The beryl high land smoulders….

Where skinny manes of cloven trailing, cuff
the rake of jumbled scree,
a porous crux of timbered carol
matins from the mossy shrine
to urchin on the bluff and draft
in nooks of birch and bilberry.

On that high dais, Corvid tribals
potter on the reeks of gale.
Fell boatman of the troubled storeys
quarter in some sleet cabal
to throw their onyx gauntlet down
a slating arc of fallow sky.

I waved you goodbye, as if
I would see you on Sunday..

Then my Father phoned
at four in the morning...

..and my Father never phones....

Too much thigh to go
unkissed
so wet-look fabric
has my tongue
in swollen lip bit
thirst..
A sunrise skirt
eased over arches,
modest drapes of stolen
passing showers...

Your pointed mouth
has come undone, to
curse the moon in
quiet hours, running
with the liquid thought
that through your thumping mind
becomes, the preaching
of the screaming sea...

Heels, held, high over head,
A bristled language empties
you of easy , urban drag....

There is a place
In  evergreen wiles
A permanent perfect                  
of boundless dimension,
I tarry untrying in idles of hours
Lost in the halls of this subtle domain


Walk with me there
To where willows thirst
On the banks by the bridge
Where cowslip with meadowsweet
Polka the pasture to pepper
The evening with notes of the rain



Gather me in-

-There,hold me in harvests
Of memory loved,- as when
  You turned your face

To the lights on the water

and smiled the glory of day into shame.

In the second hand soothing
of darkest address: frost crawls.
Having crept down the alleys
on  serpentine silvers
to pilfer the vaults of an Indian Summer,
in crystalline raiment
the malachite pavements
succumb to its covering sprawl.

On shellac returns of lamp delta falls
minutiae maraud in bitter sweet symmetry
shattering petals, encasing in glass
the Stella shot run of the vine.
A glacier tourniquet scuppers the mold
an accomplished assassin of natural device,
with icy indifference it hushes the *****:

The Moon, for the life in her eyes.

The wimpled scrolls recede....
The Authors of the braille sands
leave Northern marrow in their wording,
as sharp as Marram grasses bent
in keening subjugation....

Illuminated Sanskrit kelp,
infused with lust of fallen auras,
scrims the ****-green gartered breaks
now shaken from the glaucous mane,

while fleets of stippled cumuli,
( rain-chartered galleons of the West)
in line astern, prepare for war
beyond the deepened brim.

We,- the town-worn Pages- flutter,
drawn to trace the moiling hem,
to pour away into the water....

Salt-preened minions of the wind.

I have to unhand her, unhold her,
spell a widdershins wander
to unpick the stitches of time
sewn together.

I have to unlive her, unlove her,
-muster a fiction, a line of defence,
a charm of protection, a cobbled pretence
to convince that I'm better without her,

- but to court a dementia
that summons a shade
to centre upon the mistakes
that we made-
is, itself, a deceit.

For there were such pleasures
embossed on the soul
to remain in forevers
that cannot be changed.