I have this thought…

Our lives like leaves in autumn
From high branches falling
A thousand shades are waving
Through spectral light
Then a scent, of earth
A cold nose and the sight
Of a warm glow

Four floors up
The old flat we brought our son to
The balcony where the parakeets visit
The tall beech and the rolling park beyond
The dense solitude of the estate all around
Pushing its edges into the earthy common
Its woods and mulched graveyards

And I am walking there
With no thoughts of future
Kicking through undergrowth

Through copse then open ground
The contrast deepening
The strangers thinning
I turn back for warmth

Four floors up, I find you sleeping
Four floors up, and I am falling

The cool air slips
Through my morning window
Rests its hand
On my warm neck
And passes on

Here
The deep longing
That comes  with spring
The unbearable pull
That is the teasing echo
Of footsteps walking
Into mist or pall
Always receding
Never reaching

Is it the reverberation
Of an unknown guilt?
Like peeling bells
Cupped to ear
That die across a meadow

He is forever on the horizon
A Perfect and endless
Breaking dawn
Of grief and joy

Taking my dog to the canal
Its tea coloured peace
Resting behind the town
He noses in nettles
Relieves himself on bluebells
As I eye the bridge's span

Towards its apex
Crushed beneath the roadway
A sapling reaches out
I look closer
Its lignified limb squashed flat
Emerging arthritic
Unfurling green fingers
In a  hopeful
Reaching last

I comprehend the wall
Council funded murals
Darter dragonfly, pipistrelle bat
King fisher, KING fisher!
Are washed over stone
Pale compensation
For nature entombed

No one is watching you
No one knows you are here
Your feelings are your feelings
Your thoughts are your thoughts
Take power in that
Curl your arms around your body
Fold in your own earth
Your are as dense as peat
With certainty
As black

Only in knowing this
In touching
Your dark wet earth
Have you anything at all
To call you own
Life is after all
Death without meaning

I wake reciting lines
mouthing syllables
I thought were gone

Coldly raging
at the same hollow loss
on the edge of my dreams
you are turning away

How does it feel?

It feels like my child-dreams
the soundless screaming descent
into bottle-green dark
as the light recedes to a halo
I know I am dying

I wake drenched in this
my thoughts turn you over
and over and I ask
Could I ever have read you?

I leafed through you, yes
then put you aside
left your pages fluttering


27/12/20

Beating heart blush out my blood
Then rest then rest then rest then rest

Cresting waves crash on my shore
Recede recede recede recede

Howling gale you lash at me
Then breathe then breathe then breathe then breathe

Universe you stream away
Return return return return

In life we fill then die away
In darkness our constricted iris widens

Our life , like a time-lapse nature film plays out:
We grow, we wilt
We bolt and quiver to life
Then stagger back to earth
Eaten up to live again

Everywhere this motif
As humble as the bloat in the frog's throat
Systole, diastole
Our beating hearts our gasping breaths
Onwards, always, our lives lived outwards
Filled at rest

Is this what writers do?
Conjure the worst then set you there, contorting
to listen for the beauty that sings in suffering?
Your boiling body fights, trembling
and next to you in darkness, brooding
I see the struggling and the worst
and imagine  your beauty

as a memory that enters a room
full of mourners-
sunlit breeze captured
in billowing fabric
which turning and holding
there for a moment
lets you go
as the tears and the chatter
go on

Jan 2021

The river has pressed
Sleek backed
Beyond the bank
Forcing walkers back
Giving ducks new horizons
Opposite me here
Wet-footed on the bench
A bare tree is troubled
By some submerged thing
Making a frail and trembling hand
Of its upheld branches

Water moving through this place
Like a dark serpent
Water that fell on hills
Yielded from ice
A hundred miles from here
Passes me now
Passes the willow
Hanging in the last
Orange light of day
Trailing its fingers
In coils and eddies

It is all framed here
Indifferent and alive
Alive and forever passing

Whoever reaches into a rosebush may seize a handful of flowers; but no matter how many one holds, it's only a small portion of the whole. Nevertheless, a handful is enough to experience the nature of the flowers. Only if we refuse to reach into the bush, because we can't possibly seize all the flowers at once, or if we spread out our handful of roses as if it were the whole of the bush itself—only then does it bloom apart from us, unknown to us, and we are left alone

‘Don’t do it!’
I thought
‘A suicidal pheasant!’
Dancing at the kerbside
Brain like a walnut
Chin up in his get up
He dances there
So aristocratic
Head held high
His anxious eyes
On the crossing
It’s 50/50
At most
“Go back to the scrub!”
I think

Just like us
Putting off that anxious crossing
Hiding in our finery
Small brains
Fur coats

Strutting shoes in dust and spit
The boys make their way in scented air
This is home to the gravel pits

The intercity snakes with a thwack and a hiss
Cuts through the night without a care
Strutting shoes in dust and spit

