Then was my neophyte,
Child in white blood bent on its knees
Under the bell of rocks,
Ducked in the twelve, disciple seas
The winder of the water-clocks
Calls a green day and night.
My sea hermaphrodite,
Snail of man in His ship of fires
That burn the bitten decks,
Knew all His horrible desires
The climber of the water ***
Calls the green rock of light.

Who in these labyrinths,
This tidethread and the lane of scales,
Twine in a moon-blown shell,
Escapes to the flat cities' sails
Furled on the fishes' house and hell,
Nor falls to His green myths?
Stretch the salt photographs,
The landscape grief, love in His oils
Mirror from man to whale
That the green child see like a grail
Through veil and fin and fire and coil
Time on the canvas paths.

He films my vanity.
Shot in the wind, by tilted arcs,
Over the water come
Children from homes and children's parks
Who speak on a finger and thumb,
And the masked, headless boy.
His reels and mystery
The winder of the clockwise scene
Wound like a ball of lakes
Then threw on that tide-hoisted screen
Love's image till my heartbone breaks
By a dramatic sea.

Who kills my history?
The year-hedged row is lame with flint,
Blunt scythe and water blade.
'Who could snap off the shapeless print
From your to-morrow-treading shade
With oracle for eye?'
Time kills me terribly.
'Time shall not ****** you,' He said,
'Nor the green nought be hurt;
Who could hack out your unsucked heart,
O green and unborn and undead?'
I saw time ****** me.

She said
'drink not the beer of men,
for it is stale and tasteless.
drink your fill of the beer of women,
for it is cool and harkening.

'lay not your head upon your pillow,
for it is with lonely songs you shall sleep.
lay your head upon my pillow,
for it is in this sleepless night we shall rejoice.

'you are tired, not of waking,
but of your bones being uwarmed,
your marrow unsucked,
your hair untussled.

'come, into my arms,
feel the softness of my bossom.
place your hands on the small of my back,
pull me from righteousness and pleasure retention.
pull me towards your eagerness,
your egrogious pleasure.'


burning and aching the good ache,
yearning and fighting the good fight,
she filled me with desert heat,
she encased me with oasis wet.
for her; an hour of *******,
for her; failed musings and a *** bruise or four.

honey, I'm just down the hall.
let me taste of you,
allow yourself your fill of me.
Honey, only if it do please ya.

Yay, it's another lovely Barry Hodges "Memories" poem.*

How happily I recall the excitement of my visits to Lewisham's hospital
For my regular "haemorrhoid adjustment/re-alignment" sessions,
During which time I made the acquaintance of a nursing sister
With possibly the fiercest libido in south-east London.
And one night, whilst we were "on the job" in her comfy cubicle,
I glanced over her fat shoulder through the cracked observation window.

Ah yes, dear reader, it was the relatively cleanish Ward G
(the terminal one where the near-dead await merciful release,
wittily nicknamed "the happy dreamers' room" by the matron,
an evil predatory old **** with a 40-inch waist and wild halitosis);
I watched a spectacularly ugly nurse peering o'er the screen
Around poor old ******* Bertie "Big *****" Bloggs.

His wasted, crippled, whitened pyjamed form
Lay twitching on the none-too-clean patched sheets;
He opened his unseeing, ancient eyes and gave voice:
"Give us a gobble" the old ****** croaked pathetically,
"You know you want to, you fat smelly *****".
And then he croaked.  Unsucked and unloved,

O my beloved lector, compassionate creature that thou art,
Surely thy pleasure will be utterly intensified to learn that
The NHS bedsheets were indelibly and spectacularly stained
As his bowels opened spontaneously with Death's kindly appearance.
"Gor ******* blimey, what a ******* horrid pong," came a groan:
('twas Sammy "No Legs" Smith in mid-**** on a nearby trolley).

These events in the ward led to an inevitable result for me:
You have divined it correctly, O treasured fan of mine,
Yea verily, the happenings I espied made me blow my ***
Most prematurely and my love-partner, the sylphlike Sister Sally,
Was so sodding annoyed she crushed my tender haemorrhoids
Quite brutally in her surgical spirit-hardened left hand.

They manipulated the words
to cross the corridors of essence.
Crib was empty, child was stolen.
At blood stained altar
there was no clue to mystical death.

The contents now matter. Time
displays tools of ******,
snaps the sheet from the bed,
kills the neophyte at water hole,
unsucked breast swells, weeps endlessly.

Apes are coming.
Duplicates look brilliant like novae.
It was becoming crowded. Becoming
was destroying the matter. Fear
moves in water, on the earth.

Faraway a cuckoo sings
a saddest song.
Come, belong to my tears, drops
of my soul’s vessel, kiss the eyes
of planet earth.