Desert Grave

Disinterred dishonourably, from powdered soil's warm sleep

Fine stone-wrought words reduced to sand no longer make us weep

Earth cleaves and mummifies below her heavens' cloudless keep

Unforgivable

These eyes have seen ten summers pass
since last they saw your face
Now every morning's ruddy skies
light up a million dew-filled eyes
to watch my fall from grace

This mouth has breathed ten winters out
since last it spoke your name
Now every evening's cloud-scuffed snow
sets gloomy northern pines aglow
to heat my cheeks with shame

Lothario's Epistle

Beguiling silver tongue weaves pale and perfect lip-sung lover's letters

Parchment harp's stringed eloquence now bites with toothless velvet fetters

Flattery's exquisite chains make love's impulses willing debtors

Overlooked

Her rock pools drowned and out of reach
from groynes where sand still clings. 

The crumbling chalk's fine misted cape 

is soft across her pebbled nape

Thus drifts this northern wind-chilled beach 
on springtide's squall-gauzed wings.

étangs d'automne

My tenth-born breathed a mist across the waiting evening water

Wounded clouds and darkened trees concealed the dying day

Bloody-faced and marble-tongued, the fearful shadows sought her

She tended their contusions as they leached away to grey

Sendal Dusk

Behind the beacon hills the sky in patches, remnants, clouded
Like silk shot through with clarets, cobalts, fit to clothe a king
Below, the winking hamlets now with burnt sienna shrouded
Feigning sleep, they nestle deep into the vale's green sling

Black Spot

Into the ditch are bloodied glass and twisted metal smashed

Past dimming eyes a world of whirling grass and wet mud flashed

All happy thoughts of home and children's faces, cruelly dashed

Contrail

Ripped and torn unravelled sky marks travellers' thoughtless wend

Empyreal vaulted winds just sigh, their quilts of blue extend

Frail crumbling orbit's gentle sweep through sunset's golden glow

Is brushed aside no more to sleep dispersed like spring's last snow

Vanished History

Disembodied murmurs rustle through the corridors of stone
Happy voices blurred by time no longer tied to flesh and bone
Lost heirlooms, echoed sonants die or sadly ripple on alone

The Chiseler

I fear the tombstone's scrivener too soon has come
To charm with perjured pen and smiling yellowed teeth
By his demotic artifice am I struck dumb
This Cheshire cat so sweetly spins my funeral wreath

Schrödinger's Eyes

A far-off tolling bell has chased the clouds across the grass

The limpid sky is dreaming of a deep blue still to pass

Unfenced, lush fields now lap the line of trees atop the hill

But behind the sun-haze'd torpor unseen walls stand cold and still

Prisoners we, existing only under observation glass...

Water Tower

Solitary tree of stone
Stand tall to feel the wind
Horizon watcher, you alone
Rain's deep exile rescind

Within this skylake beats a heart
A concrete cavity
Cloud plunderer disguised as art
Enslaved to gravity

Mute

Each hazy day of summer brings the blackbird's golden cries
...while meadow'd insects hum
And only when the night approaches do we realise
...how silent is the sun
Hell's furnace'd beauty blazing right before our very eyes
...unheard by anyone

Sky Ladder

I slip between the black-trunked trees
On whose high faceless arches scud
The fleet and flimsy clouds of night
Upstream against the moon's pale flood

Carry On

Broken kerbs line grass-filled street
No sound of cars or leathered feet
While green reclaims the ground and skies

Half-crazed paving stones don't care
For glassless window-frame'd blank stare
Their sun-pools now bathe butterflies

Macadamed rivers stagnant now
Last rusting vestiges tell how
Thus souvenir'd, lost sentience dies

Lichened

Behind my father's dolmen glowing ash floats ever down

The distant föhn too late to stop his bones in dry sand drown

My throne-bound king makes this invader's geis his greening crown...

Petra's Sleep

Her gaze soft pewter clouds engross
and in the dimmet's eye,
a doxian glamour draws her close
to trap and petrify...

