Heard the moon from under a blanket.
Wrapped in silk she rapps on my window,
begging in the most patient manner - to be let in.

Hello my lovely Margret.
How I'd like to sink my teeth into her tonight.
Should we have a smoke?
She trembles in her luminous shimmer.

Takes my hands - Margret you  devil.
Never an audible urge,
but an ethereal curtain becomes us
and I hear the cry - dance with me, she says.

Not tonight Margret, we must behave ourselves.
God she's a different kind of tempting.
I really should kick this nasty habit, I know.
She snakes those legs around my middle.

She's no pioneer - not a ****** innovator,
Just a crutch, but a beautiful one at that.
Will you stop it, I said not tonight.
Dims a bit, start fearing  I've been to rough - but she's back.
Just a passing cloud.
Eager as ever, tonight, to bathe me in radiance.
Dance with me, she cries -  and I falter.

Gosh as a child when I rode my bike,
Smiling and happy with delight,
I always thought that I was right,

She told me no that it's late at night,
So she wouldn't find out I snuck out of sight,
She would never know and we'd never fight,
I should have listened late that night,

Finally I started riding it into the moon light,
Now I'm paralyzed and can never think right,
That light was a man and his front light too bright,

I got hit and my mom took me to North End Waterfront,
The light got brighter and I filed with fright,
A few years ago, now I'm thirty-nine and let out a grunt,
All I'm saying is you may think you're right,
Until you end up like Margret Kite..

A lowly wooden bench lent itself to a lonesome aged narrow man in a common garden in the smallest hour of the day’s beginning. In the thick haze of the summer’s waking light the common is thinly met with the company of others. Just an old man and his acquainted bench who came to give his eyes sight to the grass and trees, and to rid himself of thought.
He and the bench creak as he sits back; clutching at the satchel veiled among his dull drudged garb that bleeds into his pallid slack and cracked skin.
The wiry hairs bushed around his nostrils recoil to the deep inhale before the sigh, his yawning blue eyes sliding behind a milky glaze follow a bushy tailed rodent hurry into the confidence of a tree.
Through all nonchalance a pair of hobgoblin lugs under a brown woollen hat slides up the flanks of his head to outlying drowned tones of laddish laughs and lewd levity, an unseen clutch of kids filling the common’s spread with their foolish louting prances. Intimidating the preferred and performed with their innocuous idiocies; a mere asocial array of follies without the thought of good manner.
The thoughts of the old man are only briefly drawn; his ears leave the sounds of reckless recreation and back to the hushing song of the swaying grass, the rustling shake of the seasoned leaves on gorged and drooping branches. To his own wilted waning heart, the tremors, quiver and shivers within his own cage, his thoughts turned to his own temporal passage and to the re-joining of his love, of whom no longer lays her head on his shoulder, whom no longer wraps herself around his arm on the lowly park bench.
His lowest lip gives to an emotive tremble as he heaves himself over to the hem of the seat, his hands without any other part to play; frenetically tickle one another with frail kinked fingers.
With what little his body has left to give the eyes well to the upmost point of a tear, as he feels the weight of his wallet in his side trouser pocket against the rough of his skin. Where there within lays an image of a most loved face in a prized time, so that it may be remembered so it may fetch ease to a remittent floundering morsel of a man who could justly with the dead.
The photograph within his keeping need not be looked upon from under the shine of a laminated holding; it needs only to be there, only to be known that it is there.
The satchel was undid and fetched from within the clutter came an elderly notebook now held in his hands. A phlegmy husk of something said breeches his gummy chops, and he spits as he spat shouting out at the still of the garden.
“You should always write more than you do,” she would say, “you are better for it when you do and it lifts me as it does you, when you do.”
The old man reads from the notebook with a weak hate for the world.

“Am I for the worms yet? Am I to be from this rock?
Am I not yet too mad for this mad maddening world?
Four corners of an empty house, a homeless place of curling wallpaper and aloneness for company.
A room in a vagrant house with no light to fill it with a decrepit fool for a keeper
His stink stinks the walls for days as the blow flies form a speckled haze as they feast in filth of his unnoticed demise
With no manner of intention and for relation or friend, there is no cause and no mention for any to attend
He will rot with the house and his memory with it, with his memory does his love die and together they are ghosts in a world where ghosts do not exist.”

The old man pauses as he forcibly triggers one finger to his temple and ***** in his lips. His empty cries fall to a mumble as his hands tremble with his dear notebook in their grasp.

