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

When,
the being, surly murks,
hobbles, heart-bulb hurt,
in furtive mist,
obscured

when
fields of the falling mind, pine
sight-less in a fog-banked shawl,
lured, hurriedly by nothing
more than fear

-I will still believe, it's somehow, there-

that sailboat
with seabird halos

gliding, dearly
down the dusk

with just enough
to love

Martha

Your kin still fly
uncaged and called

young November sky
                   scored countless

      For three high days they came
                                     great in massing
                       climbing, radiant
                       fire-milk lariats

           gaps in blaming
rain pursued.


When leaf-cull doors
                      low fruit to fall

                implores the motley
      parkland bronze



Your kin will fly
                     uncaged and called



Your legacy
lives on.

Time..

slipping
from the parapets

a rorschach night
laid out below

If mine
is but a little while

then yours is not
for me to know

so, glittering
away, we leapt

from all convention
disavowed

restoring
golden folklores

with our whispering
of owls

We'll tell the Keepers
of the gates
that guard our varied heavens

-we weren't engaged in cruel crusades-

we just supplied the weapons-

Wind
has banked,
-grown little teeth-,
portentous new alignments
meet , exaggerated,
weather veined,
behind impatient
branches

Flames divine
entrancing shivers
breath, a ghost
an omen passed,
fragments carried,
Icy river
Holly-crowned,

She dances

All I've seen
are legs

of the bloke
upstairs

believe me,
they are snappable

I've knocked
his door

he doesn't
answer

loots
my calm
with his
bass enhancer

Look,

I'm an affable
kind of guy,
but ..

this ******
is testing my
patience

I want him
to die

Not so he rots
in a puddle of snot

-I still claim a frisson of feeling-

plus I don't want the hell
of that festering smell
or the pain of repainting
the ceiling...

I don't try
to be mean,
to stir-up a scene
but the grinning is
hard to pretend,

so I'll sit on my hands
and mutter those plans
for that thin *******
to end.

Pre somnabulation
I would taste the breeze

tease
the dew-lit louche
revealing airborne revelations

tingle,
soft of foot, divining
cool uncomplication

drinking deeply of
the hill-born wood
contented

in
passive eccentricity,
I celebrated unison

a humbling becoming
only dignity condones

When transitory laxity
forgave my foreign callowness

I took the private brook
to where the quiet rooks row home..

All this life
has left me staring,
passed me by as I was standing,
hands in pockets, thinking,
planning, something
I'm unsure of.

Long time - no sea

and feelings of the ocean-pull
have gained the upper hand,

There is nothing here
in writing,

just pigeon- breasted
righteousness,
increasing stipulations

All that meadowsweet
and moonshine ran,
to desert sand androgony

sank lower
than the daily dip
of fire's head in middle distance

Dizzy social densities
imported inner-city syndromes
proffer only impotence
of temporary reprieve

seems hard to bed
the disenchanted,
sickening for cigarettes
for solitary epithets

-ennui-

So, hide away
demands that breed
the need to know the answers

Been peeking
round the prism bars
empowered sense of self defeat

For sugared-melon hedonism
far too many lines have soured

Long,

Long time - no sea...

Mood

needs trimming,
handling,

thought

beseeches management,
preventions of digression

Yes,

I know these abled tangents,

-peculiar obsessions-

how they float up, moon- mouthed,
dream-lacquered vagrants,

Superlative deliverers
of profligate insistence

Their cool what-ifs
pontificate,

the vacant-eyed
rhetoricals,

excited by this delicate
existence

The trick is
to break the fall,

prepare soft landings

roll forward with
some standing joke,

calling-in the softball laughter

drawing on that coruscating
excellence of company

the fool congeniality
we coaxed in all conditions

We'll repeat this to ourselves
as we go about our
business....



Time will take the evidence,
possessions from the locker

but nothing is forgotten

as you're always
with The Boys..

Please,

explain..

Is there a peace,

a deep and swirling peace?

does that fabled light leave
the body ,released
from an anguish
of gravity

Can it be that you
are there?

Sustained,

outside these
small perceptions

even after all this time
the questioning

remains

So you identify
as a cat,...

