Small hail rattles petulantly
against leaded attic windows.
Below, in untended gardens,
a child's broken swing creaks
where unkempt brambles
scratch at cold night winds.

In the abandoned nursery,
where faded draft-blown drapes
brush toy-strewn floorboards,
a dappled, paint-blistered rocking-horse
sways faintly on a fleeting, moonlit stage.

Where innocence long since died,
a legless bear leers at a blind rag doll.
A jammed spinning-top lies rusting
upon a hopelessly scattered jigsaw.
A ***** Harlequin slumps in depression,
his wanton Columbine gone forever.

From the torn, once gaudy, pages
of a faded, open book,
mocking rhymes echo
insanely down the years.

Crockery elopes with cutlery,
a suicidal mouse runs out of time,
Humpty mimics Lucifer . . .
and a little boy laughs to see such fun
as Old King Cole
steals your adult soul.

One day, gasped the Dying Man,
your Empire will be nothing
but a tale in a history book.

Your great cities will lie in ruins,
and your very language
will be dead.

You lie, said the soldier
with the spear,
stabbing upwards.

Upon a  far and distant world
where silicon's the key,
a great metallic turtle swam
through seas of mercury.

His eyes were red as copper,
and his mind was sharp as zinc;
he dined off silver fishes
and he sometimes paused to think.

"Supposing there's a world someplace
where carbon is the king?
Where seas are made of water,
and where fleshy turtles swim?"

A vagabond faints
in a wayside gutter,
a ring of scarlet patches
showing through unclean skin.

A great lord spews red froth
across a bed of linen,
as his lady watches helplessly
through a veil of tears.

A skylark sings high above
a half-ploughed field
where Piers lies choking
in the fresh cut furrows.

A harlequin sprawls
grotesquely swollen,
cap and bells twisted
in a masque of death.

Elizabethan manor house
beneath a bleak October sky;
where black crows call from moss-stained trees
and hapless leaves hang where they died.

No breath, nor breeze, despoils the day
that fades now in its lowered gloom;
beset with clouds, a weakling sun
casts little light into the room.

Through mullion windows’ diamond panes
a manicured garden lays;
in muted fading colours now,
with mem'ries of hot summer days.

Electric candles flicker gold,
from panelled walls gaunt portraits stare;
old Lords and Ladies long since dead,
view everyone without a care.

And as the guide concludes his tour
and visitors head for their bus;
a small child glances back to where
he made an ice-cream-spilling fuss.

In black and satin stands a man,
his doublet slashed with crimson fine;
a drooling wolfhound at his side,
he bows in mockery, divine.

Gorse gleams yellow
in the setting October sun's rays.

A brisk north-easterly
sends grassy ripples offshore
towards the incoming tide.

Down sloping meadows
an unseen bird cheeps,
it’s call swept out across
the wide blue bay.

Weather-beaten, a fence
stands furloughed,
the summer’s sheep and cattle
now called home to safer pastures.

And I stand facing east
reflecting upon the passing year,
and upon an unknown  future.

But of one thing I am certain.
One day my ashes will
join you here for all eternity.

She goes to spend a month
(what is time?)
with some forgotten tribe
in the foothills of nowhere;
a slim, blonde ‘celebrity’
playing at being a noble savage
for the sake of hard cash and
some TV channel's ratings.

She arrives to a muted greeting,
small children hiding
behind a mother's ***** skirts..
There will be rain tonight,
even though it is
the season of the rich.

She will sleep on a pallet bed
shared with a 75 year-old woman
(she looks 75 but is only 42,
and has borne seven children,
three of them now dead).
On no! The old woman snores!
And how we laugh at our
western cousin,
cringing at spiders,
flinching at shadows!

Tomorrow she will walk a mile,
to symbolically fetch water
in an old jerry can,
and, hidden en route,
she will allegedly defecate
in the bushes!

See her eat some
vile local delicacy
as the headman's
honoured guest.
She will then be forced,
grinning falsely,
into some tribal dance,
wearing a headscarf and
clapping like a maniac.

