Where in fact could you tell me
lies this girl Felicity
The name I myself did give
to a perfect model of love

Is she the teenage girl at work
who flirts and shakes her ****
Asks me to touch her fleshy stomach
Everyone thinks we're having an affair

Is she the twenty something student
who texts me now and then
So we meet for illicit dates
and never anything else

Or is she the woman now past thirty
who feeds me every night
Wears high heels in bed
while loving me with all her heart

Which of these can you tell me
Is Felicity among the Felicities
Surely it is not you
I couldn't deal with anymore.

As I sit in the sun
surrounded by summers last flowers
in terracotta pots, my mind
fails to share the peace that surrounds it

Restlessness sits like a cloud
immovable in a changing sky
Where lies truth?
Amongst the shadows of this garden

This morning brought the first frost
like a warm blanket it lay
on the grass, on my soul
Is it so stupid to think

That at thirty five years
This chemistry with a teenager
Could indeed be real
and give birth to Felicity

Or does dark delusion
creep over lawn and rockery
To plant its own black seed
in a fertile heart.

The Fox River flows
like a river of nothingness
Through my mind in the light
and my life in the dark

So many places like this
where I never have been
Exist in the world
outwith my experience

A bridge crosses over
the flowing waters
As endless as time
that I cannot tie down

On the library steps
beneath an Illinois sky
A woman gazes out
absorbing the scene

Where I do not feature
except in the mind
Testing conciousness
and the meaning of life.

In the spring-time it flitted
across the bay
In form it was delicate
shimmering in the strengthening sun

Through the long days of summer
it lay restful and content
A perfect partner to the sand
in vast, oceanic majesty

Autumn brought its trials
darkness descending as the wind rose
Yet it met the challenge
returning to the fray

Then the storms of winter
overcame it with life
It drowned among its own
though its memory remains.

The psycological effects
of the rewired mind
infused with the 'Green Fairy'
are learned the easy way

As he - that is I
strides the late night town
ten foot tall
with a sixteen year old

on his arm
in the town
as the gargoyles
watch from heaven

A night spent trying
to climb a moving Vesuvius
a chimeral dreamscape
of unreal reality

As he - that is I
strides the late night town
ten foot tall
with a sixteen year old

on his arm
in the town
as the gargoyles
watch from heaven

A night of rain
with everyone talking about it
And I mean everyone
for it's hammering down

As they fill the hall
for the evening performance
Planned for outside
I take the stage

I and the others
Sweating below lights
And as my eye wanders
I see a forgotten face

There in the rows smiling back
I too quickly smile
Let it be known that I've seen
Then begin to wonder

What fills the mind?
Behind that smile
If I only knew
I'd forget the rain.

They'd said she was dead
but she served me just now
In the Royal Mail sorting office
up on Green Road

Fished out the river
was how they all had her
On a dark, wet Sunday
and I thought of the girl

Who twenty years before
sat beside me in Tech. Drawing
Who I didn't fancy
but liked all the same

Double periods
On Tuesday mornings
In that concrete box
that wasted our time

She served me just now
in the Royal Mail sorting office
She's cheated death
We're not ready to die.