Dead-dogs in bags and lean stray cats
Bashed old cars with their smashed glass glare
This is home to the gravel pits

Toking butts he smiles, so fit
through smoke with eyes that stir, arms bare
Strutting shoes in dust and spit

Then with cuts and grazes running, swinging sticks
A skirmish with the out-group, ****** warfare
This is home to the gravel pits

I stand here, look back and see it-
Turning for home in the cooled night air
Strutting shoes in dust and spit
This was home to the gravel pits

In deepening dream a dark moon song
Careening oration  to the reeling inside
of flickering film, burning fast celluloid
An internal tribute to a time now past

Adrift at dawn  the dervish swoops its
whirling and whining an awesome spectre
enraged she raps her raw knuckles
Pushing apart deepest self

Seeing in sleep the shadow of my daylight
That blinds me habitually; subliminally she
Speaks the script to a censored play
I’ve never seen.

The river gathers
To squeeze
Its swollen flanks through
This narrow, peopled place
In flood, It commands
New space
Spilling
              down
                          the
                                   steps

Here
******* at railings there
Meeting again to move
As one fluid congregation
Not singing, but in prayer

I am here to marvel
Toe to edge I stand
On knotted roots
My eddying thoughts
Only half perceived
Rise like an ache
Behind the face
In the palms
Like grief
remorse
Or shame

Joining the slow march
Onward to the town
Of glass, cast high in stone
Where intellect and adoration creep
My knuckles brush cold stone
Now stopped by a half opened door
To examine the blood, the skin the bone
Inside, alter bound
I glimpse
The thorns
The crown

Our shame is audible  here
It shifts uncomfortably
Among the pew creeks
The hushed bibles
Then again the thought
                                
                    Clea­rer now
                    The feeling of apart
                    The answer
                    Half perceived

Unmoved everything is leaden
My thoughts are dry
Striving like a ship in a bladderwrack sea
My vanity is death to creativity

Give me lonesome insanity
And the truth in delirium dreams

Give me  truth that hammers in torrents
At the warped deck

Give me truth that seeps and runs
To the lowest point

Truth that  opens clouds
Rolls back seas
Revealing slime-rock ****-whipped  me

Give me the humming in the womb
The beating in the drum
That settled in my ancestor’s ear

Distant sounds, drawing near

This grey sky
Squared by my window
Cut across by rooks
That rise and slide
In a moment takes me there
Like ashes kicked from pit to air

Blown east to the City
To loneliness and chaos
Beyond these chalk hills
Loose boweled I walk
At the kerbside braced
To the howling wind
In a Waterloo tunnel
Chip papers and diesel
Dizzy my senses
I stumble there, there and away
From the bloated rose-hip
The fragile blue ***,
Its paper thin skull
Deep under London’s tiles

Here Lies
My Dirt My Bones

Shall I go in?
Shall I go down?
London
Yes you have me now
You have me powerless
London Town

20.2.22

Before, I couldn’t see you
I would write about your eyes
Your smile
Your hair
All cliche, all flat
I couldn’t write
How I tried
Now I see you...

I see a green mantis
I see your freckled patina in that photo with the perfect light
I see you engaging the waiter in conversation
I see your long limbs loosely crossed
Cradling your herbal tea and segmenting your orange
I see you

The soft nape of your neck is in my dreams

I see you swimming ahead in the river,
I see your joy in that, and remember me needing to turn back
I see us crouched on the railway sleeper,
The last of the sun crossing us
While the washing up waits
The beer dries on our lips
We sit looking back at your home

I see the young and sexless person you told me about
Your nose in a book on the family holiday

I see the flicker of self-doubt
the slow rising tear that doesn’t spill over
being all things,
mother, worker, friend, lover

I see all the things you are not
that I projected onto you
Now I see you

Make a wish, and then its gone
A curl of smoke now a spent dry wick
Happiness held for a moment

Then the sickly spittled cake
For the birthday boy, mum loads him up
And jealous friends crowd round
Skirting round the edges,
Dad takes a snap at mum’s request
Happiness held for a moment

Further out, against the wall
Elderly relatives watch it all
In prickly jumpers, sovereign chains
Fisherman’s friends and pocket change
Slow and still, they watch it all

I unpack the plastic crap my parents bought
Parents doing all they ought to get me hooked
That plastic smell like sniffing glue
The cheap thrill of something new
Happiness held for a moment

Party bags at the door and then its over
Thanks are forced from mouths
By parents with an eye on the morning
Outside the orange October light is fading
On streets the lamps are lighting
And  the hush of school tomorrow hangs there
Among conkers and chimney smoke

Back inside my home the smell of boys
hangs in the air; a fug trapped
in deep pile and double glazing
The telly’s on now and **** are burning in the ashtray
Now they’re asleep, and its over