Dyad's Deception

When I stand between two states, I cause biplicity:
The difference my eye creates turns nothing into three

Overcast

Flat light births the cloudy day
Unshadowed vista's optic prose
hums even-timbred quiet dismay
'til earth exhales and green wind blows

Amour-Propre

Vainglorious ego's wintry hoar
Becomes my artful enemy
I leave pride's sacrificial floor
To seek my friend sophrosyne
And find through Janus' opened door
Salvation in immensity

Beck's Affiance

I trace a vow of fealty onto the water's skin
Word after searing word sinks down to still the child within
My love for her is fathomless, she is my flawless twin

Decline

The flimsy-winged perfidions come a-fluttering
Around my head and heart like feathered gold
My blissful haze dissolves from spiteful muttering
As the sinking melancholia takes hold

Fals Trēowth

When looked for, love hides far afield
Her words of saccharine congealed
On pedestals lie idols drowned
In time, in distance, grey, unwound
Their sentimental hearts now sealed

Self-inflicted

Such cloying smiles from silk-tied swamis every whimsy sated

Inveigled eloqence beguiles our thin-skinned pride sedated

With childlike wiles, slow strangulation, long premeditated

Life Insurance

Precious luck is wasted on the humdrum and inanity

None is saved against the cold demands of probability

Fair is fair but maths wins all in life's unplanned reality

How Much

Like the sound of earth in falling rain,
and the smell of grass where sun has lain.
All the way round and back again...

Earthbound

Sleek white gulls above the air-borne froth and foam...
so nonchalantly glide
But we must trudge on dry dune grass and sandy loam...
to watch the wind-fuelled tide

Chalk Sleepers

The night train, lazy, trundling
Through sleepy undulating downs
Stalked by shadows long and grey
Pretenders seeking hilltop crowns

Bedtime

Underneath my mattress slats of spruce lie deep asleep

and when I drift away to dream into their world I creep

A resin-scented hillside bed of cones and needles dried

Bewitched with incantations from the wind's chilled fingers pried

Creaking ravens mourn the evening lost to stippled rain

which petulantly whips against my bedside window pane

EIIR

I often see him standing at the corner of the road
He remained for years impervious, to all the sky bestowed
Just dutifully awaiting mail, refusing to corrode

Always careful of his posture, pushing out his barrel chest
Look closely and you'll notice that he bears the royal crest
"Service" is his motto, he won't take a minute's rest

This sentry wears a red coat keeping guard against the cold
A pillar of community, a proudly post-war mold
Don't bother him with email 'cos he says he's far too old

Cornflower

Cyanus looks with pleasure
On this tiny piece of sky
Which blunts the reaper's sickle
In my sunny field of rye

Yestreen

Gangling summer shuffles past the miles of hedgerows trailed by night

Truculent evening cloud unmasked now needles earth with dusty spite

The fields, uncluttered, windless, shrink from dusk's unholy appetite

Formic Sentience

When I find my garden path has grown small piles of sand
Does a wondrous conurbation sprawl beneath my feet?
I hesitate to go to war and force them to disband
or ant-ish archaeology protected by concrete?
Is this is their world, and I the brute who doesn't understand?

Poisonous Petite

The warm wind turns and stops to watch the buttercup wait breathless for the rain...

Nature's faint deceit is grown with innocence and grace

Still none will stoop to kiss her unblemished golden face

...she curtsies to the drops now seeking earth beneath the mighty field of grain

Siren

A single note pervading all
Too pure and still for songbird's call
Before its toxic beauty, all our child-filled armies fall

The four dark horsemen pay no heed
As ruined cities slowly bleed
And at oblivion's door, the all-consuming mouths still feed

Woodland Suicide

Overnight the trees inverted, fled this suppurating earth
and now their sallow tuber'd fingers scratch the sky
The sulphur sun stands helpless as they shrivel soon to fall
while they rend the air with one last keening cry

Bale

Only now are they in summer of their scions' future sure
while waiting for the reaper's fire and brimstone'd distant roar
With their newborn in the crib they briefly see the light of day
Then rejoin the wheel of life in her great golden wheel of hay

Vignette

Caught within a charcoal sketch

Parchment skin grey-lined with care

Thin lines, thin years, unbroken dretch

Smoke-stained coat beyond repair

Reminisced... a life's homestretch

Dishevelled cinerescent hair

Riverbank

Cotton-feathered branches shred the sun
into a thousand splinters tinged with amber gore
which pierce my face to fall where clouds still run
the liquid gauntlet thrown from some sierra's gentle thaw

Cumulonimbus

With fretful gusts the wind tugs plastic bags along the road
Otherworldly twilight smells earth's skin yet rain-bestowed
Electric acrimonium soon whets the gutters' goad

