Heatwave.

Dust whirling,
after mobile departures,
in the decadence
of our innumerous crows'-feet.

The sweat of humidity
dropping on neutrally carpeted floors.

Beer lubricating
many a rusty throat
as human optimism
and pessimism
make friends with each other
in a warlike fashion.

Heaving in my heart
plucked guitar note
send a hopeful tune out
to the limitless bounds
of space and the eternal.

Home sweet home -
pendulum clock
ticking and tocking
quietly on;
while the ulcer
and heart attack
haste
of impending businesses
sets forth.

I am floundering
in a sea of doubts;
in a mire
of recriminations
and guilt -
for having crossed
the border
into the unchartered
waters of individuality.
Suddenly
an Ave Maria
haunting
my room
in the isolated
depths of the night
prevents
my scream from developing
and startling the entire village.

I am
going
to Your
house
to
receive
You
into my heart -

that
I might
translate
something
of
Your
ethereal heights
into
everyday
life.

I am not
in control anymore;
unidentifiable powers play
with the furniture
of my brains.

I must go on
I tell myself;
there are things
that need to be done
but to what end?

Elements
*****
the putridness of pain's
existence
down the bows
of my sinking ship

as a scream
turns into a gurgle
before
it has really got underway.

I await,
like a weather-beaten statue
for impregnation.

No angel of annunciation
dares to haunt
the sadness of my dark corner.

Outside,
a mountain-ash in blossom
looks forward to bearing
it's fruit of red berries.

I have difficulty in looking that far ahead.

I feel
that it is not my pen
but Your's
that strikes these chords.

I feel
that Your's is the abetting
and the glory
of sanity on virginal paper.

I have a friend
who can't read or write.

I listen to him.

He always
hits the nail on the head!

I have another friend.

He was intensely unhappy
and jumped from a bridge.

Now he sits
in a wheelchair
and is intensely happy!

I hear, now,

the traffic of time

speeding on into

the gaping black-hole

of the avaricious

and all devouring

night.

I humbly ask You to unlock
the hidden silences and secrets
of my fugitive and forlorn heart,
that there may be in this exile
a fruitful renewal,
a new birth,
a total pouring forth
of without cessation worded petals
on the canvasses
of a continually blooming mind
with living acts of creation
in Your most holy of holiest names.

I humbly ask You to unlock
the hidden silences and secrets
of my fugitive and forlorn heart,
that there may be in this exile
a fruitful renewal,
a new birth,
a total pouring forth
of without cessation worded petals
on the canvasses
of a continually blooming mind
with living acts of creation
in Your most holy of holiest names.

I'm
a fool , a fool,
a fool
with a pen;

sometimes
a happy fool
with a pen,
with a pen
in his den.

Sometimes
a happy fool!

Impervious to the time of day
and suffering the idleness
of sitting in a near lifeless limbo
I am at last compelled
to take up my pen
in the almost vain hope
of resuscitating an interest
in the rhythms of the joyful
side of life.

But being of a disposition
that too easily dons the coat of distraction
my attentions are soon reduced:
to impoverished thoughts
and reflections concerning small talk
about the weather
while standing still in lifts;
to thinking about the same old heads
nodding to each other
in rain-soaked streets;
to pondering greygreen corridors
that stretch the imagination
into cheerless silences
of absolute emptyness.

Impoverishment ?

The sheen
of sun
on parked cars'
rooves
and
bonnets -

materialistic gods
in many lands.

I must be mad -
up the whole night,
a favoured night,
writing and writing;

while the village
thinks
that the lunatic
is probably
at it again.

In the awesome arrival
of your transcendent brilliance,
with all storm-clouds driven away,
my soul ignites into profound conflagration -
being endlessly consumed with raptures untold.

In the dark silences
of my downtrodden thoughts
there is sometimes
a fiery consummation,
conception and fermentation
of breaking new ground -

frontiers once again opened
and filled with cadences
and rhythms of liberation.

A blessed release
from interminable durations
of the void's hammering on
and in the brain.

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.

In time's ebb and flood
we are like puppets
falling down
and being pulled back up again
by the powerful strings
of our own primeval stubborness;

Yo-yoing back and forth
while the shooting gallery
shots of fate and fortune
hit or miss.

Tragicomedy in the full!

Precious
the days,
the hours
and the minutes
for the creation and cutting
of verbal diamonds
and rolling rhythms
in Your name.

The race is on!

In youth
my impatience was pure
and my ignorance supreme.

All advice was treated as criticism
or as a declaration of war
on the sanctuary of my little toe.

Land of pain

and complaints

teaching it's young

the miserable lessons of failure

and injustice that went cruelly mad.



An island

with rugged shores

that turn in

on it's own populace.



Rising.

genuflecting

and falling 'fatefully'

again

into the puddles

of it's own demise.



All that remains

is an emerald sadness

filled with living ghosts.

It is your birthday,
not that you really care -
you  never were a man
for giving or taking presents;
only at heart
you appreciated being valued;
for you the wishing
or being wished
was sufficient.

It is not your will
that I am a self-chosen exile,
devoid of ambition
and with no
visible interest in anything
that you might hold dear.

Yet, like a Polonius,
in the wisdom of your years
you desire for me
what is best:
security, health and prosperity.

Maybe, the Creator,
whom you most devoutly trust in,
does, after all, move in strange ways
like your son
who has begun to pray again.

I trust that
all Your
comings and goings
are for my own
and others' benefit
as You deem necessary
in Your divine
omniscience.

King of the night
with no servant in sight.

Most lights out
just me up and about

I stare at the snow
in between handling
my precious words with care.

Seeds that must grow and grow
in the springtime of my soul
being laid bare.

