I held her dying hand in the soft morning light
I studied the shrinking life in her eyes.  
The woman I loved would not last out the night
Her groaning breath now fierce sighs.

The weakening flame in the quiet breeze
Matches her dying
Her beautiful face like a fallen goddess in a marble frieze,
Riven with crying.

Her beauty had aged, not gone,
Her white hair falling down like thin ribbons of snow;
Her eyes that once shone
Filled now with a frosty glow.

Soul and body fade away
The mind is a strip of celluloid,
With diminishing returns. Nothing will stay,
But pass infinitely into a void.  

In the end, all that lingers is love
Like a stable beacon through time,
No matter how complete, never enough,
In life, verse, prose and rhyme.

A shadow lit by flitting sunlight
A scent on the air
A dream in the difficult night
Searching for you there.
My memories provide both joy and pain,
A wandering river, disrupted by rain.

Breaking its banks, driving apart the reeds
Withdrawing in a moment
Leaving endless seeds
Its force and fury briefly spent.
Your love, then and now, a storm
That takes every form.

How can I describe our love now
Without referencing extremes?
Then, once, it was more dazzling than the above
Blue fringed with uncompromising beams
Too fierce to draw near
Too intense to see clear.

It overwhelmed and smothered me
Too bright and fragile to last!
A furious, consuming epiphany
That mangled and mingled future, present and past.
I let it go, unable to sustain my grip,
I let you go.  Into the past I let you painfully slip.

Incandescent, the mystic sign burrowed into
Their untarnished consciousness
Depositing meaning where before,
In related specie, there’d been none. Ok,
At first it didn’t seem such a big thing but
Later, much later, it was.

Creating an object d’art is one thing
For a man wearing animal skins but an entire
Nation is another matter. It took time.
That said, going back seems like just another way
Of going forward.

Out of the encroaching sands crept a single idea
Made out of many others. A pyramid rose out of smaller
But more elegant definitions of power. The greater the power
The vaster the ****** pyramid became,
Enclosing space with a giant flat footstep. Khufu
Lay within, disintegrating slowly,
Convinced of his godlike nature-while minor royalty
Found cheaper ways of preserving body and soul.
Sand covered the Sphinx for two thousand years
Alexander’s body disappeared, Caesar, a manipulative bald
Headed coot ended up under a memorial stone,
Equally godlike and dead.  

Cleopatra may not have been hot after all
But having powerful lovers and dying gracefully
Did wonders for her profile. Long dead,
An icon of femininity and ****** allure, she lives
Forever in a world that desires both.
Quin **** Huangdi surrounded himself with lifelike soldiers
In a bid to recreate reality, as if
Death could be touched by an illusion. Surrounded
By a mercury lake, buttressed by an unmoving army
His bones are as empty in their fashion
As the peasants he ruled over. Can’t cheat it, or
Beat it. Can’t ignore it either.

The personality continues through
Memory aids. A huge gravestone serves as well-
As Khufu discovered. Deeds recorded in
Verse works, but in both methods
The myth becomes greater and the real person,
The one who cried at funerals, failed during ***,
Gets forgotten. Might just as well
Do nothing. It takes less energy, leading
To less disappointment.

The desire to extend privileges into death
Where nothing exists
Is the fantasy of the spoilt for whom life
Must be eternal. An Australian aborigine who
Rallied his people in overdue rebellion against
The European hordes bringing sheep and planting grass
Was killed, stuffed and displayed in an exhibition.
Khufu had himself stuffed and displayed. All famous people
Are stuffed in time and displayed like curios
Dying again and again throughout eternity.

Intense and distant, the sun
Slid imperceptibly upward through the yellowing sky
As the ships powered across the water
Oars cutting into the waves.
Like a crumbling sentinel, on the cragged promontory
The temple observed the sea. Within
Sat Poseidon, golden trident in hand, his
Features frozen into gleaming marble. Around
Him, murmuring incantations, marched
His priests.
Time has dismantled it all, except
For the pillars that poke upward, jagged
Snapped-off fingers of stone clothed
In moist, inch-thick moss. The ships
Have long disappeared. The crews dead.
Beneath the waves the turbulent god
Waits, his muscular invisible arms
Shaking the ground, as he roars out
His discontent. Reduced to bedtime stories,
Beautiful Technicolor films, the old gods
Drift hopelessly through the memory
Desperately trying to be noticed again.

