Psychotria Elata needs your discretion,
its hot lips' bloom is premature,
****** showing at her best.

Close your eyes,
don't watch her flowers coming out,
the shock will **** your desire.

Psychotria Elata needs your protection,
its secret toes that root the soil,
may soon be dangling burned and bare.

Open your eyes,
stop the men ravaging the forest,
stop them from taking what they want.

At 1100 hours the guns went silent,
but for many men (and their families)
the Great War would carry on.

They had come to face a sneaky guest
that dug into them by surprise,
scraping skin and flesh and bone.

Shrapnel took their faces away,
digging ***** holes into their ears, eyes,
noses, cheeks, jaws, lips and teeth.

It took a pioneer of plastic surgery
to ****** it all back for them, not just the flesh
or just the bone but face, true face, their face.

Their faces finally looked back at them.
Now they found new friends, they stepped
through the mirror between two worlds.

Life clings on
In deserts, ice sheets and hot acid pools.
Those selfish genes persist:
Batons in a Marathon relay race.
Generation follows generation.
Clone adds to clone.

So life spreads:
The mightiest empire,
Covering all the globe.
A world full of living wonders.
All manner of plants, insects and animals.
Oceans teeming with fish.
From tropical paradise
To awesome glaciers.

We must be mindful
Of this glorious beauty.
Mother Nature reigns supreme.
Sing and rejoice,
Party hard
And put aside
The awful truth -
That in the end
Everyone dies.

Paul Butters

© PB 26\7\2018.

-on cracking and crushing

It's hard
to conduct oneself
when candy's on the shelf

It's there for the taking
my decency is breaking
I feel I slip away

Where's that hopeless helping hand
of my helpless hapless father
Now I need it, not in my shirt
and for once not under my skirt

Who on earth can help me stand
against this hapless hopeless bar
It ***** me empty
me - imploding star

-on a person's 20th birthday

When I turned twenty I couldn't wait,
so sure was I to change the world.
Exactly right were all my thoughts
I couldn't ever stop to state.

So I turned fourty while I built and built
on top of my precisely stated schemes.
My loved ones warned me for collapse
but I would never stop, in it to the hilt.

When I turned sixty, felt a faint crack,
not in my infallible buildings
but in my overstressed back.

Now that I am eighty years of age
I know the way to perfection:
the missing line in your design
opens your cage for the future page.

-on his painting of the dog

It's such a strange place here,
we're always ready to go.
But when we think of leaving,
it seems we just don't know.

Did someone tell us to linger?
Was it death that asked us
to wait for its eager return?

This sulky sullen guard,
this safe and sorry heart
will steadily keep on beating
until the night's black start.

Did someone tell us to pray?
Was it life itself perhaps
that came to us and went away?

-on our peace of mind

I like you like I like you,
you *****, ugly, unshaven guy.

I was muttering in the bathroom, complaining about
my colleagues, cold coffee, women and the world in general,
when I heard a knock on the door.

But there was no one else.

Then it came again and I realised
the knock was inside my head.

I looked in the mirror, looked again and I thought
it could be that ******* looking back to me.

He cannot do without me.

I won't do without him.

And knocking each other is all we can do.