Words lie in wait. Ready
to spring, invade our minds,
ambush our thoughts. They fight
each other for the prize.

Born of grisly grief, lasting love,
excitements, incitements, enticements,
realities plurality of life,
imagined hope ungrasped,
surrendered souls downcast.

Treasuring pleasing phrases,
blessed by serendipity,
and so must shout their praises,
gorge ephemerality,
soon returning to the feast.

All I could see was blue,
a barrier of confusion,
or some kind of illusion.
Unbelievable. Unreal. Untrue.

Was this my final scene?
An unfamiliar stage.
No one to help my dream.
No gentleness, just rage.

Fighting for the right
or the left, praising
heroes and heroines,
They scorn all villains.

Time for a breath of air,
weighing their own ways.
Are they being honest with
their harmonies of opposites.

His innovative drives
- passionate, natural man.
The knotted grains of his life,
bringing pleasure and distress,
making a disorderly mess.

Departed, is he forgiven?
Some refuse to judge. But what
of those whose lives were riven,
infatuation driven.

Lives passed by with many sighs.
Judged his life ignored his life, ignored his work,
leaving us unopened eyes
on mystic crow, tortured lines,
raw nerves, coded signs

Guided by the stars,
a better life,
a safer life.
Their new world worth
the journey and its dangers
for their progeny.

We try to keep things as they are,
ruled by fallacies, and fears
of their strange languages,
faiths, mythologies.

Harsh voices shout with menaces,
'Send them home from whence they came
to their hollow caustic lands.
We should keep our own traditions,
Angles, Saxons, Celts and Jews.'

I'm always losing things.
I specialize in keys,
but lost my leather gloves,
moaned, groaned, bought a new pair.
Wife says, she'll string them round my neck,
found the others below stairs.

Scarves and handkerchieves,
problematic, stocked up,
can't find them now.
She can't believe it.
Vexed, she says,
'You'll lose your marbles next'.

Many of our dead are paper cuttings,
memories of those surviving or
doing duty by our famous dead.
Guardian obituries
stored in books I've read.

Hughes, Eliot, Larkin, Heaney,
MacNiece and Thomas mourning their last drinks.
Uncomfortable shelfmates all,
eternal quarrels, truth debates.

Eliot polite and debonair,
while Hughes cares no for airs and graces
but puts the ladies through their paces.

Heaney digs his pen through family,
myth and culture's history, mining
human misery and mystery,
then Larkin's calendar of life
confronts our stark reality.

I cannot pass these shelves untouched,
demanding voices drench the air,
nor can I find a useful test
by which I can decide who's best.