I sit surrounded in my room at the back of the house
The orange light is coming in through thin curtains
I can’t move for presents yet I feel I am imploding
Like a crinkled balloon, expelled of everything
Feeling everything and nothing
Happiness held for a moment

August 2021

“London calling to the faraway towns…”*
[The Clash]

God man, trinket man, fake leather wallet man,
Drugs man, drumming man,  dancing on the street man
Antique man, eel man, bus man, trades man
Boots man, bagel man, feed me I am hungry man,
Fit man, gay man, straight man, trans man,
Chinese man, white man, "oi-back-to-where-you came from" man
Business man, rugger man, beautiful wife and kids man
Eco man, hipster man, shouting man, shaking man,
Scowling man, scumbag man, shuffling don’t come near me man
War man, drunk man, cruising near the bushes man
Watching man, medal man, pickpocket poor man
Box man, sleeping man,think he might be dead man,
Lost man, lonely man,
Looking from the ledge man

The white noise of tarmac fills my ears
The mint of a humbug sweetens my nostrils
Mix in the stale odour of mum's last drag
And you have the annual pilgrimage west

The cool windowpane presses on my forred
Like a mother’s hand on a fever
Hedgerows simmer past, my young imagination
Penetrates the haze

Who was that?
Glimpsed for a moment
An old man in a scarecrow gown
Shuffling in leaves and loosening traps
In no-man’s land, once known
Now forgotten

Condemned, he looks somehow familiar
A sting of recognition- this is me
Half turning to look briefly, I see
My own cold blue eyes, the same
Stoop in the neck, ready for the noose

A window opens in the front
For the punctual smoke
My thoughts ****** out by the vacuum
Now there is just white noise and nausea
Nausea, and that familiar sadness
Of a long buried future

7.8.23

Soft seed circles, poplar motes descend
Come to rest, on this green slumber of Thames,
Just here, I drop my bike,
Moved to write,

All around they fall
Then rest like stars
An infinite blur ,kissing at my ears,
I am in a galaxy

Ancient light slowly turns above
I cannot remember last seeing that,
The infinite twinkle and smudge
Edge of earth to edge of earth
That makes you disappear,

I feel some of that now
The slow turning
Forever falling

25.6.22

Re-write 10/4/23, 10/11/24

Predannack

You lean back
Into the wind
On the clifftops at Predannack
It holds your weight
You test its strength
Leaning a little further
It holds, to your Joy
It holds
Arms splayed in crucifix
T-shirt billowing at your sides
Your sturdy ankles
Planted in deep heather
I watch from a rock
At the cliff's edge
Waves **** and swirl
A death's distance below
I am swept over
By sweet chamomile
Swept over
Reeling on  dizzying scents
My heart is stopped
By the Joy you feel
For the World
We killed

Is
this
all
working out

better

in another dimension

I find your sketchbook
Discarded in the corner
It is Sunday it is Winter
I open it

Standing tall
A charcoal cactus
Cutting shade from sun
In a bowl of cliffs
Flat desert expanse
Mojave, Sonoran
Bright Light
Places you have never been
Yet see the shadow
Cast around
Shimmer and shadow
Silent, expectant heat
The suspense of high noon

This mirage
Your thirsty dream
Your whole future  
Shimmering before you
Is beautiful
Beautiful like a dream
Like a life
Shimmer and shadow

You see all this
Cool shade
In overhangs
The long shadow
Stretching before you


20.2.22

spiral learning
spiral failing
life is always spiral
spiralling
twist me up
spin me down
give me a plastic sequinned crown
now I'm the bloated circus clown
ha ha you laugh!
at my dripping mascara and baggy pants
my **** in a bucket of sawdust
a pie in my face

the poles are pulled
the big top falls

sobbing in the stubs
and sweet smell of candies
I lie suffocating
sad and bloated
a clown in a plastic sequinned crown

The world spins tilted
On its axis, seasons turn
Another spring time

It ****** to life in Spring the dry dark Earth
Which points to sun and sends off the Holly King
Like a spark ignites the soot encrusted hearth
The celebrating children dance in rings
The Earth is in us too and deeply carved
In dark and light we are cleaved and tied in knots
And travelling inwards are we standing fast?
Or do we weep at demons we forgot?