Unremembered

Faded recollection soon plays the rainbow's snare

A room of dreams once pridian, now childhood-locked and bare

Such richly fabric'd floor through aging knot-holes trickling dust

Vast treasury of ancient books congealed, a joyless crust

The melting chandelier's misshapen prisms cloud and wilt

Oneiric wall's hiation rends a tableau turned to silt

Never more to leave the world and find my artist's womb

Misplaced, the sleepy doorway to my unremembered room

Abscission

Like unknown fallen soldiers
Blindly heaped in serried piles
The leaves have lost their lustre
Demeaned and dimmed étoiles

The Scoriae Barrows

...From Saturn's dark necronium, their outlines drift with ease

No beacon's summit vigil marks the skulking moon-smeared trees

and in the ground the rocks themselves unlocked with sap-spun keys

Toward the granite tattler sand and kaolin ripples surge

No mercy for chthonians from the sunken fires' purge

Commingled earth's apotheosis sings its dusky dirge...

Blōdisōian

Dead soldiers turned to chalices
Sweet cruor with gilt surrounded
Protected, fallen forms putresce
Their scavengers confounded

Last Border

The march-land gate's steel fingers clutch at servants of the wind

who through the mono-chromed eclipse now see their creeping shorelines limned

No sentience though, to feel the pain of worlds being slowly skinned

Lodestar

One last pillar red and white
Uncowed by nature's fury
Pelagic Lorelei decries
The vicious wind's thick wrack-spun lies
In Neptune's court abandoned
And condemned without a jury

Cūslyppe

I stand upon a grass-blade's tip
To drink the vast blue sky
My golden keys just nod and dip
Their blushing freckles shy

Mother

Her lioness heart mettle'd gold damascene
Lived two lives for one, now both hands lie still
Protector embraced by the pale and serene
My lips on her cheek cooled by mortuary chill

Guttering Candle

Burn low and slowly falter
But keep your braided head
A darkened tallow altar
Is your Stygian river bed

Purlieu

Wisdom's mirror slips and shatters, hope replaced by scarlet night

Lilith's tender lips extinguish all and breathe eternal blight

The mourning sun enshrouded finds no ember'd life to reignite

inēluctābilis

Suffused with anger, fear has come
To chain the temples, burn the spires
All cruel and righteous men succumb
New justice, smoking urban pyres

Predawn Frost

Grey breath behind the blind imago'd silvered pratal pane
From silent dark, slow crepitating wave, each crystal vein
Timid newborn sun tiptoes across earth's steely bane

Seldcūth

The child with alabaster eyes
Smiles in blank serenity
A fifty-year-long night she lies
For ottoman'd eternity

Wounded

Crucified with rose-head nails
Against the strumpet's chestnut tree
The ebbing chandeliered light fails
To scour congealed sanguinity

Svetovid

Four faces under a single hat
Two look forward, two behind
This tetrad's benevolence begat
Man and augured horse entwined

Mighty Dirt

The earth's dissension late we rue
Her stone harbinger's glee
As some macabre dreadnought's crew
Helms argil'd divinity

Fallen Tree

Assaulted one last evening by a maelstrom's clamour'd hymn
Soft birdsong filled your coming summer's day
You ended your slow motion race towards your lifeblood's sun
and as you toppled, dreamed your patch of sky away

Samara

When autumn spirals gently down
Fair-weather-vane'd posterity
She'll soothe the cold patrician's frown
With sycamore's tranquillity

Slow Descent

Between the moss-robed trunks the river mists come stealing warmth and light

My far horizon's violet touch of sunset chased by starry night

Silent bats across the plough-swept field now make their ritual flight

Roadkill

Hesitant, you should have fled
But froze and breathed your last instead
Your young remain, unloved, unfed

Annwn

Beneath their cloven feet our tragic midnight violets crushed

Hear the red-eared hounds like crying geese harsh moonlight-brushed

Cascading leafy tombs lack only mercy's short goodbye

The ancient grass-split stones impervious to hue and cry

Chakhlyk's Cellar

At the stairway's wintry foot, deep beneath the ground
Lies a windless desolation unwatched by human sky
Vast plain of ancient trees, broken and de-crowned
Where hushed and withered leaves have crept away to die

Red is for Danger

Sitting on the dusky beach to watch the sunset blue
Your lover's azure'd lips desist...
A homely fire won't warmly glow in any other hue
The first green blush of playground-kiss'd
Living in a world where blood runs cold and never red
...by yellow-hearted amorist
Tho' cobalt sky hugs golden sun, yet all our passion dead

Déclassé

In womanhood her martyrdom, bowed vassalage complete
Crucified with baubles, joins the haughty and effete
Her home a fragrance'd mausoleum and shrine to self deceit...

