Constant rain, no more bird song,
Constant wind, no more flowers,
Autumn bears down like a war lord.

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.

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!

At night, smothered in darkness, it hunts
Its eyes burning like stars
Slinking through the air, searching
Soundlessly for prey.
“She is such a softee.” Esther sighs
Scooping its favourite food into a bowl.
“My baby. My furry little baby.”
Its claws sink into the wren, ripping
It apart in a cold deliberate frenzy.
Sodden bloodied feathers, slithers of skin
Like red glints in a killer’s darkening eye.
She takes the cat into her arms,
Cradling it and smothering it with kisses.
It purrs, dreaming carnivorous dreams of its owner’s dry flesh.

The Right Thing

What would you do
With a life in your hands?
Those begging eyes
Pleading for clemency
For an existence hanging in the balance.
So easy it would be
To let the knife drop
To let the bullet fly
Out of your control
Snuffing out another.
Would it satisfy you
To see the skin go pallid
The eyes glaze over
A carcass crumple to your feet?
Do you enjoy the thought
Of a mother weeping
A father distraught
A family rendered asunder
From your crime?
I pity you
The likes for which this decision is easy.
Just hope that if you ever find your life
In someone else’s hands
They know
The right decision to make.

By Garpal stream the young men came
Decades before the flood
On Garpal field they started the game
Quenching the grass with blood.
Down by the hill, near the copse, they lie,
The first to score was the first to die.

Every year the young men came
Where the roses and dandelions bud
Eager to play the game
Decades before the flood.
Beyond the hedge these young men lie,
The last to score was the last to die.

It rained before Advent, it rained after Lent
The rain fell on pasture and town,
The interminable water did not relent
But poured remorselessly down
By the end of the year, under the thundering light,
The world was a place of night.

A sodden land bereft of men
Garpal field was covered with weeds
As the women waited for the sun again
Spreading a blanket of seeds.
They waited as glorious golden rays
Fell during everlasting unending days.

The sprouting seeds grew tall and thin
Turning slowly into beautiful men
In a country filled to the brim
With cattle, wheat and fruit again.
Beyond Garpal stream where the rushes grew
The youths strolled over the grey diaphanous dew.

By Garpal stream the young men came,
Decades before the flood,
On Garpal field they started the game
Quenching the grass with blood.
Down by the hill, near the copse, they lie,
The first to score was the first to die.

What if my sight deludes my brain
And shows me things that cannot be?
What if my brain deludes my sight
With shapes and colours distorting light?
What if a chair is not a chair,
A sky not a sky?
What if my body belongs
Outside of time, in ridges, in riffs, in kaleidoscopes,
Pinging around or forever mute?
What if I die, but am not dead,
Having never been alive
That what was breathe was CGI
That what was a heartbeat merely
A mythological god slamming against a drum?
What if my words are not my words
But belong to speakers in the past
My thoughts not mine, nor yours,
But passing adverts in the electrified air?
What if existence is without shape,
Unseeable, unmeasurable,
A perishable vapour already dissipating
Unable to form and never formable?
What if none of these words were written
None of these words were read,
Nothing appeared here-
Nothing has happened, or ever does,
Except in your unquiet head?