And eventually, when they
have enough footage,
the sentence will be over.
"I have learned so much about myself"
she will bleat towards
a smirking, unseen director.

Later, as she climbs into an air-con
four-wheel-drive monster
that will whisk her back to
civilisation, the realisation is
that she never once
asked the tribe
what they thought of her.

Hanging motionless
in warm, tropic seas,
sun glints on fin as
diamonds dance.

Ungainly giant,
head without body,
balancing existence,
suspending belief.

Cold sunset torches
the western sky,
turning leafless branches
into flaming embers.

The world spins into night
and the solar wind is born.

Auroras dance now
with electric fire,
tearing open icy voids
beneath a long-dead moon,
immolating phantoms
above Earth’s funeral pyre.

Unnoticed, beside the hedge,
I watched them embrace.

She, body arching, silk snapping,
oblivious in her white-hot passion.
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,
for 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.

Little Eliza she cries in her cradle,
Benjamin crawls on the rug by the hearth;
Hannah stirs soup with an old pewter ladle,
Jane’s picking blackberries down by the garth.

Mary and Lizzie attend to their baking,
Billy’s a carter out learning his trade;
wee Tommy follows - a man in the making -
gathering horse-dung with bucket and *****.

Widowed at forty with eight children living,
Mary, their mother, cleans houses by day;
money is short and the work unforgiving,
asking for strength, on a Sunday she’ll pray.

Thomas, her husband, was killed at the sawmill,
working long hours to put shoes on their feet;
times they were hard, nothing ever came easy,
but sweet was the love shared in old Sugar Street.

Behind locked doors the Gamblers dare
to cast our fates without a care.
The white, the black, they pull our strings
and use us as a child’s playthings.

Upon the tables of the gods
with wagers cast at any odds,
they stand us all in serried rows
and knock us down like dominoes

As thunder rolls and blind men feast,
the Red Horse rides out in the east
Who’ll win the game, who’ll take the bet?
The wheel is turning faster yet!

Deserted by the fleeting glacier
that once bore him here,
a boulder stands eroding
above a windswept valley.

Tibetan ventriloquists pose
beneath a silken awning,
whilst poor forgotten Mithras
looks on in bewilderment.

An author relentlessly writes
his soporific life’s work,
fingers smudged with
yesterday’s dead beetle ink.

Peasants fish for eels
beside a feotid canal,
as an Inca death mask grins
through flaking lapis lazuli lips.

An asthmatic mongrel twitches
and dreams of happier days,
lungs rustling like
some ghostly crinoline.

And further on an Abbott gives
his holy-roller blessing
to men in chain-mail,
four-wheel-drive caparisoned for war.

Shrivelled blossom falls
from dark green hedgerows
shaken by a foreign wind.
Dust flurries whirl and eddy,
dancing, spinning along
bone-dry lanes that lead to nowhere.

Across a beige, hay-scattered paddock
wide-eyed horses shake their heads,
and skitter from fence to fence.
In the distance a young girl
shouts unintelligibly to an unseen friend,
light livid on her white t-shirt.

“Hot day,” comments a passing old man,
“Enough blue up there
to tailor the Royal Navy.”
Under his arm a folded newspaper
screams silent headlines of drought
in some foreign land.

And within me a long-dormant memory awakes,
for this is not how things should be.
I hear innocent warnings sing
down the empty, echoing centuries;
“For Summer is i-cumen in,
and Winter is a-gone . . .”

Warm sun gives its blessing
to rolling blue-black cloud-band.
Sudden wind blows coldly
across the greening meadow.
Tall young grass bends helpless
before its unknown master.
White tailed rabbit runs now
for bramble-burrowed refuge.
Knowing magpie chatters
up high within tall oak tree.
Mare and foal seek shelter
beneath the may-thorn hedgerow.
Butterfly flits wildly
towards safe dry-stone walling.
Heavy now the teardrops
of saddened springtime weeping.
Rain pours like a torrent
down ancient foot-worn pathway.

