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1.1k · Aug 2015
Where Swifts Fly
A feather will drift but hard as is, you cannot catch a migrating swift. A tap will drip, a slow death rising from an evaporating pool, a cloud will steal what the sun will lift. Life will wilt and seeds will sprout, earth will provide what deity choked on drought. Promise will hibernate and people will pray, roots will remember and hope will stay, next seasons gorged seeds on which swifts will prey.
843 · Aug 2015
We Love Urban
We love urban, ice wrapper choc full, dense with matter, cream the power runs through, finding space, each cell. Unit, one by one, stacked upon deck, pile, floating concrete and multi access path. Crank each floor, glass patent steel, glint the Thames, Humber and Clyde, a boat in the reflection, slum cleared gentle penthouses on the other side. Dogged, ***** not allowed, Barking, Hackney, Toxteth, Little Ireland aka Cardiff gone. Dodo, hatchet, escalate poverty, high rise cool, the high rise flat.  Crowning glory, a sea of chiming memories, stirs the tenement cat. Swept beneath the paradigm, catapult off the parapet, somersault into a different time, moonlit skyscrapers, street sweepers become the concrete and the fifty foot glass dancers, cross between the cargo arches, gargoyles and shields bring them to the ground. The twisted metal of prams and brand new cars grind, traffic in drones, and the city drowns. Strip turn central, gorgeous girl, Hoxton lad, a touch too Dad, deposit on a Liverpool street pad, generation retro spinning fractal, money linear pavement uber yellow, scuttling insects and street martins, skylarks flying Saint Pauls cross and ball bearings, shopping centres unending. Biting into Cheapside, the hidden livers, gold delivers, pure to stay the shivers, the office block rises. Sharp bends, the bridge divides, shark rides the sky, dumps the bank and pierces its side, docks in every city worldwide, rivers pink with the ticklish blood of regicide. Pumpish, Victorian, sweet and blue, the older the City the quicker the glue. Mortar rectified a moment to ***** and overawe you. Shock, new wave architecture, backhanded awe. Brum pill wave beast eat your heart out, find another Chinese storm, currency blizzard, scales hardly balance, aha you had it, now you simply own. Own the moment, the pebbledash, corrugated roof, outside toilet and underground transit. We love urban, your moment we cherish and drain, there is nothing we can’t refuse to understand, too complex to refrain. Bounce as we ride the terrace and its suburban long train. Take your sweetheart on the nightbus, ****** him her, the hier of your plane, that’s where they will love you in the memories of the life near the top floor, and the final flight you were too drunk to gain. Seventy Two, you’re only thirty and you’re on forty one. You’ll fall back or you’ll begin ascendency. Shrink with wisdom, pick up the building, a tool, dreaming of scaling London, young a journeyman, jousters young son, learned, resisted the gun. I’ll fight with two hands, pile bricks or guide with a pen. Draw your city, write my memory, bind moment with every fragment, underpath, cycle through. Lights fading, jumping colours in the district where the girls who live the density beyond you and me, each element boiling their hearts and steaming potent New York’s paths. You had poetry in the apron of your mother’s lap, golden syrup and milky sap. You love urban, fifties bubble contrast in your seventies shunted through urban oasis and with that unknown factor, uber bijou, ‘Finding Nemo’ flat. We are urban, you are fashion, you are the generation that copied that, found the culture in the swinging city, post uni shack. Seven Eleven, Atlantic side heaven, promised more than double checking your watch before bedtime. Look at your daughter, she’s got ‘more than’ you hoped for, already in the palm of her sleeping hands, waking up to a metropolis only she will understand.
757 · Aug 2015
Eternal
There is hope and heaven on the other side of never
Where rain falls like a chandelier with fairy tale endeavor
Where green rolling hills offer up rainbows and marshmallow clouds
And everyone there enjoys feeling under the weather
I struggle finding titles for my poems, I always write them last, often years later, if at all. To me, emphasising one theme, at the expense of others, can make poems appear a little top heavy. Does anyone else share this view? Is there a skill here that I haven't yet mastered? Would you suggest a different title for this poem?
410 · Oct 2015
The different colours of me
You are what I want you to be, a canvas on which I paint the different colours of me. As I grow old, no one left to see what I see, I am left behind yet closer to God. And now I die and dream in the same way, to find a God that is just like me.
360 · Oct 2015
Washing me away
They are young, I am old, I have achieved a solid age. I am a rock, shy of a rising tide. They glitter in the daylight, even if that warmth draws them cold. Somehow they survive, take root, embed or toss within the bay. The bulging sea merely touches them, yet it washes me away.
328 · Aug 2015
A Horse
A horse alone, in a field of its own
With nothing to do but eat the grass
To feel the sun, of a day begun
And watch the people pass

— The End —