We sit cross-legged in the story corner
Breathing faint ammonia smells.
Table chants and hymns echo through corridor acoustics,
All creatures great and small.

We are wedged in a tangle of podgy thighs,
Grazed knees, scabs and warts.

And Anthony is sitting alone again
Where he can do no harm.

Yet he said he would bring it, and bring it he has.
Its tiny white head is nosing over
The  hem of his pocket,
Whiskers a-twitch and
Eyes like tiny blood blisters ripe for popping.

A shudder of shivering whispers and
Nervous heads are half turned:

Yes, Anthony is smiling his special smile.

Mrs Lloyd has found the page,
My lids are squeezed tight
As I urge my mind to follow her away
From here, away from now.

For playtime will be ****** once again.

Sunshine,
Birdsong
And children drunk on
Lemonade
And laughter.

That Welsh picnic
Has lasted forty years
And will last forty more
In daydream

And nightmare.

The stream babbled
Over pebbles,
Fern fronds
Brushed our sun-browned shins

Till the dead sheep
Slugged us in the guts.

Bloated and bulbous,
The body dammed the stream,
Its lifeless eyes
Crawling with life.

Those pearly marbles were
A child’s looking glass into death.

The rocks we hurled at it
In reckless revulsion
Were the screams
Of violated youth,

And those empty dead sheep thuds
The dawning of our mortality.

Ambush
An azure curtain is ripped in two
With scornful arrogance

Needle-points glow
Weaving the rift with intricate wefts
Of red
Of white
And blue

Heady aviation fumes
Lift us swimming
Skyward

Imaginations looping the loop

Gazing at bubbles
His infant world is contained
In the moment's joy

Cried a knitter (found **** on the beach),
"Look away, guys, I beg and beseech!
I'm a **** young *****
Who's not wearing a stitch,
And my knitting just ain't gonna reach!"

Angular shafts
of shimmering
April light
charge
each atom
of the morning
with rhythmic
Parisian
energy