I snatched at her soul,
grabbed it and held it to my chest,
a beatific grin upon my untruthful face
glorying in her spasmodic transmutation-
her monotone vision
beset with confusion
her gender breaking in my grip.

Loping footsteps over taut, troubled seas
spawned secretions ejected
like flame-
her sighs, a storm
her cries subsumed in sanctified fire
without worship.

How do we know of god?
By word, visible presence or internally-constructed belief?
Can we read a book and know
That these are a god's words
Or sense that an ambitious man
-great or malevolent-
Created them for temporary gain,
To impress others, or for power.
Is god a grandiose representation
Of either gender, and why should that be?

The myriad flowers scattered around,
wind-blown, gale tossed
are but our planet's codes
Tree and toad
are equal products of earth and time.

Why ask for another kind of being
in a world replete
with every grim and wonderful sort,
in another realm surrounded by
other winged and chubby divinities?
Why believe that old books,
written in time and place,
are products of gods?

Do gods really write so badly?

It beats into my body-


ramming,

I lie twitching


My body is subsumed within the pleasure...........................

It’s not usual to feast on snap-dragons in the cold months
Or run naked through un-sketched woods reeking of incense
And gloom, ridiculing the battered men on crudely carved crosses-
Dribble running from their loose-lipped mouths tumbling into rivers.
The soul, recently discoloured, doesn’t stay long in such corrosive
Environments where time runs furiously along a thin elastic band
Springing backwards then stretched to eternity.
It isn’t usual to feast on snap-dragons in the cold months
Keeping warm before the incumbent gates of hell
Afraid to sweep the snow away from the garden and live.
To sweep away the snow, now turning brown, and gild
With shafts of gold the fallen lily.

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.

He intimately coaxed the bomb like a lascivious lover
Passionate for death-
Carefully balancing out the ingredients,
Fixing the charge,
His soft-palmed hands caressing each part,
Beneath his unsettling gaze.

In paradise he’d spend his eternity-
Having killed his way towards god.

The crowds gathered in the boulevard
Arm in arm, laughing, relaxed.
He drove past them noting their joy-
Loathing their happiness,
An offence against his desire for death.
Turning his car sharply around
He slowly drove past them again.

In that brief moment, the wind
Gently rocking, his thumb pressed down.

The bomb blew, shredding the air,
Grinding his grinning soul into dust.
The blast ripped screams from each chest:
A world suddenly full of unbearable pain,
Blood crawling along the pavement,
Limbs in the gutter, leaking tears.

His road to heaven cost a hundred lives-
Cracked bodies, fragmented souls-
The squalid suffering of children.
Rivers of milk and honey
Thickened with blood.

Each hill climbed means an obstacle overcome,
behind each hill is another,
behind the next is a mountain
of ravines and crags, covered with fine
snow; when overcome, the peak transcended,
life becomes just a pleasant downward
snowboard into the sun.

A rude dawn over the city
Where Pepys once fought with his beautiful wife
After seducing whatever servant-girl chanced
To be around, where kings
First ruled from cold castles full of cockroaches,
Murderous cousins
Lurking through the baleful halls of history
Eyeing the empty throne. The stinking
River long shorn of fish sweeps elegantly before
The crimson petticoats of multiple ******
Promenading along Thames Street,
Winking at under-washed gallants.

Vauxhall gardens a pithy cavalcade of priests and doxies,
Of flower girls, flaxen haired girls selling fruit,
Anxious to reach home before the ****** hour of early
Evening when beaus gather in alley ways establishing
A testosterone gauntlet in the dust-spawned gloom.

The road to Tyburn is littered with lost hopes!
On hanging day bodies swung like debutantes dancing
To jazz tunes-
Aristocrats quartered with precision squealed like common folk,
Bleeding as much. The city watched all this
And didn’t murmur-never complained-
Smiled, as only a city can smile, at gin-drunk matrons, pie eating aldermen
And the ****** activity in street shadows by relieved young women on
VE day 1945.

