Dull pattering through agonised woods

fumbling winds, serrating storms

animals vanishing into the undergrowth

scurrying beneath the ground

birds huddling under leaves.

The river breaks its bank

water spreading out like *****

villages swamped with infestation.

The storm batters and bruises,

bellowing through the night like a troubled god.

Crushed leaves in an old book

Squandered memories;

In the dark, an old woman speaks

Softly

Through cracking teeth

Of an ancient fast disappearing love

Looking for the light.


‘As my future is invisible

I live in the past,

Scrounging memories

From fading dreams.’


Her words gently rustle.

Reconstructing the past

A straddling child

Mimics her toothless sounds.


‘I remember ***

I remember caresses

I remember coition’.


The rambling hours end in a sigh

The quiet voice in a whisper.

Time is a walk away.

Beneath the water lived a nymph, beautiful as
A flower, if you like woman with petals
Growing from out of their face
And lips adorned with myriad metals
Moving silently with infinite grace.

Fishermen who caught her, in alarm
Tossed her back with dismayed cries
Fearful that she would do them harm
When she exposed her fangs, darting from her eyes,
Forked tongues from each palm.

But apart from all that, she was a delightful creature
As proud as a catwalk model
Sexuality impressed into each feature
Death in each cuddle,
Poison injected from each freshly opening suture.

At the sea’s dark bottom lived the nymph
Devouring fish raw, terrifying sharks and barracuda,
Dining on shellfish and prawns for lunch;
Darting amongst Angel Fish and eels, a hungry aficionada,
Tearing into shreds what she could not crunch.

Gentle with her own kind until coition
Was complete, when if hungry she devoured
Her temporary mate without undue consideration,
No please or thank you. Feeling duly empowered
By her actions, as confirmed by her explosive, acrid indigestion.

No longer young, her children dead,
She glides through the water from China to France
A preposterous seaweed hat upon her head
And in several places, impaling her scaly flesh a serrated coral branch.
Her sartorial taste filling even the sharks with fin-quaking dread.

The last of the kind. The others are (literally) toast.
Protected by animal charities here and abroad
She gladly subsists on ambitious swimmers who venture far from the coast
All she can now catch or afford.
A capricious tyrant until the last, when, victim of a fisherman’s boast

She was hoist up like iniquitous cod
Out of the sea, paraded on the deck while she struggled for breath.
Shot at. Abused. Poked and speared with a steel tipped rod,
Dragged into the harbour, pummelled close to death.
Screaming out, as she in unexpected agony died: “I thought, I truly thought, I was god!”

It was our final day together
During an awkward time, strolling purposely in the woods
Beyond town, sheltered by the interconnected canopy
Of colluding beech, joined in suppositious intimacy.
Pausing where serried rows of heavy-leafed fern gathered
Around a half-hidden stream,
And we stopped, lying down to make love.
In the cold fading light.
Fox and badger shuffled anxiously away, spooked by our jerky movements and unsteady moans.
We parted as the moon began blooming in the dark sky,
She returning to her husband, I to my wife.

I saw her again, I, an old man in a ***** coat fluttering in the wind,
Snatching at dying memories, remembering
A hundred other women in a hundred places,
Their features in lustful heat evaporating like water.
Seated on a park bench, a grandmother with a swollen leg
Bent over and senile, I, in a momentary, flashing epiphany, recognised her smile.
Her eyes, that once I loved, shrivelled by cataracts, she bellowed
At ghosts in the sunlight.
Identifying her long-dead husband in the gathering shadows.

Our frequent copulation had always been long and energetic
Enough to light up half the town, our laughter lighted
Up the rest. Walking through the fields or sitting in modest
Restaurants, our conversation roamed from favoured food to preferred, most stimulating books.  
Mutually absorbed, we happily exhausted our youth!

Fifty years later, dribbling through
Pavement traffic, a strange, erratic
Coalition of people, bikes and mobility scooters,
She ****** out a shrivelled arm towards me,
An exclamation mark on a memory of soft bleached skin
Dripping with love,
Vaguely recalling me as a shade from a more
Hopeful time.


I shrank away from that shambling, once beautiful, form,
Refusing and betraying her,
Our lives and bodies once gloriously entwined; her fate also mine.
I remained unalterably committed to her altered end,
Minds fading gently together.

When the light went, a cold wind blew.
An accumulation of warmth
came from copse and hill,
cheap spawned and self created,
as the night renewed.
He walked home, careless of his stumbling steps,
and softly threw his bags to the
floor, demons on the hearth-rug,
coiling snakes and insects everywhere.

It was all behind him now.
A sullen fist of half-remembered regret,
the weather-laden wood carrying his dreams
in each silver flaked leaf.

A half-remembered face, an
age destroyed beauty.
It was time to go now!
Time to go!

The sunrise burns the sky
A carefully coloured explosion
Blooded light flooding the low Kent fields that lie
Before Maidstone, excreting soundless motion:
Yellow carnation shards sway
With this violent advent of day.

In Hucking Estate diaphanous bluebells nestle
Beneath the groping canopy
Of Ash. Oak; the encroaching stinging nettle
Shields the frequent woodland scree
Covering with a verdant flush
Brooks that through the stones invisibly rush.

Within the hour, the Gorgon-headed sun
Sweeps aside the cloud-
The red into blue and orange has run
And in Lower Fullingpits Wood the increasingly  loud
Shuffling of badger attacking vole, fox strangling rabbit,
All compounded into daily habit.

The Kent Downs rise and fall
Like resurrected earth-bound music from a time
When hill, wood and pool
Emerged from unfettered chalk and lime.
Before the Cantii hunted in ancient Wents Wood,
For deer and boar, spurred not by hunger but for the love of blood.

Above the sparrow-hawk attacks the sparrows
Claw enmeshed in feather,
Beak unravelling neck. The unalterable sorrows
Of nature and weather.
Cruelty never ceases, but just gets more efficient-
Kindness remains deficient.

My mother sowed seeds from dawn until dusk
My father kept sheep-
My brother tended pigs in his backyard-
They all attended church every Sunday.
My sister was a *****.

All had busted backs when they were fifty,
My sister had a big house in New York.
All had religion,
But my sister had the money.
At ninety, with everyone else long dead,
She lives in glorious luxury
Smiling gently at all those hard-working people
Who believe in god
Her ageless insouciance worn like a pearl.