Your eyes smoulder with an imagination that is even bolder than I could have dreamed and colder than this toxic air we've been forced to breathe.

You write poetry across your face to form a Gas mask of rythym, blocking out the hate yet sealing in ideas that might frustrate you.

You hear the birds in the trees and you read the articles in every magazine, you take in information like the bees to the Queen.

Your thoughts radiate an aura surrounding your entire body, you bleed history and pop culture facts, you need the written word like an addict needs their cigarette packs.

You're empathetic to your core, you feel what everyone else does so you hide yourself in your mind until you can categorize the emotions from the lies.

I know you can feel the love in your heart even through all the cracks, like a weathered and torn apart roadmap but you're taped together perfectly and even with a few wrong turns you always find your way back to me.

a talking bag of bones
a poets heart
and flesh that demands
death

it's not life...

it's not death...

but the aftermath...

All poetry,
Well it took hold of me
I mean all this poetry
It really grips the soul of me
To read all of this poetry
Well it would take me centuries
Sitting silent on endless balconies
Questioning the whats and whos and hows of me
Lying still on sturdy bows of trees
Reading through perfectly posed symphonies
Twenty six letters making all this poetry
Oh how they take ahold of me
And all of you, authors of this poetry
So distant and naive
Unknowingly knowing me
Unknowingly holding me

They’ll be rockin’ in Heaven
Down St. Peter’s Gate Way.
Chuck Berry passed over,
But he still can play.

True King of Rock,
He’ll live for evermore.
And he’ll keep duck walking,
Along that golden shore.

His guitar keeps twanging,
Wah wah tlang tang tang.
Ya want a Showman?
Chuck’s still yer man.

He died at ninety.
It was very sad.
But now he’s up there,
I’m sure that God is glad.

He’ll love that Rock N Roll Music,
Chuck’s sense of humour too.
A touch of Devil also,
When he sings the blues.

So all you Saints and Angels,
You better move and hurry,
For they all want to dance with
That amazing Chuck Berry.

Paul Butters

everything of
me was choir-song

every bolt of
air,
every summer
moon,
every drop of
cooling rain,

in spring i
melted like
a hedgerow,
in gold and
sky-bronze,

in summer i
gathered the sky
to my branches
green with shadows
of longing,

in autumn i trembled
downwards like a
girl unwinding her
hair,

and in winter i froze
on the doorstep
all black branch
and cold
rigging on
a barren ship,

everything of me
was choir-song and
i had the most
beautiful
purple throat,

i was a soft
melody of love
on a strange
moody day.