I had a midlife crisis yesterday,
So I bought a yacht.
Now I’m going to live to be over a 100,
Isn’t that amazing?
Maybe I should repeat it,
Every decade or so.
Just to keep it topped up,
Like a pay as you go phone.
This is the secret to eternal life.

Each day I cross the canal,
With its corrugated water,
To the recently harrowed field.
A leather jacket laid on the green grass of the dunes.
Your curls spill on the hedgerows.
Propped on my elbow I dive headlong,
Into twin infinity pools.
Lost in twining souls of string.
A girl balling the wool,
As I hold it gently between outstretched supplicant arms.
We were seventeen.

Each day I cross the canal to the harrowed field,
Where the now winter wheat delicately erases,
The leather jacket on the grass of dunes.
It was once a summer,
Where no world anchored us,
No past taunted us,  
No demands listened to,
On the cusp of transition.
We loved as never again,
When we were seventeen.



Each day I cross the canal to a green field.
The colour warms a winter morning.
Blowing into cupped cold hands,
No longer brings heat,
Only faint clouds of breathtype mist.
The cold invades my toes and fingers.
There are things I must remember.
Next time I will wear my leather jacket,
I’m no longer seventeen.

The canal today is mirror deep,
Reflecting all the trees that weep.
The grass is fridge frost white,
From the cold of last night.
The trees are dripping snot clear tears,
Sparkling in the sunshine glare.
An empty ***** bottle on the side of the road,
In the distance shines Morse code.
The houses in sharp relief,
Like stricken ships on a reef.
On this winter morning all fears,
Are lost like unwanted souvenirs.

The Beggar at Canterbury Gate

The beggar sits at Canterbury Gate,
Thin, pale, unshaven, sad.  His little dog
Sits patiently as a Benedictine
At Vespers, pondering eternity.
Not that rat terriers are permitted
To make solemn vows.  Still, the pup appears
To take his own vocation seriously,
As so few humans do.  For, after all,
Dogs demonstrate for us the duties of
Poverty, stability, obedience,
In choir, perhaps; among the garbage, yes,
So that perhaps we too might live aright.

The good dog’s human plays his tin whistle
Beneath usurper Henry’s1 offering-arch
For Kings, as beggars do, must drag their sins
And lay them before the Altar of God:
The beggar drinks and drugs and smokes, and so
His penance is to sit and suffer shame;
The King’s foul murders stain his honorable soul;
His penance is a stone-carved famous name
Our beggar, then, is a happier man,
Begging for bread at Canterbury Gate;
Tho’ stones are scripted not with his poor fame,
His little dog will plead his cause to God.

1 *Henry VII, who built the Cathedral Gate in 1517, long after the time of Henry II and St. Thomas Becket