Goblins, gremlins, ghosts, galore
tricksters,  treaters: not anymore.
Parties, parades, toffees, galore
masks, costumes, gowns to adore.
My black teeth sharp anticipating gore
I’m up on a chair behind the door
wielding something special in store.
So whatever you do, I implore
don’t you dare enter my yard
since you won’t leave unscarred.
Hee. Hee. Hey! ******! ******!
Whatever neat and clever your riddle
my axe will split you down the middle.
Though you scream, squirm and squeal
You kids will be my very next meal.

Tobias

I could feel my heart
breaking like waves
on an alien shore:
shards of my soul
being put back
piece by piece though
not in the correct order.

My emotions dragged
every which way
by relentless tides
then I heard a voice
familiar calling to me
from a distant ship
passing in the night.

I can't contain it
not anymore
the pain of being
alone - it gnaws
at the hopes I once
had flying high like sails
I felt my remaining pieces
slowly cracking.

Until one day,
sooner than later
all of me in broken pieces
is washed up on a beach
making me officially
shipwrecked.

tobias

Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril ****** with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock's fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

R L Binyon

Bathed in moonlight
are my love and me.
Under the trees,
rays spreading,
through woodland:
a sylvan canopy of
boughs lighter each day.
Autumnal - not dying,
retiring, destined to return.

Plants and creatures,
taking refuge in
mother earth,
mother nature.
such delight,
each night,
sitting outside,
my Love and me.
together - yet solitary.

No other humans
distracting us.
Silent and still
only nocturnal
creatures stir.
What magic,
what sanctity,
mystical delight.
together with THE ONE.

Our senses feeling our nature,
always here - never apart.
Not fearing death, loving life,
relaxing, laughing, pure and free,
forever more, just being,
revealing the truth of what
we have become,
that which we are
who we always were.

Such sweet life:
my love and me,
sitting here in
this place - this Autumn.

Tobias

We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come,  
were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two,
the youngest assistant curator in the country.
I had some good ideas in those days.

Well, what we did was this. We had boxes  
precisely built to every size of canvas.
We put the boxes in the basement and waited.

When word came that the Germans were coming in,  
we got each painting put in the proper box
and out of Leningrad in less than a week.
They were stored somewhere in southern Russia.

But what we did, you see, besides the boxes  
waiting in the basement, which was fine,
a grand idea, you’ll agree, and it saved the art—
but what we did was leave the frames hanging,  
so after the war it would be a simple thing  
to put the paintings back where they belonged.

Nothing will seem surprised or sad again  
compared to those imperious, vacant frames.

Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble
after the daily bombardments. We didn’t dream—
You know it lasted nine hundred days.
Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie  
sometimes a foot deep on this very floor,
but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell.

Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you.  
Early one day, a dark December morning,
we came on three young soldiers waiting outside,  
pacing and swinging their arms against the cold.  
They told us this: in three homes far from here  
all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad  
to see the Hermitage, as they supposed  
every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing.  
Now they had been sent to defend the city,  
a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe.

I had to tell them there was nothing to see
but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung.

“Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.”

And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger  
than all of us being here in the first place,  
inside such a building, strolling in snow.

We led them around most of the major rooms,  
what they could take the time for, wall by wall.  
Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them
part of what they would see if they saw the paintings.  
I told them how those colors would come together,  
described a brushstroke here, a dollop there,  
mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout  
and why this painter got the roses wrong.

The next day a dozen waited for us,
then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes.  
Each of us took a group in a different direction:  
Castagno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cézanne, Matisse,  
Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer,
Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood, and Gropper.  
We pointed to more details about the paintings,  
I venture to say, than if we had had them there,  
some unexpected use of line or light,
balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces  
the same way we’d done it every morning  
before the war, but then we didn’t pay
so much attention to what we talked about.
People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact  
we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned  
out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings.

But now the guide and the listeners paid attention  
to everything—the simple differences
between the first and post-impressionists,
romantic and heroic, shade and shadow.

Maybe this was a way to forget the war
a little while. Maybe more than that.
Whatever it was, the people continued to come.  
It came to be called The Unseen Collection.

Here. Here is the story I want to tell you.

Slowly, blind people began to come.
A few at first then more of them every morning,  
some led and some alone, some swaying a little.
They leaned and listened hard, they ******* their faces,  
they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them,  
to see better what was being said.
And a **** of the head. My God, they paid attention.

After the siege was lifted and the Germans left
and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places,  
the blind never came again. Not like before.
This seems strange, but what I think it was,
they couldn’t see the paintings anymore.
They could still have listened, but the lectures became  
a little matter-of-fact. What can I say?
Confluences come when they will and they go away.

MILLER WILLIAMS

You are swimming,
breasting the waves
in a wild blue ocean.
I am an incoming tide,
foaming white, surging
into  underwater cleft
probing, lingering long,
holding on, bursting in.

Then ebbing quietly into night
into stars, into fleeting sparks
of myriad fire flies flitting
over moving silken surface,
itself a ghostly glow
of phosphorescence,
a transient trail
of luminescence that
fades to reappear as light
to penetrate deepest depths
of the  ever restless sea.
I surface and breathe into you.

Tobias

'Because I am mad about women
I am mad about the hills,'
Said that wild old wicked man
Who travels where God wills.
'Not to die on the straw at home.
Those hands to close these eyes,
That is all I ask, my dear,
From the old man in the skies.'
                Daybreak and a candle-end.

'Kind are all your words, my dear,
Do not the rest withhold.
Who can know the year, my dear,
when an old man's blood grows cold? '
I have what no young man can have
Because he loves too much.
Words I have that can pierce the heart,
But what can he do but touch?'
                Daybreak and a candle-end.

Then said she to that wild old man,
His stout stick under his hand,
'Love to give or to withhold
Is not at my command.
I gave it all to an older man:
That old man in the skies.
Hands that are busy with His beads
Can never close those eyes.'
                Daybreak and a candle-end.

'Go your ways, O go your ways,
I choose another mark,
Girls down on the seashore
Who understand the dark;
***** talk for the fishermen;
A dance for the fisher-lads;
When dark hangs upon the water
They turn down their beds.'
                Daybreak and a candle-end.

'A young man in the dark am I,
But a wild old man in the light,
That can make a cat laugh, or
Can touch by mother wit
Things hid in their marrow-bones
From time long passed away,
Hid from all those warty lads
That by their bodies lay.'
                Daybreak and a candle-end.

'All men live in suffering,
I know as few can know,
Whether they take the upper road
Or stay content on the low,
Rower bent in his row-boat
Or weaver bent at his loom,
Horseman ***** upon horseback
Or child hid in the womb.'
                Daybreak and a candle-end.

'That some stream of lightning
From the old man in the skies
Can burn out that suffering
No right-taught man denies.
But a coarse old man am I,
I choose the second-best,
I forget it all awhile
Upon a woman's breast.'
                Daybreak and a candle-end.

W B Yeats