Late at night
in a white, silent
and sleeping village

The Elizabethan
Serenade
seduces a heart
playing
solitaire.

Let
some solace
come
from the fire
and brimstone
rampant
in my soul.

Let
a soft and gentle
lyre
transform
the black clouds
permeating
my mind
with
condemnation
and gloom.

Let
the rivers
bursting
the banks
of  my heart
subside
and flow
to a tranquil
ocean.

Life's sometimes hundrum haze
and maze of tangled thoughts
are now and then lit by illuminations
fleeting through the lens of revelation's eye;

like a full-moon in June fringed with
a late-night-hot-navy-blue satin sky
or an expanse of shimmering water
dotted here and there by an odd-dark-green island.

Waves and leaves rustling in the contented sphere,
radio-voices and soft music floating over
the air-waves travelling from a distant dwelling;

the identification of a wild plant or flower;
your only child putting his big toe in his mouth.

Miracles without grandeur,
miracles of simple import
with no screaming white gulls
spoiling the tranquil view of the sea's horizon.

Like an object
lying on the strand
I am tired and immobile
in the dying light
of the day.

Let the tide
sweep in
and carry me off
to the depths
of glistening pearls
and divers' dreams.

Look!
Here's a body speaking
some clues to answers sprung
from a tired and exhausted mind.

Just watch the rippling apple in the throat
contort the face and tear the lips apart.

Picture to yourself
in a single moment's breath
the pounding voice in the head
sledgehammering them shut again
till they take the appearance
of a fist gripping itself
in the teeth of it's piercing pain.

Mad in the furnace
of the mind;
mad in a hurricane
of despair;
mad in a meltingpot
of depressions -
time floods forth
in a total absence
far from reality
as cerebral fires
gust into one
panic attack
after the other -

there is no relenting,
there is no relenting,
there is no relenting......

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.

More than radiant
Your loving light
flooding from the infinite reservoirs
of a teeming heart
into the vast spaces
of an ever thirsting mind.

Mr. Williams
and his guitar
bring aesthetics
to a new level
in the paradise of my room -

my entire being
totally ravaged
for 3 odd minutes.

Music
flowing
in
and out,
around
and around,
weaving
and
transcending
into
eternal-like
circles of bliss
on a new
God-given
summer's
morning.

My many
faces in a mirror - multiplying
faces of one being,
dully and mistily ever changing,
erring
till the death.

My voices of many pasts and buried pangs
looming into the uncertainty
of the fleeting moment's anxiety
for arrest and release.

My memories -
generations flowing into generations,
like clouds of permanent change,
wind across the circles
of earth's heavens

and there are waters rising
dangerously higher
with the engulfing of  unforgiven faults
and tragedies not sufficiently drowned
in tears of blood and anguish

and there is the baptism
in the bath of self-confession
leading to glimpses of patches azure
in a sky of cold and brittle
shining glass.

The mirror shatters into its atoms
and while they escape
I remain
none the wiser
just being those faces,
those voices,
those memories,
those waters,
that baptism

both recognizable
and totally alien.

Night's journeyings
through the unfathomed
depths
of the mind's basements
lead
to the immeasureable mysteries
of more than this, our temporal
existence.

Occasionally adorned
with glasses of brandy
and appletart and cream;
while cigars are passed around
stimulating very good storytelling -

a highlight in the life of a coffee table.

2 and 2 is irrelevant,
3's and 4's are ridiculous -
feed your furry bears,
your Ollie Elephants and quack-quack ducks!

They are days
spent in pure learning,
though you may not know it;

no fractions, A-bomb formulas
or historical disorientations -
politics and religion
are mingled into one and nothing.

Typically reflecting
the soul and taste of your race;
poignant in the moment
but eventually flowing
to the heavens,
the unattainable
and the ideal.

Your joy is in fighting for dignity;
the well-being of nobly conquering
all jokes made at your own
and others' expense.

Yet within you
there is the sublime humour
magically transcending pettiness
and hates of every gender.

You ascend
into celestial understanding
and sweet compassion.

However
in the end
you are a tired compromise
of love gone wrong
while bearing fruits
for insecure futures.

Nothing more can be said
to describe your beauty
in all it's temperamental
indulgences and lack of self-restraint.

O! Sacred Muse
where is Your voice
in this dry
and empty
desert of immensity?

In dark isolation,
this winter's morning,
the heart yearns apparently alone
while the mind remains vacant.

Havig put the radio on
music from a requiem
seems to add to a soul's distress.

I place my pen on the table again.

Our local publican
comes from Amsterdam.

Because of his heart
he has to watch it.

Yet,
once in a blue moon
he gets very drunk.

His
favourite trick then
is to shake
every customer's hand

and tell them
with an assinine grin,
insultingly,
to disappear
and never be seen
again.

Ah!
Nobody
takes offence

and
the next day
everything
is back to 'normal'.

Outside my window
the blur of a November fog
hastens up eternal ghosts, Hades-like,
from gardens bleeding with pungent odours.

There are
the remembrances of mistakes and faults,
unexcitably, gone to dismal wastes
and waters of stale and frothy ****.

Paradox -
to name the indescribable;
give it flesh and bones,
water to drink,
food for it's soul
and a heart to digest
both life's pains and joys.

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.

Presently
You will come
into my famished
heart.

Help me, then,
times
without number,
to reflect
something of Your            
more than ultra radiant
light

in an opaque world.

Sooner or later everything gets played out
and the music stops -

childhood almost before it has begun
with youth rushing on to it's doom
and adulthood  showing some semplance of maturity
before middle-age despondency.

Wise old age reveals itself as a grinning caricature
reflecting comically the way things should have been.

Purpose -
to bring something
into existence
baptize it with a name
and bless it's frail tangibility
with an aura of poignant grace.