Yet like a swallow flying,
so soon the squall it passes!

Sunlight glints like jewels
on dripping rain-bowed flowers.
Blackbird sings to blackbird
from branches decked with diamonds.
Steam arises gently.
from muddied flanks of cattle.
Furtive feet bestir now
to seek the heat of noontide.

By green and windblown rippled slopes
where cattle graze in summer sun;
beneath blue skies where larks sing shrill
and rabbits by the hedgerows run.
When meadowsweet and columbine
bedeck the grass 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
the toils of men in leathern tome;
unread and lost for centuries,
hid deep in our ancestral home.

And through the watches of the night
we drift from room to balcony;
recalling days of childhood lost,
and 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.

As I was out a-riding over pleasant hills of green,
beneath a sky of cornflower blue where larks sang all serene,
I heard a distant hoof beat drumming loudly ‘cross the land,
and I saw a horseman riding with a bow strung in his hand.

Upon a steed as white as snow he galloped like the wind,
and carried awful knowledge of how oft mankind has sinned.
Upon his head he wore a crown that dazzled like the sun,
and he aimed a headless arrow for to conquer and have done.

Behind him came another on a horse of fiery red;
a mighty sword he wielded as along his way he sped.
I shouted “Where is it you ride, and what’s that great blade for?”
He laughed and answered, “Always, friend, I take the road to War!”

And as I watched him vanish in the blue horizon’s haze,
a black horse trotted by me with its rider’s eyes ablaze.
He carried rusted iron scales that never more would weigh,
and he named the price of famine that Humanity must pay.

The day grew bleak as winter and the green hills turned to grey.
As birds fell dying from the sky, I turned and rode away.
My own horse snorted madly, and his steaming breath did writhe,
as I spurred his pale flanks onward, and again I swung my scythe.

Started back last summer with
a piece of bad news.
Why us?  Why now? What have we done
to deserve this?  But no-one is to blame.
And  you try and make the best of things.
You say "Nah, that can't be right!
They must've got it wrong!"
But they haven't.  
They most certainly have not.
For these are the end days.

And so from then on you try to
carry on as normal, whatever 'normal' is,
praying for some kind of miracle,
hoping against hope that one will be granted.
You smile like an idiot at strangers,
trying to be friendly, looking for support,
but looking plain weird,
your emotions in a whirl
and your feelings jumbled.
For these are the end days.

You go down the pub, have a beer,
play cards, laugh if you can,
but it's always there,
a shadow hanging over you
like the ace of spades,
poised to slice you in two.
You try and joke on social media,
post a little music, just to keep sane,
but your heart's not really in it.
For these are the end days.

How long do we have?  No-one knows.
And if they do, they don't answer directly.
You make your own daily forecast
in this new and strangely sad world.
Sunny skies one day, cloudy the next.
You have to stay strong whatever happens,
yet you fear the inevitable worst.
We are grateful we have good friends
to help us through.
For these are the end days.

So long ago in King Hal’s time, our nets we cast upon the wave;
and drawing in did stand a-feared at what we’d caught in Orford Bay.

Entangled ‘midst our dripping catch, with eyes that stared all hellish green,
enscaléd like some creature deep, a Merman writhed as one obscene.

All webbéd were his hands and feet, his body dripped with ocean bile;
upon his head the ****-wrack grew, green-bearded was this demon vile.

Fast to the shore with awful haste we sped before the wind and tide;
Lord Glanville for to summon forth, the Merman’s fate all to decide.

Upon the quay his Lordship stood with men at arms and shriven priest,
and all did cross themselves in fear before this strange unholy beast.

“Enchain it,” cried Lord Glanville loud, “then to God’s Kirk with all good speed!”
The shriven priest prayed long and hard as to the church we did proceed.

With Holy Water, cross of gold, with candle and with testament,
the priest then exorcised the beast, who knew not what was done nor meant.

