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.

“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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

Where bright blood flowed
across my carven chest,
I now feel only warm,
tropic raindrops.  

Once, impassive priests stood here,
clad in gold and feathers,
obsidian blades poised
and dripping gore.  

But now a bored child sulks,
kicking at wet pebbles,
dragged unwilling to my side
by tourist parents.  

He turns away, spitting pink gum
into my granite bowl.  
There was a time when
I would have had his throbbing heart.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 . . .”

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.