Poets like blackbirds must sing
at the dawning and ending of each day;
tear the worm of nothingness
from the heart of existence
and embrace every miracle of chance
encountered or revealed
in every stream of light.

Sun and seed
warmly embracing;

the caterpillar
winding it's way
to incendiary flight.

Dichotomy
between the struggle
to be born,
the will to live
and a crestfallen
and ignominous
exit.

The sun exits, ever so slowly,
down behind the heights of bursting-into-leaf beeches
as gym-shoe-running children
are called in to supper and to bed.

Voices sound from balconies and neighbours' gardens
while blackbirds bid, contentedly, the day farewell.
Lawnmowers cease their whirring sounds
and clippers, rakes and hoes clank in wooden or plastic sheds.

Fragrances roam the evening air,
invading every square metre with terrestial joy,
and cigarettes are passed around
as the face next door has ceased
being a removed nod and smile.

Eventually, the curtains are drawn on a happy ending
while tentative talk succeeds in silencing
any riotous upheavals that might occur
in the night's discourses and dreams.

In the supine despair
that infiltrates every corner
of the spirit's, sometimes,
suffocating privacies

we yearn
to grasp and breath
hope and the simplest of joys.

This heart
weighs heavy
on the shoulders
of my existence

as a Welsh choir
bleeds forth
another lament
for and about
mankind.

Your door
was always
open -

this time,
I entered
from the weatherbeaten
steppes
of my non-being

never to leave
again.

Is there to be no reprieve
from the mental rack
of present hauntings
resurrecting a persistent
and pervading past ?

Into the more than endless night
they loom, dressed in cloaks
and armed with countless daggers,
rusted in their deep graves.

They plunge and contort
the heart into a shapeless mass
of free-floating anxieties
dominating and dissecting
every half-conscious syllable

destroying all feeble endeavours
at any semblance of normality.