To all’s dismay he would not bow before the Host on bended knee;
and so to dungeon was he dragged to dwell upon his blasphemy!

The silent Merman beaten was, and hung in chains in for seven weeks,
and fed was he on fish and shells, yet never did he sleep nor speak.

And so at length his Lordship said, “Across the harbour tie a net,
and we shall see how he shall swim, but by his ankles chainéd, yet!”

The net a-fixed, the village folk came down to see the Merman’s plight;
into the sea they threw him then, with foam and wavelet flashing white.

He vanished ‘neath the waters like some seabird in pursuit of prey,
then surfaced laughing, chain in hand, and to his Lordship he did say;

“You thought to make me such as you, who walk in blindness o’er the land!
You’d punish me for difference!  You thought to treat me like a Man!”

So long ago in King Hal’s time our nets we cast upon the wave;
and drawing in did stand a-feared at what we’d caught in Orford Bay.

“Have you heard all that nonsense that’s going on now?”
Said the Mother Hen, clucking, to Daisy the Cow.
“I was watching the TV through Farmer Giles’ door,
Oh, it makes me feel happy to be where we are!
There’s a strange orange man in a far distant land
that is shaking his wattle, he can’t understand
why he hasn't a friend in the whole big wide world,
and he says that he hates us for not being pearls
before swine - not that I have a grudge against Pigs,
I mean, did I not once allow them to dig
all around my fine hen-house before we were moved,
far away from the paddock ‘til drainage improved?
Even so, said the man on TV with a grin,
there’s a place called the Middle East where we can’t win.
And another, I think that they said was Iraq?
May the Great Chicken Spirit please send our boys back!
Oh, I tell you, old Daisy, we’re better off here
being just farmyard animals, having no fear!
And who do you reckon keeps telling us lies?
Says we’ll all end up frozen or baked into pies?
What I know now, my friend - and my sisters and brothers -
is that all Men are evil, and some more than others!

“They believe everything they read,
but they don’t understand a word of it”

Yeah, right . . .

“They say the world was created in six days,
but they never worked a day in their lives”

That’s so true . . .

“They say the world is the centre of everything,
but they’re at the centre of their personal universes”

So I’m told . . .

“They say a lot of things,
but they’re so busy talking that they don’t ever listen”

Guess so . . .

“I’m telling you, Lucifer,
we should’ve stuck with the giant lizards”

….. and with that God sadly
put down the phone.

Life is a gift.
Gratitude for what remains
is more helpful than resentment
for what’s been lost.

Our days are wicked short
and terribly beautiful.

All we’ve got is this one breath,
And, if we’re lucky,
we get another.

Imprisoned in some nameless jail
and, like ten thousand inmates pale,
I counted time I could not feel,
and stood on head, and then on heel.

So turn and turn again about,
like other tortured souls I shout,
yet am not heard, my temples pound,
beneath life’s torrents am I drowned!

Ignored am I, like one and all,
save for the early morning call
that shakes us from our torpor, aye,
and then we fall like hail from sky.

Inevitably down through time
we are mere specks, as dust and grime,
yet in our falling purge our sin,
our labours end, then re-begin.

For lost are we within this sphere,
for all eternity, I fear!
A universe where all are ******,
within a timer’s grains of sand.

I heard them as I walked through cobbled streets
made damp by a late December squall.
Sheltered by stained red-brick walls,
shunned by shoppers, and deliberately ignored
by those of a certain wealth who deem any individual
to be of an inferior race, they played old airs
upon makeshift, much-travelled instruments.

A battered top-hat stuck with peacock's feathers,
a pinstriped waistcoat that had seen better days,
a gold watch-chain hung with lucky charms
beneath his paisley cravat, gnarled hands caress
a knee-held drum as he beats out a timeless rhythm
that echoes around the thronging streets
like a half-forgotten memory.

Clad in stained and crumpled jeans,
weather-beaten face half-hidden by the
downturned brim of a leather drover's hat;
the singer barely looks up at his transient audience;
his faded combat-jacket buttoned tight against the rain
as his leaking boots dance an unconscious jig
across wet flagstones.

