Well I woke up this morning and heard all the news;
There was none of it good, seems to me.
So I turned off the radio and went back to sleep,
And I dreamed how the future might be.

From an orbiting space station somewhere above,
the newsreader’s emotions were mixed;
She smiled through her tears, “Hallelujah, my friends,
The big hole in the ozone’s been fixed!”

“Oh, and hey, by the way” she continued to say,
“Pollution’s a thing of the past;
Contaminants no longer poison our seas,
Heavy metal’s no more than a blast!”

“There’s enough food for everyone everywhere,
And a pleasant mild climate for all;
There’s no more povertee, because everything’s free,
Have a drink on the house, have a ball!”

“Religion and warfare have all disappeared,
You can do what you like, no one cares;
Just keep the place tidy and put out the cat,
And make sure you have clean underwear.”

Then my sad old alarm clock, it brought me right back
As the snooze button started again;
If I didn’t move soon I’d be late for my work
Spreading hatred and terror and pain.

I wonder if someday, he thought,
perhaps someone will maybe notice
that I stood here?

He stared across the endless,
quaking mudflats,
steaming beneath a hot, young sun.

As his feet began to slowly sink,
he crushed some lowly creature
gasping for breath beneath his heel.

Sighing at all creation and the report
he must now send to his superiors,
he unwittingly left his mark.

By green and windblown rippled slopes
where cattle graze in summer sun;
beneath blue skies when larks sing shrill,
and rabbits by the hedgerows run.
When meadowsweet and columbine
bedeck the lea like ocean foam;
we soft return like shadows lost
to seek our old ancestral home.

Within the tree-lined borderlands
we wait until the day is done;
‘til passing fancies leave us be
and once again our time is come.
When doors and gates are closed and locked
we slip within as night winds roam;
and talk in whispered secrecy
of times in our ancestral home.

No more within cold fireplace
do fallen logs burn bright and fair;
from panelled walls in sullen oils
dark portraits of the long-dead stare.
On bowing shelves of oak repose
forgotten tales in leathern tome;
unread by men for centuries,
hid deep in our ancestral home.

And through the marches of the night
we drift from room to balcony;
recalling days of childhood lost,
the laughter of sweet memory.
Yet all too soon we must be gone
‘ere birds again chorale the dawn;
and disappear like shadows soft
that fly from our ancestral home.

Unnoticed, beside the hedge,
I watched them embrace.

She, oblivious in her white-hot passion,
body arching, legs flailing, silk snapping!
He, all the while, behaving as if drunk;
snared by her feminine wiles,
paralysed by her clinging grasp,
shocked by her sudden forwardness!

I passed that way again today,
but they were gone, those lovers.

All that marked their passing
was his drained husk,
spinning madly
upon a broken, abandoned web.

Wheeled around in a pushchair,
an innocent child
stares out at the world
with a sticky-faced smile.
A day at the seaside
with ice-cream to eat;
how it melts in the sunshine
and drips on her seat.
“Oh no, look at Ellie!”
her mother exclaims;
“She needs her mouth wiping,
she’s covered in stains!”
But Ellie just giggles,
her small gooey hands
are now grasping her bib,
she cannot understand
that one day in the future,
a lifetime away,
she’ll be taken again
down along the same way,
for a day at the seaside
with ice-cream to eat;
it will melt in the sun
and drip down on her seat:
And she’ll need her mouth wiping,
again and again,
when she’s on medication
to ward off the pain;
staring out at the world
with a bland vacant smile,
pushed around in a wheelchair,
an innocent child.

Thin, cold air,
bright sunlight.
Faint clouds border pale,
empty skies.
Ancient stones lie tumbled.
Vast, silent ruins
of a forgotten age.

An iridescent beetle
scuttles down
through cracked strata.
What cataclysm occurred here?
What distant cosmic dream
became unspeakable
nightmare?

Bleak and windswept, my errant ramblings
led me to some time-forgotten vale
wherein a desolate mansion stood; its mullioned windows pale
against the ebbing day, yet from within illumin’d,
as by dancing fiends at play.
Fram’d by gloomy trees, stone pinnacles leaned awry,
and, through o’ergrown gardens,  
that flanked a ****-strewn pathway to its rotting door,
a sleet-cold wind keened for lost souls in torment
‘cross the desolate and cloud-wracked moor.
With dying Phoebus now a blood-red smear upon the western hills
I so resolved to shelter here out of the coming chill.
Foreboding dragged my every step and
cawing rooks mocked overhead as if to say:
"Go, stranger, for you'll find no welcome here!"
Along the gravelled path I trod and beat the door with blackthorn rod;
it opened slowly; in I walked with beating heart and ne'er a thought
for all the world I'd left behind, as rain and sleet and howling wind
blew shut the door with crack of doom,
and left me peering through the gloom!
Around a table there they sat 'midst putrid food and cobwebbed vats
of mouldering wine; their bony mouths gaped vacant
as they grinned and laughed through time.  
I swayed and swooned as in a trance, my own existence thrown by chance
into that hellish company, who revelled, foul decay’d gentry!
And then a fearful thunderclap's reverberations
brought me back to sanity, I screamed and fled
to where the hillsides cried and bled;  
with staring eye and hair turn’d white,
I ran into the raving night.