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Stanley Wilkin Sep 2016
Dressed in black,

What can you lack

in a monochrome world?

Your eyes weep glass

As your lovers pass

What you remember you dread

Inside your throbbing head!
black, lack, lovers, dread
Stanley Wilkin Sep 2016
What now, the loss of limbs in a distant conflagration?
The seeping brains amongst poppy fields?
The myriad nature of violent death, outside of journalistic imagination
A grind of experience on which the lost youth builds.
What now? Within the shredding blasts euphoria
The élan of a soldier, in memoria

Downing drinks in the Stag and Hare
After a tour, ordinary actions reek of tedium
There is, in the conviviality, no rush of adrenalin there
Fermenting trouble establishes a happy medium.
Quarrelling with a man who wears a business suit
Is displaced adventure, smashing his face in is a hoot.

What now? A mate, a favoured friend, dies in the dirt
When whistling a tune, recalling the holiday in Spain, the family,
A shot coursing through his unbuttoned shirt
Deflating his lung, another shattering his knee
When he died, his platoon died too,
Metaphorically; the snipers aim was true.

Bottled up in Basra, aimlessly wandering in Helmand
A shrill event on News at Ten between politics and football,
Another death, another iconic face, the catasphropic end
Of a youthful  life.  What now? The swift end to a morning stroll
Amongst watching villagers in dry breathless mountains
Empty streams and florescent fountains.

In the terracotta dirt my soul leaked away
My final return was like a funeral celebration,
I said nothing anymore. I had nothing left to say.
I’d given my youth to a sniping cynical nation.
What now? It was over for me in a grasping world-
A gooey puddle spread beneath me as my soul evacuated.
Stanley Wilkin Sep 2016
SHADOWS.
Sunset shadows creep across the wall,
Memories flit through the mind
Coagulating into an unlit pool
Where dissembling thoughts unwind.
Then all is utter darkness,
Opaque, a descent into barely contained distress.

Thoughts lay dormant
An incantation in a poisoned sacrament
Waiting for the moon to wane, sun to rise,
Excoriated by refreshed light  
Burning into the mind’s dull eyes
Destroying the mind’s dull sight.

The sun exposes every cranny
Evolution of moss and vine,
Lucidity shuffled aside to free
What lies behind the surface shine.
Once exposed, what can we know?
We cannot illumine the mind’s cavernous flow.

An untended wall will last fifty years
And then break apart and fall.
Destroyed by fears
That over time weaken and spoil.
Within each of us there is a roughly built division
Turning our forms into dust, blown into the sky, by demons driven.
Stanley Wilkin Aug 2016
Long ginger muzzle
eyes burning
through the copse, fixed upon
the snuffling vole eating
grubs in the moonlight,fangs
like stunted darning needles
revealed in its widening jaw.
hunching in the grass
it crawled cautiously forward
and pounced
like a god on an acolyte
quenching blood-lust-
the fox ate again that night.
Stanley Wilkin Aug 2016
It beats into my body-


ramming,

I lie twitching


My body is subsumed within the pleasure...........................
Stanley Wilkin Jul 2016
Ripped out of the night,
pulsating cruelly,
passion spawned

Reaching out, all is changed,
the crow darkly wanders
stars fizzle away into transmutating haze
and dread comes
walking like a bony corpse.
Stanley Wilkin Jul 2016
1
The surging water threw strange shapes,
Waiting crows with stabbing beaks
In the sky and in the drowned souls,
Festering in the swell.
The huge irrepressible waves
Spread wings flattening houses with a single downward swipe.
It was a sudden death,
They died screaming-avidly watched by millions nestling before TV sets
Unmoved if sympathetic.
They had watched enough CGI
Not to be bothered by such drama.


2.
The girl quietly combed her hair,
Bitter black in the lamplight,
Watching the snarling fox shoot from its lair
Slathering with fright.
As she lifted her arm again
The salt spray struck her, flattening her face
The wave soothed where her smile had been
Her limbs acquiring a greater grace.

It ****** in cars and houses, gulping down
The unresistant landscape with unforgiving speed,
Turning the living green into regurgitated brown
Digesting  the landscape with ******* greed
It drew her little body back into the equalising sea
Just another bit of debris.
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