“Take me now cruel are the fates, take me now and rid me
The worms will welcome me, my flesh for an endless night
My life for a world without this life, for a life without his world
I would hold with a brim smile if it was not for my memory of her, if she was not to be lost at the close of this stint
I know not or want knowledge; I seek not of a design and not of meaning
Just a cure for this affliction for my must to her who brings me so much sorrow
Through blissful ages I can no longer hold, and can barely recall
We are all just people who will soon be once living, to be unlived and to forget is a conflict in myself
I have no answer as I have no question, you can have no answer to a question you do not seek nor ask
I dare not speak but I have no end for this, I have no solace and I have no end.”
The old man; the poor old man began to close his dear aged notebook and find the need to bring a smile, perhaps a moment of lunacy to calm the tightening knot beneath his breast.
He pulled a scratching cackle from the pit, wild and uncooked wiping the drool from the crook of his maw with the back of his blotched, mottled hand.
The old man found some seconds of a stoic amenity as his wild eyes grew gallant for those mere moments before the grey metal heft of his sullen vesture fell to his shoulders, he became heavy once more as the world retook him and cloaked again in the present - the light ebbed from him as swiftly as it came. The old man reproached his satchel to humbly return his dear old notebook.
There was a crack like a pick to ice with a hollow thud like a boot to wood as an immediately dissipating claret mist fizzed above his head. The make shift found-about cosh still swinging through the air and over his crown, the old man’s wilted body twisted and slumped to the floor face first. The concrete path before him tearing at the skin of his chin, his frail bones cracked as the meagre weight of his body forced itself into his neck. Laying perverse and unnatural the life was soaked up into his woollen hat and out across the concrete, to the grass – to the worms that writhed below the muck. His eyes were as lifeless as they were when he lived.
They did not wait for the gentle hiss of the spray or the bubbles that popped in the pool that surrounded the old man. They had snatched the satchel and ran off into the spread of the common until they were nothing but outlying drowned tones of laddish laughs and lewd levity.
Crazy old *******.
A lowly wooden bench has lent itself to a lonesome aged narrow man in a common garden in the smallest hour of the day’s beginning. In the thick haze of the summer’s waking light the common is thinly met with the company of others. Just an old man and his acquainted bench who came to give his eyes sight to the grass and trees, and to rid himself of thought.

Turn on

I
This is the BBC news at 1 o'clock.
A rambling diatribe,
lost boys, a lost war.
The falling cost of stamps.
'What do you think of the deficit,
Graham from Newquay?'

II
Some bald man
holds a cadaverous gaze.
'She don't want me no more Pauline.'
The ware and tear
of Albert Square
immortalised
in one ***** stare.

III
Ella looked into the eyes of
the African children with bloated
stomachs, scooping up brown water
she wouldn't even dip her toe in.
For a moment, they were face to face.

VI
Margret! Margret!

Look what they're...

Check the cupboard,
have we still got...

uh...

tinned peaches and caster sugar.

V
Our hands, in every listless waft,
wander through an electric soup,
thick as frog-spawn.
Spermatozoa of information.
A gentle fuzz of creation,
our atmosphere is
pregnant with
separate universes that
embed themselves
inside our own.
We broadcast
our noisy planet
to the skies.

VI
'I've seen what's going on,
you don't have to tell me!
I know what they're doing.'
The walls are closing in,
as each breath from her
dusting lungs is getting tighter.
'Besides, my eyes won't let me, or
my knees these days, It's all i'm
good for'  
She wheezes.
'I can see all I need from here.'

VII
Click
I swear 400
*******
channels
And there's nothing on

VIII
As I approach the blue glare
of the living room, I know
she's in there. Not even
watching,
she's on her
iPad. We don't talk.
We went to the
Maldives
once,
after the wedding.
she couldn't keep her eyes off me.

IX
Dead square.
Silent pixels.
Nothings watching.

X
We crept down in the morning - my sister
and me, before anyone else was up and squabbled
what loud cartoon violence would take our attention.
Nightie, pyjama cotton siblings, sewn in to the 7 to 9 o'clock schedule,
we were as vital to each other as sleeping bags and cereal.
Our building blocks stood in a castle,
we were unaware that one day,
they would be strewn across the floor
as we grew up.

XI
We're not going out tonight.
I just want to slip my hands down your
pants and touch you while
we watch game of thrones...
Deal?

XII
Smoke rises behind the mosque
in an arabesque twirl.
The blinding sunlight behind the minaret
crashes on the lens, like a flash bang.

The call to prayer is empty bodies, iconographic art,
cars hollowed, alien tongues, history, a melting *** culture,
cockroach romances, squalid graves, body hewn tunnels, little cuts on
trigger fingers, trained monkeys, orphans, marble carvings,
the stench of petrol, jobless drug habits, brickwork, wiring,
forbidden love, lust, teenagers, plastic explosive, god, work,
prayer, tears, life and death    

and briefly the box is the world in our homes.
We must see who's behind it.

The clock struck mid-night London on the cheeks of her rosy smile. Glancing at Big Ben her high heels shined posh over the moon. Bold, intelligent and independent she stood at the corner of Westminster and Margret upon a shadow that faded her invisible to the alley of the ******* door. She wanted a walk on the wild….. so with crimson lips the brazen beauty blew a kiss that knocked deaths door three times firm.
Beauty: Hello sweetheart. Could you be a doll and crack the bolt. She playfully inquired.

