Objective upon objective,
They stack one upon the other,
Higher and higher indeed,
Until a snag scrubs it entirely away.

A new stratagem was needed,
A long term goal to help better align the rest of your life,
But steps must be taken,
And too soon they always pile up,
And the stratagem must be cast away.

This continues onwards,
Farther and farther,
Leaving The Frontman awash in an ocean of grey.

Oh, you have been so lovely and so lost
While May arrived to purple flowers,
Moisten lilies and the early roses show. But no
Skimmering of joy leapt up to gild the glory of those flowers.
Martins built (so suddenly they came)
And all the swallows, too,
But elegies made cloudy dimness glow in heaven’s blue,
And then the pageant May descanted Katharine,
And Katharine’s untrue.

Kathy, lately
birds seem rarer.
Even in the lilacs
where the blackbird whistles,
boughs seem spent.
Foolish men who read their loss in nature’s
always wax too eloquent,
so, while I try to paint
a sense of desolation
in the brooks of heaven and streams of night
(wherever they may be),
I know it’s farce –
an enterprising manufacture making nothing laugh.

I should write nothing,
nothing makes more sense,
although, my darling,
when I mourn for you who travelled hence
(and left me, placing nothing in my arms)
my mind drifts out,
and like a fragment driven by the wind,
I have to write.
I have to wring these vague alarms.
I have to give to nothing something slight.

You are no longer smiling
In the garden stacked with afternoons,
Your skirt above your knees,
Gloating and scorning my wish for modesty,
While roses are sticking themselves to bees
And sun is setting on coffee spoons,
A lifted skirt, your knees.

My darling, now when you never smile
In that garden without a fair,
When those peculiar stretches of petals
Are memories better forgotten, being bare,
I can still see you walking across that lawn
And turning to me with dark, extravagant beauty
And your secret held into you like an impossible dawn.

Knowing you hated me then and hate me now,
Knowing you called me “Horror” for a reason, every day,
What point in writing an elegy
That mourns the spurious and grieves for the grey,
Dissolution of love, the continuity of deceit,
Light in the stocks
And modesty peeping out of your socks

If not to celebrate something more
Than everything you were or can ever have been,
Something more because you made me seem
More than myself and surrounded my heart
With so many somber and beautiful dreams
That life grew riotous
Springing the lids of tombs?

The door was open
After all I needed was
A soft and slight push

Embracing concrete
A blanket of brittle stone
Never seemed so soft

Vividly coloured
Petals fill the crimson marks
Of blood-splattered streets

For I never longed
The eternal rest of mind
In sheer discretion

I can see hollow places in the hedgerow.
There are voids from stalk to stalk, but they shield each other from the outside world. An aegis of natural kinship forcing me out.
Safe, inaccessible, inviting, shadowed loam hints of escape.
Keeping to the public path is compulsory.

And there are parched things here maintaining their drought despite the deluge as the fountain grass keeps watch o'er the spillway below their wall. The rainwater doesn't wash out all the antiquated, little, abandoned pennies discarded there with facades slowly being worn away.

A dozen blunt faceless men stare up at the bridge with no mouths with which to share the careless, one cent wishes which flung them here to be forgotten.

I know it's wrong.

But for a second it smells like wild onions--like home. Life's intoxicating perfume floods, impairs good sense. Amidst Cassian's Choice, October Skies above, below staining a gray skyline with hidden life--

I had choices to; decisions too late to undo.

I uprooted myself from that silken touch and holy embrace. I remember the first time I felt lace. Now a cassock hangs void hinting of a bypassed path. Now I lay fallow like a spillway waiting to be stained with another year of shadowed hopes.

There are hollow places in me the rain can't touch. An aegis of broken kinship keeping the world out.

I lament the days to come

they’re empty and look

so useless without



your words they moved

my view of things and

anointed the way



I look towards life

and living in a broad

perspective it’s seems



in vain, so now all

that’s left are forgotten

words memories of



brightness and a

sun that fades into

an ocean of emptiness



no flowers please

acquisitions are not

appreciated

Numbness spreading like a creeping wildfire,
Carrying heat along the wave's crest,
And that's when it hit,
Ideas spewed forth,
Everything was clearer,
Everything was bright.

The Trio were on fire,
Immortal in their success and youth,
On the rise ever higher,
To some their words were truth.

To be loved by all,
Their following seemingly limitless.
As was their potential.

Look upon thy creation and shudder.