View from the Firehills

High summer's fervid scrying
Behold the high cliffs burn
The kindling winds defying
Green lings to purple turn

Horizon's far contusion
As black brume'd bowlders fall
In dull deranged profusion
Their frozen vapour'd squall

Low country's suffocation
Unbounded glebe-land grass
Vast cellulose creation
A weir of emerald glass

Secret Turning

At the bend before the hill between two hedges gently lies

A thorn'd and nettled riot shielding ruins from prying eyes

Where scorched and sagging beams are offered up to open skies...

Dughall Mor

Tall stranger dark of countenance to vertigo consigned

Bough'd rigging lashed by rising wind, thick night transfixed and blind

A wild and resined emerald rain re-navigates the crest

The earth's diaphanous claim surrendered for a humble nest

Village on the Scarp

The houses are empty, all titles abjured
A fractured road stops by the church of despair
Below the dead village dear departed obscured
Where once lived-in homes stood now nothing but air

Railway Station

Every morning watching throngs of travellers
With her pigeons and her glass and wrought-iron eyes
She collects a thousand precious human moments
And yearns to find a hundred long goodbyes...

...So when along the coast in trundling darkness
Slowly slips the last unkempt train for the night
She shuts her eyes and dreams of being human
In a carriage with her lover holding tight

Bankrupt

Intelligence incarcerated crushed beneath the weight

Of sentience blind and fettered by a death that's worse than fate

The watcher of the clocks boards up the rusting pearly gate

Floorboards

In my kitchen underneath the chequered lino
Lies a slivered golden-hearted old oak tree
When I'm alone I sometimes talk to her for hours
Of vast green forests from a distant century

Bridge

Three tired arches dip their toes
and rest a while on the river bed

A fragrance-laden spring wind blows
around each drowsy cambered head

Between two banks in quiet repose
Kept safe by sun and blossom shed

Baker

Each morning rising early, with microscopic life
Building airy edifices,
Roads and non-stick terraces,
Dried fruit in floury crevices
All condemned to fall beneath Pompeii's Vesuvial knife

Unnatural

Nature's creations so beautifully flawed
Blemished asymmetries win our affection
In exquisite precision our birthright restored
With our soulless pursuit of unnatural perfection

Brood Parasite

You recognise and welcome me, you love me as your own
I'm appreciative and kind, and so much fun
As my siblings leave abruptly one by one I'll soothe your pain
Look but closer and you'll find the cuckoo's son

Child's Picture

She draws unhappy houses under clouds of misery

The handle on each cheerless door replaced by cobwebbed key

Dark windows thin and bleak are never opened from inside

to see their gardens without colour, all the plants and trees have died

There are no homely fires to send up plumes of friendly smoke

So no rooftop chimneys needed for the ceaseless rain to soak...

Puddle

Oh rain-refracted moon please gaze on unenduring me
A lowly plashet I who fear the desiccating sun
Under your unearthly light your seamstress would I be
A silver marriage band from fractured ice and lace now spun

Night Trees

Soft ghoulish glow from city streetlight
Bathes the tar-trapped timbered midnight
When lulls fluttered amber'd umbra
Blossomed boughs cold cast in dunite

Prairie Train

Horizon-bounded road of iron lies groaning in the heat
The torpor-laden air bids Zephyr's wind concede defeat
Await the hurtled hell-bound fiend who cleaves the golden wheat...

High Tide

Once a happy seaside town, now briny artefact
The gentle daily tides wash roads so finely bladder-wracked
Gazing down from sunlit undulations I can see
In gardens swaying children calmly looking up at me

Nonbeing

Insignificant I
My abject soul's atonement due
This speck of sand, for life eschew

Inconsequential I
My hollow form now valueless
This meaning, strip and dispossess

Immaterial I
One eternity to learn
From nothing come, to void return

Slick

The ocean bell now tolls at last, to draw the deep's dread antiphon
An underdog released to desecrate
Between the Neap and Spring this body vast and dark bids life be gone
A spreading shroud no sun can penetrate