Beside him a dented steel-guitarist sits on an upturned milk crate,
his grey dreadlocks cascade back from his side-shaved head;
his tattoos flicker like feedback from his unsafe amp,
barely connected by dubious wiring to a ***** car-battery,
as "Old Bold Captain Preedy" is re-released into a sputtering sound-system with all the reverence of the 23rd Psalm.

And I will fear no evil, for thy existence and style, they comfort me,
and thy music is always with me.

Under a cataclysmic sky
they sheltered from a wind so hot
it burned green leaves to ashes
as they watched in fascinated horror.

They’d not seen anyone else for days
and, having found each other,
had become inseparable companions
lost in a world turned awry.

Behind a crumbling wall they sought refuge
in what once had been a garden,
its solitary tree bearing what they knew
to be the last of mankind’s fruit.

Starving, he plucked it from the twisted branch
and clumsily made her an offering of love.
She smiled sadly at his youthfulness,
but took it nonetheless, biting to the heart.

“You never did tell me your name” she whispered.
“Adam” sighed the boy, “What’s yours?”
“Eve” she replied, brushing away a tear
as acid rain fell on them like venom.

Well I’ve lain in the dirt now for many’s the year,
and I’ve seen cowards fight and I’ve seen brave men’s fear.
I’ve witnessed their laughter, their songs and their tears;
I’m a spent cartridge case on the Somme.

My body is rusted and bent now with age,
ah, but once I was young, full of hatred and rage!
Back in 1916 history turned a dread page;
I’m a spent cartridge case on the Somme.

It was my destiny on the first of July,
as the larks sang above in a cloudless blue sky,
for to sentence a young soldier boy there to die;
I’m a spent cartridge case on the Somme.

Now the guns are long silent, the trenches are green,
and a peaceful sun shines on a poppy-strewn scene.
White headstones cast shadows where heroes have been;
I’m a spent cartridge case on the Somme.

This morning they found me, and out from the clay
I was pulled by a man in the harsh light of day,
just a small souvenir of a tourist’s brief stay;
I’m a spent cartridge case on the Somme.

Awkwardly leaning forward, sloping over damp, brown earth,
stands a young boy’s chiselled memory.
Above rooks caw incessantly in budding branches,
yet little ever grows beneath the great yew’s venerable shadow.

Here beside cold, forgotten, lichened stones,
thin pale weeds strain for scarce obtainable light.
Small insects forage through fallen leaf litter
whilst passing squirrels move swiftly on, sniffing decay.

Lettering barely legible, a long-dead stonemason’s art
serves only now as brief refuge for tiny red mites;
and yet for those with eyes to see a tragic tale is here,
a tale two hundred years in the telling.

“Hic Iacet Poor Benjamin,
who did Fall into some Awful Vat
within his Father’s Manufactory,
whereby he Perished,
Scalded like a Cat.
No more the Trees of Youth he’ll Climb,
for Ten Short Years was all his Time.”

Awkwardly leaning forward, sloping over damp, brown earth,
stands a young boy’s chiselled memory.
Above rooks caw incessantly in budding branches,
yet little ever grows beneath the great yew’s venerable shadow.

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 gaunt 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.

Grey October dawning,
mist hangs low in woodland
Fading is the season,
beech and oak leaves falling
Tangled are the brambles,
overgrown and berried
Spider in her leaf-hide,
sees her web bejewelled
Drowsy cattle standing,
breath and wet flank steaming
Sunrise gleams on water,
streamlet coldly flowing
Wasted grasses leaning,
trampled under hoofprint
Fern and mosses greening,
close by wall of sandstone
Early sings the sparrow,
yarrow flowers whiting
Sluggish flies the bee now,
nectar scarce inviting
Owl in tall tree sleeping,
shuns the day awaking
Fox in earthen breastwork,
sated now from hunting
Rabbit sniffs the morning,
burrow mouth beguiling
Scent of mould and mushroom,
undergrowth pervading
Fallen tree trunk rotting,
spotted red with fungus
Naked roots stand grasping,
fingers locked in death throe
Down in dew washed meadow,
foal lies red and stillborn
Sadly stands the old mare,
one year past her blessing
Nevermore to call home
her stallion by evening
Hidden in the hawthorn,
by blood-red berries dripping
Carrion crow watches,
waiting for her leaving
Patience is his virtue,
soon to know the feeding.