I grieve for you in the cold quiet of winter
My absent child, my long lost son
Warming my hands over dying flames, frost covered smouldering clinker,
By the wood where icy streams run
Through the shrunken sedge, and barren fields
Stretching for miles, empty of meaning.
The landscape like a worn photograph yields
Your tremulous smile, then nothing.

Here, you ran with startled steps
Through the yielding sheaves, yelling with surprise,
Chasing indifferent spiders, and discomfited birds
With hatred in their pebble pool-dark eyes.
Querying awkwardly spoken words, small
Tenacious fingers that caress and clutch
Every passing object, loudly chuckling, wisely playing me for a fool
A silly father who loved too much.

On the anniversary of your leaving I required solitude
Partnered only by memory
Away from familiar crowds, the booming, barking fusillade
Of the present day commonplace urban itinerary,
Where only the crackle of snow
And the fleeting trajectory of birds
Distracts my slow
Marshalling of comforting thoughts.

The cottage where we lived haunts the shallow glade,
A shrouded ghost swaddled by the half-light,
Positioned squarely like an old man, its cladding beginning to fade,
White branches like dead-fingers that gleam in the night.
In the closet are your dust-sprinkled toys, a yellow plastic duck,
A cheap skateboard, ancient video games,
A guitar you never learnt to pluck
A chess board on which you pulverised my endgames.

In the preserved furnishings of your bedroom
Your school work gathered into stacks
Barely visible in the gloom,
Our life together in disorganised packs
Denoting year and level
Development and academic achievement,
If any, (but I mustn’t once again cavil)
Indicating, even in your earliest years, a specific bent.

Standing on the mantelpiece, propped up against the wall,
Are brightly coloured, polished pictures
Of you. Plump, blonde, agreeably small
Dancing, standing, jumping, grinning, absurdly wistful mixtures.
A bitter echo resonating from the shadows
A cold thought darkening into memory
The spectre of your voice disappearing in the meadows
Having left all of us! Having left me!

How strangely she moved
between shadow and light
in the thin hollow air
wingless and eyeless
on the edge, the very edge,
of death.

I watched her hang
cruelly in the sky
wondering then and now
why she was smiling.

As the seconds passed
each more thunderous than
the last, she faded,
skin disappearing from bone
muscle separating from tendon
her genitalia
a darkening hole.

In the end, only her sigh
remained to remind me
of her short, uncomfortable life
completed in the coldness
of incomplete night.

Mired in history, coiled around by cheap reflections
On previous ramshackle glory,
Roman armies camped in valleys,
Swords trickling with blood from the battle
On the heath. Bodies covering the bracken
Like a foreshortened locust swarm, wingless

Over the town. The triumphant Italians had there
On the high ground, above the sinuous Col,
Built temples
And baths. Marble hauled in from Sicilian quarries,
Loaded on to Carthaginian ships by fierce North African slaves-
Themselves beaten warriors.
They were in the town when the tribes struck,
Dying in chains.

Before their own savage deaths, they slaughtered
Others, cut them into ragged pieces, decapitated, *****,
Choralling songs of victory, leaving none alive.
That day, the dun hills smelt better!
They torched the temples and wasted the proud theatre,
The slender apogee of culture.

Now the town slumbers in the present,
Burying its past under beautiful gardens, purple flowers and
Raffish gladioli peeking out from unobtrusive suburbs
Stinking of ancient corpses.

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!

Before me the monster grew
In the stippled light
Dappled blue
It was an interesting sight.

A wondrous uncompromising
Dark hue
Its features had a disconcerting
Temporary feel. Nose and ears fixed by glue

And where his mouth should have
Been was a blue suede shoe,
And in place of eyes grave-
Stones inscribed with the names of no one I knew.

Still, he was very polite
For such a badly-hewn
Creature of the night.
Crafted as if from ancient stone,

He quietly broke my neck
With a pleasant-enough smile
And I heard it crack
Dying, deeply impressed by his style.

