When younger tongues
were free of froth
when softened air propelled
the word in hungered myths
of coppice smoke,
that somehow spoke of home...


Alone
but never lonely
in the healing of a wood

befriended
green redeemer stood
a deep fermented sense
of something constant..

Sea breeze
leaves my reasoned lips
a baffled map of goodbye kisses

wispish curds of milky-weigh white horses
riding out bespoke and breaking
making shore...

this day will never come again..

tomorrow
but a glib Gomorrah,
sorrowed in some foreign fold
of muffled do's and dont's

Under this
is nothing new

flown


over my dead bodyweight
the sky reprises peace...

Though trauma grows its
root in dream,

I clover on a pearl
of sleep

upended by
a tender sun

gone


falling into

blue

Tapping
sleepy gathers

in the bombed-out
church of expectation,

fundamental frequencies

too cynical to pray

Because
the senses crave
mistake

I worship
from afar

these days,

when everything
that's ever loved

leaves something else

betrayed

Old skin,

I swore,
I would not make

But here I claw
In all my flaking majesty...

Some sordid Lord
of  all Misrule,

a gruelling fool
inglorious

anathema
to pitiful anatomy...

Shouldered cold
bent deep in grims of collar
turns to maddened hash
of blustered sleet

the walk to wear
is work itself,

A solemn
adamantine morning, pleads
me to ignore the well of failing
human kindness,

by this hand I try
to see

predicaments of alder
whip lacuna from the
mindless face

that beauty
is but symmetry

thus ,crudely overrated

and then again
there's Winter Jasmine,

understated, famined stem
emblazoned with the gemstones
of its flower

now the winter sour, sweetens
cracks the lip a timid noise

pouring forth,
some golden ratio,

sulphur trill of banished voice

The hearth had yet
to warm a toe, an hour
before the paling

The rain had gone

now comes the cold

profound, inactive ,cold

Assumed a duelling clarion
across the mustered aerials,,

slung, humboldt in the jangled dark,
inanimate