Bleak is the day,
cold clouds drift miserably
over sodden fields
where hawthorn hedgerows
weep for summer’s passing.

No sun now to warm the soul,
no longer cheer within
the tumbled cot
where ragged sheep stand
and shelter behind old walls.

Collie sniffs damp air,
his  breath steams and curls
as we secure the gate and make
our long, sleet-ridden
way homeward.

Tonight we shall sit by the fire,
he and I, dreaming
of snow white lambs,
cornflower skies and
warm, sunlit meadows.

Meantime there’s crackling to chew
and whiskey tots to keep away the chill,
for we both know
the Green Man sleeps,
and Winter is upon us.

Shut away from public view
behind high walls and landscaped gardens,
Antiseptic wards where beds
have strong restraints, and none are pardoned.
Seldom are the inmates given
visits by their family members,
those that have forgotten kinfolk
cling to life like dying embers.
Who would wish to see some brother,
giggling, imbecilic, drooling?
Who would wish to see some sister,
***** round her ankles pooling?
Then there are the psychopaths,
the freaks deformed, and those possessed;
sedatives and exorcism
pacify the most distressed.
When the sun goes down no shadows
lengthen in stark corridors.
Never-winking neon tubes
ensure that light’s forever yours.
Even so when night has fallen
always come the sounds of Hell.
Slamming doors and running footsteps,
screams and shouts - a tolling bell.
Lost souls roaming empty stairways,
disembodied spirits howling.
Bodies stiff with medication
twitch whilst cotton sheets be-fouling.
And when dawn returns to shine
upon this Godforsaken phylum,
Nature wipes a tearful eye
and grieves for mankind’s bleak asylum.

My ragged wings are black as night, my eyes are cold as sin;

the crows and rooks and magpies, and the jays, my nearest kin.

I am a rogue and vagabond, I raid the nests of Man;

I’ll steal his golden trinkets and I’ll take whate’er I can.


Some fools have tried to trap me, and yet others have their guns,

but they who think me stupid little know what’s to be done.

Some others think to bribe me for to leave their crops alone;

I swoop in with my brothers and we take their kernels home.


To superstitious folks who see me perch upon their roof,

a new born babe will follow, for that is the Devil’s truth.

Yet down your chimney should I flit, beware the Reaper’s blade!

Within the year cold death shall come to master or to maid.


So look outside your window now and see what I may do,

If on the weather vane I sit, then rain shall come to you.

But if me and my brothers all do chatter, jack and caw,

then pray we are mistaken, for we tell of coming war.

Saturday evening, it's early, so early,
before all the bright young things come out to play;
5.30 down in the pub by the bus station,
paintwork is peeling, it's seen better days.

Up by the juke box a man in a faded
old jacket stands baffled, a coin in his hand.
Names flash before him in gaudy confusion,
he can't find The Searchers, his favourite band.

Three women gossip and shriek by the window
where pale light illuminates glasses of gin;
Elsie's a pensioner, Maureen's a widow,
and Dot buys a round from her last bandit win.

Up at the bar big fat Ronnie's demanding
they switch on the TV t o see if he's won;
Got a hot tip and he stuck on a tenner,
he'd better not tell her indoors what he's done!

Smell of stale ***** permeates from old Billy,
he's been drinking Guinness since quarter to three;
last night he was nicked by the cops on his way home
for taking a leak underneath a park tree.

All human life is arrayed in the bar room,
it's where people come when they've nowhere to go;
seeking companionship, happy the hour,
when somebody talks to them that they don't know.