Air Raid Recital

He doesn't seem to notice the destruction everywhere
Lost in some enchanted reverie
Now his piano keys bring forth a ravine's crashing flood
Then frail refracted stars beneath the sea

Abandoned

As first light gilds the minarets
No sound of morning call
The dried up fountains wait in quiet repose

The desert air breathes frail regrets
Sand laps the quibla wall
Such stillness watched by crumbling porticoes

Night Harvest

Collectors come before the sun
To prowl the lacquered skin of sleep
As through its pores one after one
My newborn dreams must creep

Inescapable

I hurtle through the tunnels seeking haven
While behind the silent predators give chase
My ragged breath and clattered feet resounding
Stale air gives way to fresh upon my face
Just ahead I see the door of dazzled morning
Dissolved in red, for I have lost my futile race

Missing Slates

Night's baleful wind has died away
Sad rainfall stupefies all sound
While through my broken roof's decay
The dark sky ponders muddied ground

Seaside

In the space between the yellow and the grey
Where the muscled dancing ocean meets the sand
Could I but freeze one tiny instant glimpsed today
And laughing run across the sun-skinned water-land

Desperation

However hard he runs, there up ahead
The twinkling lights of life still to be chased
Long grass through which he drags his feet of lead
Behind now sand, a dying arid waste

Less Fortunate

Consign the wretched to the sea
Don't pique my fragile guilt
The accident of birth for me
Lets my house be rebuilt

House of Sand

Each day I walk this corridor
But never reach the end
To search new rooms for something lost
My waking hours I spend

Each day I climb these winding stairs
To find a different floor
This window yesterday framed hills
Today it shows the shore

Each day I come here looking
On my little plot of land
Each day I find a new face
On my house of shifting sand

Seeking

Against the jealous seraph's banes
Implacably we make our stand
While Rumi's ravishing quatrains
Walk abroad in Virgil's land

Skiving

Lying in Halfacre meadow under the leafy firethorn tree
The smell of loam and creosote, nostalgic company
My grass-kissed skin is warmed by wind from far-off Tripoli

Visitor

...though his earthly face was by the squall's grey veil obscured
Flayed and tattered hands which held the reins to pain inured
The mighty roan faced ancient gates unhinged and shadow-bound
Tossed its armoured foam-flecked head and pawed the sodden ground...

Treasure

Underground, hell's door locked with a living human key
The walls are veined with liquid ire, the floor with treachery
And as I seek my fortune there, compound my misery
To find the face of Midas as he blindly touches me

Assault

Before the daffodils uncurl their yellow hats
The slow grey-fingered dawn slips through the park fence slats
To find the flowers bruised from cans and bottles strewn
Last night's bus stop gifts wrapped by the kindly moon

Winter Blossom

The asphalt bleeds white petal'd stars into the stygian sky
Split and perforated by penumbra'd boughs' shrill cry
Their marbled skin decays to ash in Niflheim's frozen eye

Lycanoculus

The trees have grown long eyes of green and yellow
They watch through half-closed lids in some uneasy sleep
Like wolves they pad through undergrowth in shadow
With cunning, find and pick my bones en-tendril'd deep

The Church

Above the sickly rain-lashed trees
A blackened hat of moss and stone
The hordes of timbered hosts crowd round
In homage to the grizzled crone

Near yielded to the brambled tide
One faint path entreats the gloom
Past the creaking leaf-mulched trees
Soft silhouetted headstones loom

Dank clearing framed by buttressed bark
Receives the moon's cloud-scudded smiles
Below the door's scarred sandstone arch
Bow granite steps to leathered miles

AC Units

Edificial parasites found basking in the sun
They scale defenceless buildings unseen by anyone
I walk past oblivious to crowds above my head
While those unfit to climb aloft wheeze on the ground instead

Wall Flower

I met a gentle girl who cried that sand ran through her veins
Her bones were made from bricks of red,
Her head weighed down with chains
Sad stillborn child of earth, she'd spared her mother's labour pains

Holiday's End

At the end of the garden he followed the stream
To a still millpond bridged by a mouldering beam
With small fragile gasps, both slipped into gloom
And the mill's decayed windows watched stillness resume

Jilted

...With stones of glitter'd jealousy and mortar'd vitriol
She built a gallows drop upon an incubus's knoll
Then cauterized his black heart and loosed Eblis on his soul...