She left the mosque, glancing back to admire
Its conforming embroidered established beauty, its
Minaret rising skywards in ******* glory, her prayers done
In unprotested segregation. In public
Only her embellished eyes were seen staring outwards
In religious line-toeing from her crow-black shroud
Her breath caught up in its funeral mummery.
All individuality shorn away by garb caught mid-way between
Oppression and conviction. Rejecting sexuality, the flirtatious
Gaze of strangers, but by doing so obsessed by that which she feared-
A world filled only with lust where displayed flesh
Is a siren’s song in a corrupt world and living a gasping lurch
Towards death.

His life, he’d been frequently told,

Was a stepping stone to

Something better. His growing religious convictions

Taught him about the different levels

Of god.

The innocent child, sacrificial man, distant father,

Steadfast sister and mother.

It taught him not to lust after his pretty neighbours,

Man or woman, nor to daydream

Of unlikely trysts with all the inherent dangers

Involved but to expend his energies

In religious ecstasy instead

Agonising inwardly over the beatitude

And the internal landscape of the soul.

By the time he was forty, he reckoned

He’d got a raw deal. No money, no career,

No friends, just a lot of ****** prayers.


They put her coffin gently in

And he cried, watching it disappear

Unable to think of heaven.

He was not consoled now

By thoughts of

Infinite life.

The slow sounding of a repetitious tune

Amongst cloudy vistas of

Over egged benevolence.


He’d missed the boat, through

Worshipping too much. A rotund

Middle-aged man

With a sagging mind, brown teeth

And old fashioned clothes.

All he had now were his church

And his mother’s dying friends.


He threw dust over his mother’s grave

And walked softly away.

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.

In the middle of a storm, rain crumbling the air,
My father died
I did not cry, nor care,
I sighed.  
Walking the ground I hummed a jaunty popular song
Knowing now, at last, he I could tread upon.

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.

My thoughts are like clouds

drifting slowly

My thoughts are like fire

Burning fiercely

My thoughts are like air

Invisible but life-giving

My thoughts are mine.

I kissed my true love
Beneath the gurning sun,
I caressed my true love,
Until the sun was gone.
I planted seeds in my true love’s garden,
Employed my eager ***** all day long,
I dug and dug in my true love’s garden
Until the planting was done.
Each seed became a flower,
Each flower became a sigh,
Pressed into her languid bower
As the night drifted slowly by.
In the morning, refreshed by the new sun,
In my true love’s garden bright
My work was finally done,
And I left with a horticulturalist's delight.

Her beauty rests on her
Like lavender in the hand
Like smiles from a baby
Like heat from the sun:
It meets her smile with a kiss
And drops glistening light in her eyes:
Her beauty greets admiration with a glance
And settles gently like clear water,
In a rippling pool edged with drifting beams,
Her black hair burnished with fire.
Her beauty surrendering to the shackled
Gaze of my surrendered sight.

Walking over the moor on a sunny day, the wind at my back,
I saw before me a woman over-burdened by a voluminous rucksack
She trudged along face against the wind
Reached a gulley filled with bramble bushes and turned around a bend.
I looked for her when I reached her point of departure
But could see nothing. In fact as I looked I became increasingly unsure
That I seen her that day. The moor was full of mist,
And in truth, I was fairly ******.
Walking over the moor the following day
I searched the land for the best possible way
To reach Croven, a village first settled by the ancient Brits,
Whom the Romans had routinely cut to bits,
Where I had left my wife and car.
Going around in circles, up and down, lost in the mire
Of marsh and bog, the mists kept descending
And my return to Croven, wife and car, seemed never-ending
When I saw the woman approach me again
The rucksack straddling her back like a fin
I called out in a tired and plaintive voice
She walked through me over the purple grass in a trice
Stopped, looked back, noticed my agonised expression of a man completely lost,
Squealed, dropped the rucksack and began screaming about a ghost
I did the same belting headlong into the marsh
Dying swiftly there, which I thought was kinda harsh!
I still see the woman when I trudge a sad spectre through the moor
But we greet each other now, knowing each is Nevermore.

Although I strut like a bright plumed bird
I do not choose-
As a man, I am chosen.
I noted your face first I thought
but it was you who
selected mine. You
who arranged our first well-considered
copulation, who washed and aired
the sheets two days before-
You who arranged the hour.
I who complied.

