands work down
broad cavalcades of ochre;
flames glint over vigorous tools.
Maneuvering across, they move
with bright reverence
and their own deep purpose.
On the wide grassland
each thing gestures its appetite,
and its consequence.
Jul 11, 2023
Jul 11, 2023 at 2:44 PM UTC
Sleep then, sleep among the stars
Dream of those days when your words replaced myth
Where all that you breathed, became the just so.
You created the coiled mornings,
And infused dust-filled days, that led
To evenings replete with quiet contentment.
What now is the purpose of a life without beauty?
What now is the purpose of a life without duty?
What now is the purpose of oblivion?
If you understand it, it’s not 'it' you have understood
The gap between melody and each second tone -
Resides in an absence beyond language.
We know this place through faded recreations of creation
The tides wash away faces drawn in sand
Only light need not hold any understanding, of time.
I meet ghosts who do not know they’re dead,
Who recite the poetry from the shade on the dial,
And know not from where, of a yet to come...
Of a wind that will blow dust from your throne,
And allow that cold magisterial, emptiness
To be filled again by your sublime sense of things.
Apr 17, 2023
Apr 17, 2023 at 7:08 AM UTC
the light at noon
spread over green:
fields of tender green
before the harvest
before time knew all
but our names.
the seasons reinstate
grass broken beneath
treads of the innocent
who tried remaking the world.
memorials of thorn
uproot in a moment
and who are we to disturb
what remains underneath.
how many lovers since
haunted by sacrifice
lay nameless across
England's pungent greens.
and with their kiss we scatter
between the gaps
in this thriving
meadow soil.
as birds above, explode
from the time-worn trees,
and wheel dreamlike, toward sun.
Apr 16, 2022
Apr 16, 2022 at 6:48 AM UTC
I must confess,
Amidst the swirling blizzard
That I had been waiting.
How to explain that feeling
As you lent into the storm
To cradle my focus
Before it swam away.
I still remember
The first encounter.
How when you're a child
Worlds alter during mealtimes.
As the adults in the room hesitated
I saw then that you lived
In the gap between their words.
I was raised in fear
To believe you spoke only
The language of regret.
To never disturb 'neath the hood
Or pause to revere, the haunting beauty
Of those lingering webs
Misting dew drenched fields.
I see you approach
In dreams, as soothed calm encompasses
Those vague surroundings
Outside, on the line
All that haunts us is just time
Looking back, like a drawn
Face in the basin.
I understand now,
Perhaps, I realised even then
Under the night somewhere
In the faint darkness
You walk beside me.
Under an emerging moon somewhere
The paths of our shadows meet.
Mar 25, 2022
Mar 25, 2022 at 6:38 PM UTC
There: in the distance
Snowfalls, heavier and heavier
A landscape of solitude, muted,
Not grieving but all-knowing.
What still moves underneath?
As I fell to thinking
You turned and said:
'Come outside, watch it fall'
Those eyes, those eyes
Recessed through the glass
Bright and visible still
As the hereafter.
Mar 12, 2022
Mar 12, 2022 at 2:56 AM UTC
I open my eyes to let you go
And hold on a moment longer
Morning, and its forceful breath
Shakes the dangling blossom off the tree.
I remember you once saying
Beauty always arrives too soon,
And that's precisely the right time.
May 3, 2021
May 3, 2021 at 12:38 PM UTC
If I dream of inaction …
I stand in that time before time
Where all possibility lays over
A field of bristling deep white
And all the words that are unwritten
Outreach every star ever stitched.
Sometimes, I picture in absence
All things waiting to be connected
To one continuous present.
Where those not yet born
And those who have lived
Exist together side by side.
Were I then to write of action
I would be drawn by narrow pleasure
Into a slow but diminishing realm.
Apr 9, 2021
Apr 9, 2021 at 8:17 AM UTC
What is that sound, when water meets water.
Sometimes far off, like fine down drifting
then close by, giving everything in hard metallic bursts.
A man and a girl like you, once met in the half-wind -
half-water, as night fell upon the wood.
As the trees exhaled, they saw how to be ****
how to retrace a moon from vague beginnings.
Tonight, it groans sideways across iron roofs
that seem to bend double, even as they hold their own shape.
Somewhere far off, the wind speaks the name,
that whistles bird-like, across the deep water.
And the unfathomable that rest, undisturbed,
murmur fluent lyrics to instinctive melodies,
which become lost, in the hour and the light.
Oct 28, 2020
Oct 28, 2020 at 12:04 PM UTC