Death’s Door: “****** off!” I’m tired and about to hit the rack!

Beauty: "Eee you cheeky monkey" Do not play coy! For you may be a Fit Bloke for most but I’m
Karen Wankerstien the sexiest women in England! Crack the bolt I say!!!

Death’s Door: Who?

Beauty: Don’t be a ******! I’m Karen Wankerstien, business women of the year and the toast of this year’s Queen Charlotte Ball! Crack the bolt I say!!

Death’s Door: Who?

Beauty: You Nitwit. You know me well. It’s me Karen!

Death’s Door: OOO  Hi Karen!!! You know I don’t recognize any of those fancy titles! For once you pass through these doors they all vanish. It’s best you live your life for the unseen beauty that never fades! “Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing, But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised.” (proverbs 31).

Then crack goes the deadbolt!  Fluttering her spine with the momentary thrill that danced upon the sun-rise of her temporal fairy-tale identity.

“I like his hair” said Karen

“I like his eyes” said Sue

“I  like his smile” said Mary

"I like his laugh “said Lou

“I like his wit” said Margret.

“I like his ***” said May.

“I took his heart" smiled Jackie

“I stole it and hid it away!

Equals twenty one thirty 22:30 military time
future time traveler looks back one century ago,
oceanic waterways overladen with green slime,
yours truly attempted crafting id est feeble rhyme
far from madding crowd, nevertheless yet lovely
bones and flesh quite spry, still considered prime
(moost procreative, prodigious, and progressive)

stage, since (case ye didn't know) approximately
eight score orbitz round Earth's sun still noontime
chronologically analogous to protracted lunchtime
whereat the average offspring jetson or (daughter)
can be sweet as apple pie or sour as lemon or lime
cell metabolism catalytic converter courtesy enzyme
routine medical procedure costs about one dime.

Me - born fifty nine years into twentieth century alive
eight score and three years secret condiment iz chive
and well (still hashtagged as precocious) with drive
to safely, sidestep, and surmount establishmentarian
archaic, formulaic, and mosaic Judaic/Christian hive
found synchronicity within Unitarian Church more so
parents introduced dogmatic, ethic, fundamentalistic
jargonistic, kinetic, linguistic, pluralistic, quixotic I've
discovered compatibility with non religious teaching

wry master of words (me) take poetic license to jive
reasonably rhyming nope heart tickle early misthrive
moost definitely ***** deeds done dirt cheap (trick)
super tramping space cowboy lobbing power-drive
re: frequently innocent prelapsarian double entendre
(Jean Jacques Rousseau) Noble Savage he doth strive
even though hanky panky tinged entire his/her story,
**** sapiens animal husbandry hastily did wive.

Formalities encompass chalice lighting ma yoyo
wing liberal Democratic political bent embraces XO
shorthand for virtual affectionate charisma minister
Reverend Margret O'Neal imparts open greeting
congregation Sunday at ten thirty AM courtesy zoom
bajillion years after proto humans experienced woe
countless figurative early Brady bunched bro doggie
dimples encountered necessity to escape cohabitation
(marital covenant alien), yet quasi marital brouhaha
ofttimes witnessed altercation begetting re: thorough
out baby with bath water phenomena, which literal
cruel fate heavily peppered past (mine) accounting

lamely explaining Pink Floyd momentary status quo
upended accompanied courtesy lapse of reason no
definitive evidence to substantiate claim, yet I know
without shadowed doubt every friggin forebear (***
pining to savor manumission, versus cotton pickin)
back breaking stoop labor think indentured escrow
harking back to days of our lives (mainly bonobo
nasty, short and brutus creatures millenniums ago
unsung simian kindred beings suffering figurative
ruffled horse feathers nsync with bird in hand dodo

which latter species long extinct (as Dutch good eats)
now non sequitur (sea quitter) mine homeboys/girls
comprising Harris eventual clan (of craven lionized
"scapegoats" set genealogical precedent, and grew
some real winners gentiles, who commingled and
intermarried, and united proudly to kvetch as Jew)
eventually acquiring redeeming qualities conveniently
best caricatured as features exhibited by Mister MaGoo
invariably dear reader "fake" anecdote ye will poo poo
as well how storied and fabled coronavirus (COVID-19)
medical technicians reference quaint pandemic setting

figurative global stage brethren and sistern microbes
made webbed, wide world wish for said good ole days
cuz, communiqué done being crafted about six hours
marine hated, armies of beastie boys slain 2122 yahoo
the darndest, latest microscopic bugaboo nearly slew
entire population, hence envision terra firma with
divine providence absolute zero people as edenic
provenance (metaphorically offering tabula rasa view.