THE NYMPH

Beneath the water lived a nymph, beautiful as
A flower- if you like women 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 opened 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 thunderously satisfied indigestion.

No longer young, her children dead,
She glides through the water from China to France
A preposterous seaweed hat upon her head
And criss-crossing her piebald nose a serrated coral branch.
Her sartorial taste filling even the sharks with fin-quaking dread.

The last of her 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 in unexpected agony she died: “I thought, I thought, I was god!”

The old man looked up
into the rain-swollen, cloud-broken, time-tossed
sky.
Sitting down again on the park bench
smoothed by a million previous
lonely, plump backsides-smoking a joint,
thinking of a riotous past he stared
at his memories-

a jocund boy, a quiet teenager privately lusting,
years like trailing smoke-
a husband, family man his worries growing into
deep-set wrinkles fashioned on nothing-
the sun leaning on him, the moon smiling cynically,
as he dwindled into dust.

Who did he make love to? Why did he? Why did
he bother? the thick bloated flames of fickle *****
and trophies for his mind.
Nothing in the shaded recess, nothing looms,
in his pirate's, crow's, magpie's soul-
an old man in his final hour
beating around for husks.

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.

Perched on the wall, the Raven scrutinised the fields that stretched for miles
Studying the crows as they gathered together by the clump of berry bushes
Its gimlet eyes concentrated, waiting to strike.
Searching for weaknesses amongst its minions, a black-shirt, a minor deity made for death,
Skull’s head, ****, the demon of the dull cloud-dark skies.
An omen heralding star-snuffed, moon-ruined night.

In the quiet of the morning, heavy with mist, rabid with scents
a woman settled in the copse meditating amongst the fleeting mice
and secretive rabbits, the bee and butterfly. What was she thinking
of on such a humid day? Her features relaxed, a smile lingering
over her lips, eyes opening and shutting ritually,
the sun poking its frazzled head above the half-light, the grass
heavily hung with dew. This was our goddess, still alone, still alive,
a thousand years after her demise, battered by crosses and incantations,
holy water and an ever-present authoritarian god searching the land
for sacrifices. I watched for several hours.
In that time, that uneventful time, she grew older, flesh flaking away from her opaque bones,
the sun slicing through. Within hours,
her presence vanished, earthbound, seeking to emerge once more within the millennium
exhorting religion's timely death; with once again irrepressible love, life and joy
freely restored. As darkness fell
her shade morphed into a seed, sinking slowly into the soil.

The curious activity of men/women

makes me wonder precisely when

both will learn how to conjoin

with rabbits, geese, bull and lion.


Talking incessantly like birds,

roaring like lions. However absurd!

snapping like crocodiles

or habitually waiting in human files,


torturing like cats

water-boarding rats,

rolling like logs

snarling like dogs.


snorting like pigs

gobbling up figs

In everyone an animal lurks

whether saints or jerks!

Cowering in the corner, the boy began to cry,
******* in the gloom.
Searching the room
As his father slowly went by.

His father’s reddened ******
Caught under the weak bedroom light
His genitals pink and bright,
Like a swollen crucifix hanging impudently.

“Out my boy.” He called
In a voice that to the child
Sounded like thunder, ill-tempered and wild.
“Daddy needs you.” The father bawled.

The father’s affection was a wound
That disfigured body and mind
Care sullied, love unkind-
First loved, made love to, then wholly ruined.

His father’s hand jabbed the gloom
And laughing cruelly pulled him out
“I knew you were somewhere about.”
Dragging him through the room.

The child at first whimpered,
Then was muted. As his father began,
Through his small body the pain ran,
Biting his lips, the boy quietly simpered.

I watched the fox, rat held firmly in its jaw,
Trot across the street, lithely avoiding the cars,
Ears pricked up.

It slithered under a fence and weaved through the undergrowth,
Not once acknowledging my presence.
Disappearing in the night, it yelped out its echoes in the wood
Licking out worms.

The shadowed moon slung down its light
Like weak silver bristles from the back of a carved out hedgehog
Covered with newly deposited fox saliva.
It had screamed as it was consumed-unable to die!