Hearth

In the home's warm belly, night immures the still and dark
But early wakes the dusty morgue to flinted scarlet spark
Stretch and face the slivered sky with cold earth at your back
Your heart of flicker'd apricot turns green life pyric black

Snapped

Captured in a photograph, her colours fading now
No air beneath the glass but she keeps smiling somehow
Outside her friends and family live out their natural span
Perpetual summer lasts as only silver nitrate can

Whence

My house began in the soft mouth of Earth
Carved from rain and hard rock, pale roots sang her birth
Caressed each night by the moor-billowed mist
'Til dawn found her walls sweet gossamer-kissed
My house is made of the autumn and sea
My house, my love, made me

Precursor

The wasteland knave's Sirocco wind brings finely ochred sands

A great corroding breath exhaled from cruel and heartless lands

This mighty flying desert's bitter tears compound our shame

And now as kites of glass we no longer feel the blame

A silence falls before the roar of childrens' tears in flood

Sweeps us and our steel palaces away in ochred mud

Speck

My sky is not where I left her, she fell and became a sea
Cold hard stars ripped through her flesh, left holes the size of me
The day is black behind my sun, I am dwarfed by the humble bee

Afternoon Nap

Unhurried ticking wends its way through century-old air

Barometer, untapped for years, reads confidently: "Fair"

Faint sun through yellowed nets now lattices the gloomy stair...

Unwindowed

Above our hearth, behind the mantlepiece
Unwindowed mouth, the blackened chimney flue
When winter comes to chase the calling geese
I tilt my head to glimpse the far-flung blue

Midday Flare

No escape is found in Eden from the lacerating light

Saffron sun cleaves perfumed air and cuts all feathered song mid-flight

The fruit trees blossom'd branches now with dying birds festoon

Flower beds once swept with colour ploughed and scarlet ribbons strewn...

Friday Night Bus

Last night in my dreams when you whispered you'd died
On the park bench your coffin and I side by side
I held your hand with the white lid drawn back
Warm sun on your face, brave words on your plaque
Then I played my guitar and we busked for your fare
For the Friday night bus to heaven knows where.

Sight Unseen

Across the rooftops moonlight creeps
Through feathered clouds, slow silvered leaps
As into each dark shuttered space its gleaming fingers slip

One high oriel reveals
The crescent mirror's broken seals
Where from the sill her crimson tears still drip

Unrescued

Blurred by wind and sun's last glow
His scared face etched in freezing snow
I could not reach his icy hand
He breathed his resigned last, and slipped away from land

Reckoning

They silently wait at the gates of your world
Where riven and splintered old friendships were hurled
Now deserted you stand facing spectres unseen
Your memories devoured, guilty bones being picked clean
With your eyelids removed there is nowhere to hide
Prepare to confront all the hopes and the dreams you denied

Chestnut Tree

Dappled smiling faces flutter through the leafy bower
The languid heavy honeyed air-kissed chandeliers in flower
My fair companion's torso girt with beryl'd velveteen
She sings faint wind-bound treesong...
...through my heart's tongue-tied ardeen

Traffic Lights

A quartered field where four friends stand
Surveying their dissevered land

Each blackened belfry's heart must squeeze
The sun through stained glass jalousies

Benumbed and mindless drones file past
Each unseen commanding mast

The watchers mournfully agree
That movement breeds insanity

Redressed

Unseat the castled tyrant's brooding red-tongued storm

While bloodied arrows speak from heartstring's quivered swarm

Reap the silvered light that calms the lilac sea

And thaw the crimson shard that sunders you and me

Boding

I dreamt the land unfolded
Green hills devoured, grim harvest blight
Fine estuaries congealed in flight
My kin consigned to dust-mouthed plight
Dread future world remoulded

Caer Sidi

Arianrhod's uncovered head a sign
In cobalt eyes a spiralled shrine
Her lustrous alcazar revolves
A northern realm that death absolves
Ensorcelled light and sea combine

Commuters

Dark glittering from glass and stone
The isle of Indus' Tree
With metalled tide and wind are thrown
Blind legions of the sea

Washed up high upon the shores
They scuttle from the sun
Intent on tracing paths to doors
March mindlessly as one

Each evening the steely waves
Clatter up the beach
On cue the tide of silent slaves
Sweeps out of sight and reach

City River Beach

No holiday makers here with colourful towels to court the sun...

No children with sandy toes to run shrieking into the water...

No mighty roar and raking of pebbles by the voracious ocean...

Just little unseen tides for small unassuming places.