I'm alright with that

come in through the flap
in the back door ,

eat jellied meat from a bowl on the floor

crap in a tray or lay
cables in neighbours
back yards

Shouldn't be hard to tell

you're a cat

Beeline to your feline kin, slapping
the thatch off a whiskery chin
and yowling like grief

treating your mates
to a corpse of a bird
that you hold In
your teeth

lie on the sack
with your tongue in your crack

and I'll back you're a cat

But I think you'll change

in fact,

I'm willing to bet

When you're not so busy,
oh, little Miss Frisky

We're taking a trip
to the vet

Profanities,

declarations

bombastic, love/ hate sprayed, whatevers,
beer-stained brutalist underpass

the lake, a paper-mill, stink of pulp-steam,
dog-**** minefield ,fast-food cartons

park-and-riding, egg-fried verges
turgid outflow,

Down this squeezed tube,
of dead algorithm n' *****,
blue-green algea ,wetland gangrene,

come Nightingales..

Meliflous revelry,

distinctive dichotomy,

obvious opposite

oddity

Beneficent Mediterranean
medicine chugged via
secretive syrinx

sweet,

sweet

sweet unplugged jugular

thick cut clarity, every
note a pearl-dropped hope for muddled

ditches, creeks and jetties, broken
wings of football pitches

blood of oak and bluebell
soaking smoke above the muddied tracks

and clearing,

clearing all
before their song

We
were once
the Spring

Easter voices climbing
from a namesake lane

Early risers,
Windmill limbed and finding
out our simple selves

Nimble, skinny
twitten skippers, wile-aways,
unburdened, burning, spotless
in our pheasant- feather gold.

One decade undecayed
brought all the stories ever needed

One decade undecayed
before the innocent
were sold

Becoming
husks of things
hollowed out and sickening
for nourishment

mystically redundant

raised to graze on empty calories,

spineless fluids puking
endless effluent
of chosen pronouns

Influence biology

Identity a bracelet taken
on and off at will, by
Pop-up preachers,
screeching out
their digital misogyny,

Narcissistic troglodytes,
who, prancing in their
echo-chambers,
jettison the Suffragette

there's no such noun as Woman,
Helen Reddy-or not,

Forgotten sacrifice of troops
has stooped to this..

Time to decontaminate

shall I tell you
of the Snowdrops
that are showing,
by the garden gate?

Slowly
it begins..

tiptoes down the bantam
skin, one bird awake

water holds both
cold and oldness
somehow fresh

and freezing air
grows, unaware

that yesterday
existed..

A lorry carries
off the stars

The barking dog

demands,

demands,

insistent as the car
alarming movement
at the window

was a virtue
gentle and benign,
she offered up her qualities

but no-one had the time..

On
this crest
a learn of words

From the ruby
throated humming
burns a burst of brittle
somethings loved

as we remember
better times,
from vicious
days that were...

At the falling
of its maker,
promise ends

for the bravest
of our betting
is but pennies
in the fountain

take a moment
to attend the honour
promises deserve

then return into the light,
a brighter soul...

My trepid step
has long abandoned
carefree whips of youth,

Thus, gingerly I test
the bridge for traction,

A full beam darkness
buckles back
the harness of my shame

misleading
ever older bones
across this gaunt canal

Suddenly
December...


with a rueful
little smile,

swept the weeks
into a pile

of a year
gone by...

They'll give me a page
present me a pen

but I'll draw my
own conclusions

Leave
in peace


this gull-bone light,
to beechwood feasting
vapours,

And may it be
a paper ship,

our languages
of liberty
borne sea-ward
by the falling water

thoughts
to mean the World
for those who languish,
foamed in contemplation

bending
from their tree-top
forts to bid the fond
farewell

I have
not forgotten

-you-

purring, from
the parching tree

Your unassuming
crooning wooed
the willows
of an older
England

earth-smoke

fumitory..

summer songs
of Solomon

A single sweet monotonony
dependable as harvest store

came summoning the daysleep
word delectable.

The form
the flux,
the constant
becomings

the duty,
distraction,
the running
of motors,

the quotas,
the breadline,
the rising
and shining

the hiding
a stupefied look
in your eyes

There is an art to letting-go,
A craft, I hurt to master

I've asked the four-winds
what they know

But haven't heard
their answer

Someone
swears

"We'll
never see
the likes of this
again"

The day
withdraws
exquisitely...

Charisma,
only evening has,
coagulates
in orange bloods..

dancing by the castle turrets-

scarlet mixing fuchsia pinks

sinking into psyche ...



How joyously
we raised our arms
raised our arms and sang,

sang deep into the starlit mirth
of everything we ever were

and ever dared to be...

