A solemn Moon, a solitary tear
        amidst fire-fly flecks of stars,
        looked east to ink-blue light rising and spoke:

Sun, do not rise today
        for love is lost
        and your warmth will sear the tears on our face

Sun, do not rise today
        time is frozen
        in the moonlit shades of night

Sun, do not rise today
        light cannot lift this morn
        from its sorrow and lament

Sun, do not rise today
        leave us be
        let all be

Sun, do not move time on
        let us lay in lovers arms-unmoving
        seized eternal in this moment

Sun, do not rise today
        nor raise the voices of hope or joy
        for a child is gone, a mother stolen

Souls are shaken
        from their earthly care – born
        to the wind and flown

Sun, do not rise today
        your time will come
        when we may turn to you again

For warmth, for comfort
        for reprieve – but ‘til then
        do not cast our shadows long and drawn across the land

Sun, do not rise
        as we catch our trains
        and walk desolate to offices and schools

Let our tears fall ‘til faded,
        leaving just the stars
        to illuminate the night.

for all my life I’ve striven hard
not to be confined
by iambic pentameter
nor other metered rhyme

You can leave wires alone, hidden away
and they still get tangled, ******* in knots,
twisted around in angry coils, like a pit-full
of leathery snakes.  Everything appears to work still fine

and it looks nice and shiny, like it always did.
Dusted off every week. Our visitors admire it,
and family don’t notice it anymore.
It’s part of the furniture, there every day;

useful and pleasurable though it is, in its way,
if it broke, it would be replaced. So why,
though untouched in anyway
are the wires in such a state?

So, moving the furniture, you try
and release them. You try and follow the trail,
from where they used to run straight and true,
to where they now entwine and choke

each other with their tiny knotted fists of flex.
And you think this is beyond the laws of physics,
That an inanimate object can come alive
With such malevolence.

You look for explanation, such as
spectral interference or evil black-eyed
midnight fairies with sharp pin-teeth,
who, in glinting moonlight, spin and prance,

Whirling the wires around, as if in some frenzied pagan dance.
Rather, though, (and you know) it’s the small
unseen twists of time that, uncorrected in neglect,
have snared the wires in their own catch net.

However did it come to this? I ask her,
and she looks at me, as if
I shouldn’t be surprised. For so
it happens every time.

The slipping plates of the planet
Grind ceaselessly against each other
In terse and violent tension.  
Neighbour against neighbour,
Conflicting caress of rock against rock
Until one gives.  

                            The tension explodes.
Little Boy ten thousand fold
Wrecks vast destruction across
Land, sea, village and city
With indifference
For whoever
Whatever
Wherever.

What feeling, what emotion,
Crashes through the landscape,
Dashing communities, families,
Mother and child, father and friends,
School children, colleagues,
Shopkeepers and trades?
Picked up and tossed over and under
By wave after wave, dragging crushing debris.
A black lascivious tongue
Unfurling its fury, lashing
The skin of humanity
From the face of the Earth.

*(And what do I care of the destruction?
Of all the pain it leaves behind?
Of the ever-rising body count
Upon a never-ceasing tide.

I am on my way, surfing
The fury, feeling all powerful
And magnificent, but all the time
Controlled and ruined).

Forced trust breeds jealousies
and in loving shells grow enemies

I measure out my days in witticisms that fall
As freely and pointlessly as leaves in autumn,
My few amongst the countless that fall anonymously
Along streets, in parks, in gardens
Filling gutters, blocking drains, making homes
For hedgehogs, rats and beetles.
Things we **** with cars, poisons and heels.