Gutter

Stormdrains sealed with spiteful thirst
Their flinted murals scarred and cursed
To watch through tarmac'd iron-ry
Retrenchant skies to lock-jawed sea

Cuckold

Stone mirror'd heart supports a crown
Fair treason'd face disguised as clown
Once true love now rogue's intended
Grand plans in ignominy have ended
Scalding tears too few to drown

Abaddon

The vast and silent army reach their quarry long pursued

Dark whimsy-driven butchery fanned by ancient feud

Across the ghastly battlefield the red lines raise black cloth

Unearthly tongues now summon dread Apollyon's cold wrath

Transfigured by the frightful spectre waked from voided ground

Powerless, the mightly throng is crushed without a sound

Unseen Dawn

The silvered space beneath the door
So pale with rain-washed moonlight
Weathered panes in flaking frames
Rapt with starshine's nightflight
Spellbound lull before the day
All green life wanes to sward
The moist black earth breathes deep and low
No creatures yet abroad

The Crane

A strong and silent type, he stands above the crowds

The city-dwelling Polyphème that yearns to walk with clouds

Looking for true love, he explores all compass points

The sky globe's promised far horizon always disappoints

And when his tribe are gathered, eerie cries resound for miles

Long shadows on the buildings from these skyward-bound sundials

Depression

Don't save me...
when midstream, I lose my footing
and plummet from the bright into the deep

Don't follow me...
through the black to drown in words
cruelly barbed with bitter tears I daren't weep

Don't stop me...
while I draw the coldest comfort
from this self-revenge that failure justifies

Don't tell me...
that a newly dawning day
will cure despair and pointlessness with denim skies

Don't give up on me...
before the stranger who inhabits
disappears and I awake as if from sleep

Growing

Outside the door of adolescence
Creep the ghosts of childhood fears
Nursery toys now dust and shadows
Fairytales and infant tears

From the house of adolescence
Shines the light of future years
Across the meadow turned to concrete
Behind the hard, soft disappears

Light Pollution

A million streetlights fire the clouds
The city's single baleful eye
Red sky at night delights the crowds
Glares unblinking at the sky
They plod like fatted ants in shrouds
Who not waste not want not why

The Race

Closed-eye'd vigil awaits the sightless moon
Torn oneiric fabric portends a sunless day
Three wind-scoured geldings reach the storm's dark womb
Now Jack Frost's creeping presence must seek another prey

Puddockstool

Small monolith of flesh and stone
Eschews the moon to sleep alone
Inscrutably pale-faced and blind
Dead skin and para-lune entwined
Just for one night, the hayfield's crone

Momentary Light

Bright winter sky spills from a lofty window
Sun-reflected dazzle mirrors centuries of snow
Transcendant other's frosted arrows pierce me
Through my veins regret and bitter bliss now thickly flow

Lily

Pale lady gilt with gossamer
Jaden arms anoint with dew
Her fragrant spinnakers unfurled
To kiss the windswept blue

A House Dreamed

Inhabited by only I
House of my youth rediscovered and dreamed
In perpetual summer suspended

Mother to only I
House which embraced me endured and esteemed
For my childhood kept safe I depended

Abandoned by only I
House once resplendent a dulled bygone gleam
Our easy communion ended

тайга́

Sun-windowed chartreuse our hideaway canopy
Slumbering alder in soft fallen atrophy
Noontide's lost sonants in mantled decline
Intone Benedictus for aspen and pine

Defaced

Sorrowful and silent the custodian intercedes

Aghast to see his progeny cut down like paper weeds

Deceitful armoured paragons decry their earthly deeds

Stolen from their childlike mouths all innocence resigned

Disingenuous pencraft leaves the quislings flying blind

With toothless smiles and pretence are their pockets deeply lined

Winter Library

Rustling rain-kissed far-off gables bid me listen
Musty tomes in yellowed orphic languor float
My age-old hallowed athenaeum must now me christen
Before intoxicated I awake, a drifting sunlit mote

Kunstkammer

By mating song the unicorn betrayed so carelessly

Renaissance man tracks quietly the silver-plated sea

Now narwhal's life and helixed horn mere curiosity

His eyes intent with effort spent, this creature's fabled bone

Effulgence gored with claret, deeds the night skies must condone

A sacrificial gift to his museum's velvet throne

Beguiled

I met a faded man whose face I could not see
He seduced and won my eyes with smiling sophistry
I tried to speak his name, but his monstrous name was me

