I
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

II
Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.

III
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

IV
Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Iron man with his chessmen
Reinvent heretics for God's sake
Rational excuse aforesaid

Iron man with his chessmen
Wild flowers dancing to salute them
Drinking the blood after the game

Let me cherish thee this time
Never bartered you with victorious rime
Let me consecrate individuals with my light
You are your own conducting mind

Complex,
but to the mind,
distance is no object,
if I am here and there
then I am everywhere.

An insecticide,
I can hide in, slide in
underneath your skin.
Disrupt the flow of signals to
your brain,
drain you of the will to live.

Multi ***,
I am he and she and in me there
are many more, it
all checks out to me to be
more than complex
but in my mind,
I cannot object,
I only project the pictures that I see,
I keep my own and I own my self
and my
own company.

Complex.

Colours black,
fades
back
to white milk night.
Though blind of sight I
hear the falls,
the cataracts call in
colours black.,
On the board
knight backs night.
Checkmate
Right?

Crepuscular creatures bow their heads to dusk,
Licking the blood of their wounds, the sun stanches
The thousand faces of the moon, waiting,
For our cries, trapped by the mountains in our west.
Hands have eyes gazing the desert of a sea,
Hands have their own odes, so don’t teach them.
Waves cradling their souls. Undulating darkness
stare at them face-to-face, black and cold.
In their town, fishes feed on lights,
While their people feed on winds, the amihan.
Fishes paraded, muted by embers of the coals.
Women, children, singing, waiting for men
to unload their boxes, those bañeras of golden fish scales,
Pull each fish, peel their scales gently, there
There, they  hide.

Hide us in that box,
That rectangle of a box,
Our little box of threads and needles.
Stitch us on the seams,
Sink us under your sole,
Hide us in that barrels,
Distill our spirits,
Wash us pure. Age us,
Better yet,
Open our souls after the  war.

War is not a game
among chessmen
pawned into death
but to the hands
that move  them.

***** fortresses and palaces
write tightest code
reach the pinnacle of artistry
painting raindrops
composing sublime orchestrations
from furrows where germinate
the double-helical zenith
of human engineering outside
nanotubes, transistors or
our private clouds—
all the emergent complexity
we've harvested in semantic grace
—to seem like life is comfortable
and tastes good and may actually
be worth something in the end;
yet, bloodied or coddled, chessmen
march on, moving into position
guided by the arbitrariness of their
quest, immune to the nuance
of getting caught in a summer rain,
hugs from your grandmother,
some memory of reciting Bible verses
in Sunday school, singing a hymn into
the depth of a passionate smooch
or the fancy of imagination's depression,
but the arrow of time points on!
And eclectic rumination notwithstanding,
etropy always wins.

How difficult to rejoice when one hears
That those relatives against whose predations
Dead-bolts have been fitted on every door
Are visiting for Christmas after all

Let us rejoice that the nephews who pick locks
And break the windows in the garden shed
And ride the patio doors off their hinges
And pocket pewter chessmen for their play

Will be with us merrily once more
With their mothers – ‘tis the season to abhor

doesn't feel like it did before
cold wind is howling round my door
not like a lover, more like something
else, another thing entire. . . .

And I don't live on a moor
O, I am no where nearby
Heathcliff, name of my stallion true
I feel unhinged, I let it fall
There were strange & ghostly
Sightings that I never should of saw

All I gave to my own Self and
Even Ghost Town trips....I let it drop
It now evades upon a chill frost
quiet down stroke

I can make it all blow down
in formation, the chessmen
placed  uselessly before me

your will is marching towards
me any way I turn, relentless, one
pinnacle of moment when

ceased to bow under you
evil eye a warning like a gale
force tornado flying monkey  

(just a rumor, in a dream, so many years ago)

headed straight  towards
very heart of me, you do no harm. . . .
yet maybe you see it differently?

keep tossing them gals
down into the depths
wearing  200 pound diving dress

continual surprise when
sheer will carries gals
aloft, back to the airy
living world

diving bell, ring it out
nothing new to see here
move along

give into our  open hands
&  waiting mouths what cannot be give
to local charities or time

or space, in place of otherness
all words were wasted
on us, once you locked onto
such tender tight coordinates

anyone would do?
would anyone do for you?
it was so real and maybe I
am wrong in thinking this of
you, but I would never mind

one true thing is that it
scares me to think I left myself
behind for no more reason and I
could live with any truth

if it were truely true
my confusion is
not half as lost

as wondering what
has really happened

and with whom?

it bothers me too. . .

I have my own room
back tomorrow now
it will be my time

I will call all my friends
just to hear their voices
hum into my ears

I never missed those guys
so much as I do now
after what is left from you

what did you do?

only what I begged of you. . .

how did I enter into such
a bargain, sell it out
at fire sale, where
did my mind fly to?

I need a lonely bus heading out
into a sheeting rain never stopping
without a reason to keep driving

need a radio without a dial
a black raincoat and three extra miles
to go

Act 2
both sides use conscience for a hook
it's a con artist's suitcase
fill your cup in the Ocean of Tears
there's enough of everything in there
toasters glowing blenders humming
dogs ******* on lawns across the land
in a cloying oppressive sweetness
that could diverge and go anywhere
Club Med’s Oracle Island for example
blind sibyls eyelids fluttering
hissing spitting twitching babbling
it was the wisdom of the ages incarnate
but Bobby was miles from all this
making that fox up a tree deduction
consumed by a lingering half lit dread
of discovering at the moment of death
that his life was an in-flight movie
only with less captivity and more wandering
unsure of coming up with an airtight alibi
he suddenly mobilized his only shield
the lid off the dustbin of history
held against his approaching doom
they give you anything you want at first
the customer can do no wrong
then the high pressure hose
and subsequent foxhole autopsy
great 3 color graphics
they even have a screen saver
yet Fate had a trick up her ****
plucky LeMona it suddenly turns out
as the machinery of Zeus grinds us skyward
has been a spy for the forces of ambivalence
disguised as a bushwhacking retromaniac
gone undercover and surfing the channels
that were woven into the Swami's beard
from the first instant that she knew
the Eel King was a candle lit hallucination
as well as a groping spiritual vagrant
don't you **** with Bobby Eel daddy
it was LeMona and her retinal retinue
of petulant maidens on a magic carpet
Jacobins in Mr. Roger's neighborhood
the boardroom's feral chessmen
puking up last night's takeover
I mean takeout for the 6th time
uh oh I'm getting calm down messages
from my fiance LeMona Oblongata
so I can't even feel illustrious at last
I've been inoculated against everything except
the Eel King's daughter

From "Pageant of Naked Mischief" available on Amazon