Taste
new words
to see
it through.


a pseudo
synaesthesia
grown easy
on the eyelet,
fits, apparently
awake

the derelict
convictions
say,
it cannot be
this much is all

The All, we are
to ever have
and less the time
to take

Seems aeons
since the badlands
let, their Agincourt
of arrowheads,

projecting from
the epicentred
tragedies
of Your


a softer
vector
than before

yet, pertinent,
as ever

Their
ambient
trajectories

descending
back to you

.
In this
asphalt
halitosis,
growing tired
of my kind

noting doltish
bovine, influence
as drivers of despair,

I fair
impossibly


To think
my smaller feeling
called the villagers
to prayer,

two hundred
miles East of here
In wealds of hop and apple..

How
I wring these
calloused grapples, well,

aware of my atrocities

confiding to be someone else,

sometime away from this

'Tis a tyrannous
horology that haunts
the lighthouse keeper's watch,
the turning beam he mans alone
splits night for but a single beat.
His thoughts are nothing more than mist
a slow condensing of the airs
that form about his rising chair
and chill his idle feet .

The house bound head
had heard the news

old-money descant
dipped in dog-rose

Tuning forks
for goat-foot Gods
curating song
bedazzled zones

The crown
emblazoned sink estate
retained the annual Pilgrim's rite

where
roundelays
round every door
bore cherry blossom white

I was going
to text you

to let you know
I have your phone

but I have your phone,
so I couldn't text you,

but I guess you
didn't know...

I tried
to call you

you were out,

left a message
for you, bro..

like, I said,
I have your phone..

With
all those
Russian tanks
advancing

why are boys at
Lockheed Martin
popping corks
and dancing

like there's
greenbacks to
be gained...?

I note
the bird sings
beautifully

but does not
sing for me

This
will be a
low colt prayer/
a player's prayer of
sayings dark anointed,

sliding in
to new existence-

trailing disappointment,
from the one that went before

At this
appointed juncture

I am more
or less
the same..

my un-angelic
angles grind
in uninspired
office

from this
I seek a mealy sway,
a speck of strength to recollect

exhilarating dialects
my lovers deigned to speak..

So I gave Bob Dylan
a Greylag Goose

( for his wildfowl collection)

I phoned him and asked
what the bird was up to
and he started to reply,

" The Anser, my friend..."

- get the folk outta here, Bob!

Today is a duck
sort of day,

grey and windy
with waves
on lakes..

good for choppy,
                            bobbing,
not so great for
                             dabbling

but ducks find ways...

see,
to our
stuck look,
they're doing
duck-type stuff,

just as
the text book said

or

while they paddle
are they pondering
their station in the universe

expanding on the mysteries
of bread.

A gunshot
splits the air

resounding
whip-like across
the back of morning,

milling rooks
erupt in flight
exploding out
the tall, thin, tree

assurance
has been tangled with,

a rabbit scarpers
for the warren ,
breaking, frantic
to evade
those hands
that shatter peace.

Those nameless
hands that claim the day
that rob the complex
of its store,

Those heartless
eyes that aim out life
that blackened eye
that flames the roar

What vow
knows iron twinned
with flesh,

what conscience
has this beast.

adept
in deprivation are

The hands
that shatter peace

I
have
grasped
how cold
it's grown

now I
cannot feel
your hands..

As I recall
we watched together,

turning off
the upstairs light

we huddled by our
landing window.

bundled
under burgundy

We stared across
the road, toward

that solitary
street lamp

both silenced,
by the wonder
of it all...



So when
the first flakes fall

I become that child,
once more,

my face behind
the curtain

forehead pressed
to freezing glass,

being careful
with the breathing..

living only
for the quiet snow



some part of me
expecting you
to be here

And I shall
flinch the brittle creature
from the rock face

proclamate,
proselytize,
with frightening
euphoria

to your glorious embrace,
I must comply,

perching
vulturine, delirious
impervious to pain

near that place
between excitement
and all possible regret

I will go by

looked
into the mirror

there was
nothing staring
back at me

could be
I'm free

could be
I'm free

Leaning more to
Winter now,

I set a silent
time aside

become a thing
crepuscular,

led in and out
of twilights.

This vintner's loss
of glass-blown height,

too intricate
to comprehend,

like promises
we occupy,

leads meaning
to an end.

As
if from
nowhere,

a dimple
of that far-off laughter

ripples through
the wavered spaces

fainter
than it used to be

indubitably
yours

In
our culture
of elusive truth

I
place
my faith
in doubt

And on this sluggard
mattress find me

slipping
from a cast
of frazzled intrigues...

A continental tiredness
has undermined
all frequency,
alleviated
monologues

and more...

Gone
overboard,
abating, freighting
ingots by the pocketful

To soothing leagues
of mazarine,

I

dolphin

down

invisible




While
off the prow
of Longships Road,

the morning wades in tall

A nascent scent of wet light glares,
cetacean skinned.

Invincible.