I

Half of the fellow father as he doubles
His sea-****** Adam in the hollow hulk,
Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles
To-morrow's diver in her ***** milk,
Bisected shadows on the thunder's bone
Bolt for the salt unborn.

The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled
Corrosive spring out of the iceberg's crop,
The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled
The swing of milk was tufted in the pap,
For half of love was planted in the lost,
And the unplanted ghost.

The broken halves are fellowed in a *******,
The crutch that marrow taps upon their sleep,
Limp in the street of sea, among the rabble
Of tide-tongued heads and bladders in the deep,
And stake the sleepers in the savage grave
That the vampire laugh.

The patchwork halves were cloven as they scudded
The wild pigs' wood, and slime upon the trees,
******* the dark, kissed on the cyanide,
And loosed the braiding adders from their hairs,
Rotating halves are horning as they drill
The arterial angel.

What colour is glory? death's feather? tremble
The halves that pierce the pin's point in the air,
And ***** the thumb-stained heaven through the thimble.
The ghost is dumb that stammered in the straw,
The ghost that hatched his havoc as he flew
Blinds their cloud-tracking eye.

II

My world is pyramid. The padded mummer
Weeps on the desert ochre and the salt
Incising summer.
My Egypt's armour buckling in its sheet,
I scrape through resin to a starry bone
And a blood parhelion.

My world is cypress, and an English valley.
I piece my flesh that rattled on the yards
Red in an Austrian volley.
I hear, through dead men's drums, the riddled lads,
******* their bowels from a hill of bones,
Cry Eloi to the guns.

My grave is watered by the crossing Jordan.
The Arctic scut, and basin of the South,
Drip on my dead house garden.
Who seek me landward, marking in my mouth
The straws of Asia, lose me as I turn
Through the Atlantic corn.

The fellow halves that, cloven as they swivel
On casting tides, are tangled in the shells,
Bearding the unborn devil,
Bleed from my burning fork and smell my heels.
The tongue's of heaven gossip as I glide
Binding my angel's hood.

Who blows death's feather? What glory is colour?
I blow the stammel feather in the vein.
The **** is glory in a working pallor.
My clay unsuckled and my salt unborn,
The secret child, I sift about the sea
Dry in the half-tracked thigh.

Can you settle for more or less if today was your last day
And what would be your retort if you were denied another chance?
How life introduces sobriety and the impending inevitability
The interstice and it’s ingress that encloses before your eyes
The demanding pouring of importune time
That soothing allaying sighs that evoke incalculable alleviation

If someone were to impart as they closed their eyes
As they died with a commital of happenings with not enough time
As to burden you with the impression of only one chance
It would seem and with the impending inevitability
Of your death which would subito compromise the day
A bearding contrivance plight of obligations engagement and commital no alleviation

An abecedarian dossier concealed for a long time
All this time the inevitable coinciding incident only for your eyes
The emotional habituation was of quotidian rendition each day
Of how trivial things take us on a dance with only one life one chance
With your attention and awareness on the answer the inevitability
Of what you are becoming with each passing second for each
Thought which transpires and no alleviation

Is there an epoch a replicating limn a depiction of our linear time
As we perpetrate and pursue progressively for our alleviation
Engaged to staying the course the day
Stirring closing in on our deliberate objective determined chance
Which remained for a terse duration from the inevitability
In which at the atrium of this erstwhile portage of a duvet to belabor
To stifle firsthand with your eyes

The variant from this domicile from this residence on a day
Is the vagabond to perish in yonder with no alleviation
Once man was a brute dullard or a curmudgeon spinster at a time
Which offers a mute disconnection ragged miscreant the inevi
Naivety or absent  mindedness to somnambulist and its silhouette
Notwithstanding change
The quagmire and it’s nightmare the ingrate delighted with coined
Shunned eyes

Reputation with a flagrant obscene defilement galvanizing
The alleviation
At the heart of this lies another chance
A precocious inevitability
A man who lies to die another day
The annihilation in desperate want for from those argent eyes
To the starving newfangled optimism which in its sheen
Shines sunshine dulling the ocular orbs of time

Forwithal in befuddlement remain here
The time if infringement to comprehend the volatile vertigo
And the inevitability
The harrowing of hell
Glance at the shinning suns in her eyes intention considers change
After you heal and left are the cicatrix
Will you plunge further for alleviation
Or on the intent of regression once again
From long ago to another distant day.

After a week of hot sun
we find the garden has been iced
thickly, like Christmas cake.
A blackbird on the bird table
scoops snow in his beak.

A day later,
and the primroses have survived
the snow, the apple tree buds too.

The country's sparrow population
hides in the hedges,
bread in their beaks bearding their faces.

A song thrush lands on the lawn.
Making a stance like Jesus,
a worm tethering him down,
he flutters once into the air
exposing his cartoon trouser feathers
before he pulls the worm free
and breaks it in two with his beak.

Then the hedgerow birds scatter,
and all is still,
but for the sparrow hawk,
disappointed this time,
skittering up and away.

Seven Foot Sickle Bar Mower

Lifeless on a patch of Wear farm swallowed
up by time marked in jimson and honey vine
milkweed to the eyes of a city boy, worse
a northerner, shoeless, shirtless, tanned but

for pale omegas of a low tide flat top wreathing my ears
white shading to blue at the temples, prayerful snakes
sleep late coiled around clutches of my nightmares.  

Oil can like the oil can that lubricated the Tin Man
brandished jail break file in the other hand
grandpa circled the scorpion striking at the lethal tail
silvering edges of serrated teeth, eyes shadowed

by the brim of his pith helmet, liquoring bushings
gone dry in the heat while I sat watching
from the open palm of the Ford NAA Jubilee tractor seat

bearing witness to the honing of blades against high grass
bearding the branch, touching but not touching
my father’s face swimming naked in the quarry
pond of grandpa in profile, angled low above

the linkage mechanism, steel on steel, shadow
against light, my hand rolling fine red clay dust
into thin snakes against my smooth cheek.