I know nothing of your world.
I live in perpetual darkness
beneath the strata of a million years.

Sometimes I sense others
as they slowly pass me by,
but I care not for their presence.

In the eyes of their blinkered science
I am merely a blind, white creature
swimming towards extinction.

Sand buried, parched skull
exposed by excavation;
jaw gaping in silent
death's head yawn.

Is eternal sleep so
excruciatingly boring?
Or do you instead
scream across the centuries:
"Leave me be!"

Impotent rage as trowel
scrapes upon bone!
The memory desecrated
in the cause of science.

Desolate rock-strewn mountains
lit by cold sunlight

Prayer flags flap in
ceaseless Himalayan winds

An armless, broken Buddha smiles
from a desecrated temple floor

Whisper a soft prayer as you pass, friend,
for there is a spirit here.
The days and nights relentlessly come and go,
as do the endless seasons.

Men rise and fall, each in their turn,
like the withered grasses,
sheltered for a brief span by my lichened walls,
sleeping in my shadow-ridden depths.

For old am I,
so very old.

The northern winds blow ceaselessly
over my cold, weathering stones,
for the hearth-fires of the Cruithne
are long since turned to ash.

She walked through pastures green
beneath an oppressive sky,
warm July drizzle drifting down
over web-strewn hedgerows,
bejewelling her coat
and forming tiny pearls
on her long, black lashes.

Lost in reverie, she ambled
slowly down hill towards
a reed-edged stream
where, she recalled,
small birds chased midges
when the hot sun shone;
but not today, when humidity
stifled their flight,
keeping them close by men's houses
in search of scraps
and small, errant insects.

Absently, she noticed the long grasses
clinging wetly to her legs,
and as dim thoughts lumbered
through her bovine brain,
wondered if she and her sisters
would be taken away for milking
before the downpour broke.

At six o’clock your day begins
You pray forgiveness for your sins
Your gruel and your clothes are thin
At the workhouse

Pick oakum ‘til your fingers bleed
It matters not your age nor creed
The overseer will tend your needs
At the workhouse

At noon you take your daily bread
A little meat or cheese instead
You eat in silence bow your head
At the workhouse

And when the working day is o’er
Your body aches your hands are sore
Your bed’s a pallet on the floor
At the workhouse

And pauper when your day is past
There’ll be no coffin gilt with brass
You’ll lie in sackcloth ‘neath the grass
At the workhouse

Radiating twilight, and are the deer awake?
Grey and ghostly shadows come a-gliding through the break;
Wolf and fox and boar are here, glowing through the may,
So far away in Chernobyl about the break of day.

Evacuated city sleeps abandoned now and still,
Stunted trees and weeds grow rife, the air is dank and chill;
Contaminated apples wouldn’t tempt old Eve to play,
So far away in Chernobyl about the break of day.

Classrooms lie with open books, and shops with open doors,
The soccer stadium’s overgrown, the fairground Ferris snores;
Vines climb up apartment blocks, old washing hangs and sways,
So far away in Chernobyl about the break of day.

The monster that is always near lies mumbling in its sleep,
Cracking, shedding toxic dust as Geiger counters bleep;
Post-apocalyptic scene, atomic age Pompeii,
So far away in Chernobyl about the break of day.

Upon the headland is my place
where seabirds wheel and turn apace,
a-screeching windblown tales to me
of distant lands and distant seas,
of sparkling beaches, gleaming quartz,
of strangers and of foreign ports,
of shark and serpent, kraken, whale,
of ships that foundered in the gale,
of sunken vessels, bones picked clean,
of hagfish writhing and obscene,
of ocean currents, plankton’s bloom,
of those that spawn beneath the moon,
of coral reef and rainbow hue,
of lava and volcanic flue,
of devastating waves and tides,
of those who lived and those who died,
Yet little does this mean to me
as I stare silent out to sea,
where seabirds wheel and turn apace,
upon the headland is my place.