What if you take that shadow to the light?
A kernel lifted from the pricked dark Earth
Who’s beading blood in rising runnels might
Rise up in us, to show us all we are worth

The Earth is in us; the light the dark the seasons
To hold our shadow to the light is freedom

On a blue sky day
Kites and gliders grounded, men
Envy the high birds

There is water here
raging, churning water here

There is sea here
Sea like love is here

The sea is voyage
Is pilgrimage, like love

Annihilation
Like love

Is wonder, and terror
Like love

Is wreck and scour
Like love

Is myth and cold
And suffocating  depths

Like love

I am afraid of the sea
Afraid of the sea

The terrifying annihilating sea
Like love

I am afraid

Turn onto
Trap grounds
Spend a moment
Curated Eden
Silver bushed
Wet scuffing squirrel
Shoots under
Rooted upturn of trunk
Slakes back
Hairy tendril roots
Finger away
Dappled heat
Old breath of rhubarb
Chokes
Stumble drunk elder
Fizzes nose
Alerted fresh
Up there hear
High branched breath
Look down there
Mushroom home
At foot
Lowly  mauve
Modest flesh
Penetrate deep
Immense
Deep dark
Wet dark
Soil
Absorbs
Thunderous
Footfall
Unperturbed

They burst upwards

All around this evening

There and there and there

Trees, Trees, Trees

Smashing through soil

To a darkening sky

Limbs and fingers and hands

Trunk and twig

Coiling coronaries

Pressed to the sky’s last

Etchings

Monoliths

Earths loud art

Not solemn

Not peace filled

This evening

Trees , Trees, Trees

Explode from the earth

Like Kraken from the ocean

Belittling

Reminding us

Trees Trees Trees

Four hundred million years

Before you breathed

Trees Trees Trees

don't assume
everyone is like you

You
A soft brown neck
Glimpsed
Swaying in your stall
Peace and steam
Your odour
Your gentle whinny
"I am here"
I pass in the delicious damp
Green scents and dewdrop
Boots that crunch in grit
Ankles brushed by nettles

Creeping in at every edge
The sting of my desire
The exquisite
Have, have not
My thoughts
Too much

So I imagine
Plunging
My hand in your mane
The tight-knit muscle underneath
You allowing, for a moment
Though unreachable, really
Always seconds from a bite,
A kick,  
A flicker of disgust

So far removed
Yet I persist
At this practiced stillness
Holding out a hand
There's that breath again
The have, have not
The all, the mane
The muscle, the flicker
The cruel bite

Nothing is moving tonight, the air is utterly still
A vacuum- it is the milkman’s hour but not even the static whizz of his battery disturbs us
Everything is steeped in silence, there are dusters in the ***** pipes
I open the window looking for a draft but even the street outside is flattened by it
It weighs all around, we are like dried leaves pressed between pages in a forgotten book
Where has everything gone?

I drift back to the edge of my dreams for a moment and in the corner my therapist sits- *****, grey and cold as death she watches. To her right is a tall walnut wardrobe, like the one in great grandma’s back room that held all the monsters as a child
Then its heavy weight suddenly lurches across the floor, a wrench and scrawl of noise then it tumbles in thunder and I jolt awake as it races up the stairs to my door
What is it?
Hiding under the silence
Now the house is hot and heavy as ever, and I open more windows
And reluctantly the air moves a little but still I can’t sleep

We don’t have winds like this
Here in the shire
Right now the world is screaming
Squirming on its axis
'I am here!' it shouts
However much you **** me

A deafening rush
The trees could crush me
The battling branches break, fell me
The low clouds lumbar onwards
Indifferent, closing down
The last sneak of blue

The west-south-westerly whips
All grass and grain flat
Against dark earth
Freshly turned by the blade
Autumn comes abruptly this year
The leaves are torn to the ground

The path ahead a boil of branches
Lashing at me
The dry-gold giant Hogweed
Oscillates with insanity
The tall beeches mope and weep above
The wind an inferno
Its sound like steam is cleansing

The earth is separate today
It says '*******!'
The wind can hear me
It Shrieks at me
My heart beats a little faster
Once again that thought of oblivion
Curls up like the sea
Now I am diving under waves

26/8/20

Hidden giver, sighing life into fields of
Wheat’s ears, rolling tide-like to meet the rusted gate of cracked through orange-ore, resting ajar, guarding the hedge line

Arms out, splaying fingers I divine life here-
God’s flame, burning Barakah, sacred zephyr
warming  fingers, frosted with tired life help them loosen and live bright

Rhythmic
Tearing
Cow on grass
Settling rooks
Cross sky
All around
Sound playing
Scent
On wind
Descending
Sun
Gold leafing
The horizon
Obscuration
Veiling arc
And furrow
Crop
And shadow
Poplar lined
Fields below
Quiet here
Above
A moment
Passes
Contrast sharpens
Trees recede
Into darkness
Sun bleeds
Into Earth

Blowing leaves around my ankles
Burning colour in the trees
You are my autumn
Long light crossed with branches
Lights your limbs
A pace behind
Your mellow loftiness
Haunts my walks
At the nearing end of day
I am full of woodsmoke fear
Changing seasons, churning motes
Unknown as the dread-dark conker
Cracking underfoot

You are happiness
Gone , now
An empty bench
Gold and orange
A pace behind
Wearing that look from the station
Pity-I mistook for regret

7.11.21