I buried her beside the clematis
Before the old untidy oak. The sullen wind
Began its circuitous hiss
A mocking presence. A cruel portend.
With fevered brow I pressed
The dark soil down, my quaking hands
My anguish succinctly expressed-
Stubborn fingers torn into blood-red strands.
Putting the ***** away, I went back indoors;
Her corpse still fixed in my sight, I made tea,
Sweat seeping from my pores,
As I drank, my hands again shook visibly.
A storm broke over the nearby hills
Roaring rolling sounds of shame,
Walls of rain thudding on my window sills-
The resonating thunder repeating her name:
‘Lucilla! Lucilla!’
Came each profound clap
Her voice within: ‘You killed me. Murderer!’
Long after the lightning’s crisp rap.
I had loved her with my infinite core,
Her screams scoured my teeming brain,
It pained me as I smashed her beautiful head on the floor,
Her rapid blood fading down a drain.
I died inside as she died my hands upon her neck,
Panting, protesting her undying love,
I gave her cheek a tender peck
Crying that the disinterested gods above
Knew I loved her too.
But, when a woman cheats,
What could an honest man do
In the face of numerous public deceits,
More so when his avaricious friends
Sample her like old women squeezing
Oranges in the market place? She trends,
Or did, for only one, distasteful, reason.
I did what I had to do. I had no alternative!
As was my due, I punished her with death,
And now subsumed in grief,
I strangle in my own dark breath
Now, each night I watch the clematis climb
Study its coiling struggling vines
Fixed in that cold, cold time
And the shallow grave on which the cold moon shines.

She came into my bedroom
                                            one winter's day
                                     silhouetted by the moon
                                           and chose to stay.


                                    By summer she was gone
                                          -figment or fey-
                                I waited for her return all autumn long
                                  wondering why she went away.

In the morning I walked out

leaving you like a

crumpled sheet, slumped across the bed.

It had been fun the night before

but sunshine cracks open the mind

and slaps the fertile brain

into consciousness.

I knew we weren't made for each other

By the curve of your lip

and ***** sink stacked with food-caked plates

the music you listened to

and the photograph of your ex.

Of terrible storms that broke through the town
Strangling, uprooting trees, slicing away
Homes, a gurgling pulsating fury of air and rain
That lasted four days. Unremitting,
It brought huge waves in its wake
From the tormented sea. All along the assaulted
Coast people choked and drowned,
Their corpses tipped
Onto beaches huddled between ravaged furniture
And drying plastic shopping bags,
Swollen limbs nibbled at by fish and *****,
And scattered throughout the streets
Picked at by dogs,
A feast that set them up
For the coming cold weather. Fleeing birds
Squalling overhead in clamorous flocks, plucked
From the sky and shattered on rocks;
The cats had a field day until
Becoming engulfed too in marauding waves
Deluging the land. Foxes screamed from the hopeless
Shelter of water saturated dens;
Only jagged ruins remained,
Futile gestures to a once-only god.
Towns inland were wrecked by the hurricane bursts
And all fell silent as the storm
Fled like a Viking raider back into the sea, dragging its
Spoils.

Sharp tormented leaves

Preoccupied with brief

Concerns, fighting against the decay

Spreading through its parts and those

Of its neighbours. Whether to stay

Or go? To cling to life or fall quietly, shuffling

Through the air, before time, startled by the wind?

The leaf’s existential angst is clearer

Than the slow pondering on life’s brevity

Of the tree, dying incrementally before

An equally slow rebirth. The tree

Endures through several lifetimes,

Twisting in agony.

The leaf meanwhile experiences,

After the clawing ferocity of casual storms,

Bubbling health, plump and green,

Before eviserating death. Is it therefore

Better to grow tall and long lived,

Enduring weather and creeping pests

Or live for only a year,

Agonised, to die in gorgeous coloured bliss?

In the deep, uncertain night the strangers met,
Unseeing, unknowing, unthinking-dulled brain and senses,
Through the porous shadows and tangled foliage they crept
Stumbling over fallen trees and broken-down fences
Their hatred binding them, root to root,
In the mediating light of the silvered moon;
Rotten barks covered in fungi, dried twigs cracking underfoot;
Reaching the village outskirts they emitted a painless moan
And stumbled on. Slow breezes drifted over their flesh, sun-driven
Investigative fingers inspecting their souls, medicating pain.
Memory restored, childhood relived, time rendered fission,
Their fears gliding away in the quietly-falling rain.

Striving through the bluster of life, together or apart,
We return to where in life we made an imperfectly remembered start.

When the sun cracked
the planets exploded
each merely shrapnel in a second-
or like the gas giants
puttering into kaleidoscopic spirals
and waving a
symphonic farewell to the universe
grasping the furtive tails
of comets.

mercury shrank into a cindered ball
venus ejected its poisonous atmosphere
like a dying woman her most expensive dresses
mars spun off into the velvety expanse of dark-
but it didn't matter.
only the earth wavered, holding on
to its dignity. Its oceans spilled out,
mottled soup shooting from a bowl,
and its internal fires groaned like arthritic
knees.

In the huge expanse of space
no one noticed,
no one cared.