On the white screen dance the stringed dots
Mind spilled codes of hieroglyphic thoughts
Slowly they emerge handholding lines
Not always yielding intended designs.
Something was brewing inside the head
Coaxing to weave and take it ahead
The drunken horses so wildly gallop
There is no leash to make them stop.
Nerves are taut and they won't relax
Till all is vented they reach the ******
It was thus fated the moment it was sown
What's to be grown could never be known.
As the fever wanes arrives the new child
It may be adored or it may be defiled
The canvas is washed clean as in the rain
Something is brewing to be vented again.

Thrum.
Undulating across the cyan, sea scented lagoon,
  I watch Venezia condense like an artist
  sketching grey lines in the mist.
Murano: thump, a deeper varum,
  static air fills with diesel vapour,
  smelling of engine, tasting of oil.
Thrum away.
My eyes wash the roofs and domes with terracotta,
  till I step into the canvas

The grey ghoul masks, tan mummy wraps,
    black witch's hats and corpse green Frankenstein faces
    haven't hit the bottom of the bin before
mince pies jockey for a place beside the hot-cross buns.
Halloween and Christmas are squeezed together
    tighter than a coin’s width.

Tinsel boy band advent calendars
    sell 24 chocolate milestones
    on the road to obesity.
Supermarkets offer a sanitised Christmas
    religion rinsed away
    like bacteria on a chlorine washed turkey.
They trade a childless nativity like
    pies without mince;
    sultan-less fruit cake;
    plum-less pudding;
an unstuffed winter holiday roast.

People wonder where our culture has gone:
      we sold it for a midden
      of conveniently packaged banality.

In the Himalayan mountains,
bordered by the Chindwin River,
bordered by the humid jungle,
      sweaty, musky, monsoon scented,
East of hot and sultry plainlands
      climbs a cooler verdant forest
      to a green and vibrant woodland,
filled with mossy bamboo thickets,
filled with silent trees that listen
to      the Naga log drum beating;
          shrill cicadas’ night-time trilling;
          waking hornbills, evü, goking;
          and the flashing fireflys mating
              like a white-hot viper chilli
              spreads it’s burning incandescence.
There, amongst the hilltribe people
      is my centre, is my focus,
      separated by a journey,
      many days by air and roadway,
but my most important person
      from that place so far, so distant,
lives and loves with me forever,
      in my home, my hearth, my heartland.

A naked branch awaits the spring
    when vernal vigour will awake
      the cuckoos calling on the wing.
A naked branch awaits the spring
    like distant soundless whispering
      around the icy listening lake.
A naked branch awaits the spring,
  when vernal vigour will awake.