The crow stabbed at a newly dead rock pigeon
As the stalking cat pounced......
Death mingled!

Joe, who lived near me, waved:
I waved back, wondering why he saw nothing.

Loping down at Winter
the raven
ravishes the light,
broad black beating wings spread
feeding on
tiny hidden corpses-its beak
hades' daggers pummelling the frost.

Riding by the upturned glen
forever chaste
she rarely stopped for gasping men
wan and waste
but riding and ridden
she flew into the trees
seductively bidden
parted her knees
and enveloped by sighs
she opened her thighs.

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.

Head bowed, flowing across the water
Like an organic sepulchre,
Lost in the wriggling reeds
It raises its head once more,
Glancing mutely around
It sighs, its breath dying in the snow.
A symbol of light,
The swan is transfigued.

She noticed the basking shark was wounded,
weeping vaginal blood.
The tall man in a fedora whispered as he passed.
Whipped by exploratory waves, she blushed.
The horizon was a hazy green line dipped in red.
She had been there since morning
searching for love,
and found it
from a six-pack merman offering solace
as he rode on the silvery
back of a ray.
As he approached, the sun at his back,
she moaned and threw out her arms
like a supplicant.

Complete at last, the sand grasping at
her shoeless feet, she sank
towards the earth’s distant core
using her arms as uncertain ballast.

She awoke with a shiver
brushed away the sand
and headed back home.
The shark had turned belly-up,
scavenged by seagulls.

Another day-dream enjoyed in the
empty hours between lunch and dinner
between her third cup of tea
and fourth cigarette,
her children snoozing in
the back bedroom. Half-slumbering
in a town barked at by bothersome seagulls
where an unencumbered sun
set on a postcard shoreline.
Planning the rows of petunias to be
planted by the hedge,
making shopping lists,
writing novels, never to be published,
staring out of her windows at the sea
she waited for her husband’s return,
tedious evenings of T.V.
and coition under the brightly coloured duvet.
The waves that overwhelmed her, flooding her senses,
were her own. The man
in the fedora had made her smile.

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.

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.

Silently, shadowed by night,
Its eyes shining like tears,
It pads through the desolated undergrowth
Listening for sounds in the grass
The tripping of feet, the scampering
Crunch of paws. Lithely stepping
Through the trees, a mile further on
The fox sniffs the air. The stubbled moon
Flings down its steel-like shafts
Of thin even light, stabbing through
The gloom.

The stream flows around the dying plants
Breaking the bank. The River Vole slides down
Into the labouring water, older than the
Landscape it bites through, and it pounces
Grabbing the voles neck in its maw,
Ripping the flesh apart. The cat throws
It into the air, catching it again,
Its teeth rending off flesh. It pads back into the dark.

Nose delving into the air , the fox sniffs blood.
It turns towards the water
Breaking the bank, turns towards
Its slow sibilant sound, muzzle aloft
As if drawn upward by slithers of string,
The playful moon moving smoothly with the clouds.
The cat is shaken by its presence.
The grouse gabble in their fear.

The fox pounces, caught in the air
Floating as if in a snapshot
Held there by silvery light,
It lands with untroubled finesse
As the cat screams.
The stream blanches, the moon seems smug,
The night closes as the fox eats.

i'm going to sleep
do not weep
I do not die
when here I lie
i merely sleep
do not weep

Cool, calm and comforting
arising darkly from the hill
cool, calm, comforting
it flows there still.

By the aspen
by the shrunken sedge
by the aspen
by the bracken on the window ledge,


Bird and scurrilous badger
over muddy field
bird and badger
where foxgloves yield

scents like rashes
into the sun filled air
scents like rashes
where the twitchy rabbits stare

the sky yawns towards sunset
the lounging clouds fill
the sky yawns towards sunset
where the arched light will-

chaffinch peeks above
elm branch and bough
chaffinch peeks above
in solitude now.

Catastrophic end in sight,
light bends, her eyes contrite;
a shaking phantasmagoric dispute
making both husband and lover mute;
revelation upon revelation,
hatred in each exhalation;
exasperated rivals stand apart,
one soul exultant, one twisted heart.