I met a sanguine man with my face above his cloak
I but uttered from his mouth as mine own began to choke
And in his laughing pupils my reflection turned to smoke

I met my glowing namesake, gave my heart and sweet adieu
Now faded I, hide from the sun that once I loved and knew
A spectator to my life, I am my shadow split in two

Crypt

In our vaulted dome of silence
A stone sword consoles the bride
The crescendo-stricken cyclops
Burns the coffers from inside

Thwarted silent multitude
Await their judgement chime
Curtains drawn around the crib
Red flowers imprison time

Heretical banality
Inseparable and bleak
Forty knights inscribe their names
Upon the sleeping virgin's cheek

Early Frost

The sun embraces tenderly expectant augured land

The earth bursts forth in verdant joy, finds death's encircling hand

Your head piled high untrammelled captures summer's warmest gold

My face immersed in flaxen hair, finds only driech and cold

In childhood's reveries hold dear this cherished fertile land

My feet now bare through lush green grass, find only sullied sand

Your smiling face and loving eyes my hearth and second home

I kiss your soft sweet scented skin, to find that I'm alone

Mental Illness

Dreamt by another, she no longer exists
Autumn winds scatter her millstone life's grists

Hell waits behind holding barbed mask and gown
Surrounded by loved ones, unreached and sucked down

Implacable waters close over her head
Time-misted glass proxies life's pallid thread

Outlander, mother's blind visage en-cloaked
Recoiling child breaks her, last futile plea choked

Betrayed

Fractured by discovery, our subterranean tryst
Misbegotten courage sunders faith with bitter twist
The curfewed lonely landmark constructed here to mask
Treachery at home marked well with teary burial cask

Seige

Slip between the cracks in search of predatory ire
Formless faces gravitate to one remaining spire
Blackened wrecks lie writhing on the battle-weary beach
Beset by silent legions jealous arrows dare not reach

Plucked

The lily has fallen indentured and tythed
The reeds of her bed now so sinfully sythed
Nonchalant harvest feeds ignorants' bliss
Ephemeral blooms presage morient last kiss

The Door

The corridor's nadir where light fades to dim
Last timbered marchland of centuries drawn thin
Closed by the hand of a long-dead unknown
Departed unhurried, on cool dark tiled stone

Gas Towers

Three children by the river stand
Mesmerised by sun-glanced ripples
Fenced in littered scrub-grassed land
Three neglected blank-eyed cripples
Wait serenely hand in hand

Monumental

Scandalise the sacramental
Vandalise the sentimental
Rend faceless judges incidental

Our heritage's spiteful thirst
For stolen history dispersed
Our moral dignity coerced

Night Bird

The setting sun's last lonely unseen shard
Stirs liquid notes from boughed and feathered bard
The treetop silvered voice and night entwine
Black chanticleer's enraptured notes stop time

Spout

The gargoyle's sqall-fed slavers curdle lime with baleful glee
Malignant cataract falls dark to baptise you and me
Shadow'd holy ground eclipsed no revenant dare pass
Her eyrie's buttressed tide of human bones like molten glass

Keñti

Disgorged unseen malignant sanctimonium by night
Oblivion's maw cold comfort for the innocents' thin plight
Cursed phrygian priests lament destruction of the veil
Inexorably exhalted now is hell's unholy grail

Let Me Go

So when in time this summer ends
  I'll sit with you
    and hold your hand
      and catch your eye
Until earth's warm embrace so lovingly extends

Then wed me to my black-loamed bride
  I'll lie with her
    she'll comfort me
      in dreamless sleep
With autumn's golden harvest untouched at our side

When long the winter nights are past
  I'll search for you
    to hold your hand
      to catch your eye
We'll talk of all our glorious summers long ago at last

Lost in the East

Anarchistic ochre'd sun
Kiln-fired sloops their gauntlets run
Silken skeins en-mesh the few
Whom gold with cadenced breath imbue
Thrice-fired in scalloped chivalry
To navigate the last labyrinthine sea

Obsidianus

Inscrutable though fenestrated
Mullioned in stone castrated
Lead-encompassed skies confined
Occluded art pure light maligned
Refractive umbra consecrated

Snowflake

Translucent scaffold vaulted lights
Byzantine stars ionian heights
Glacial minarets of air
Fissured symmetry forswear
All first are last, lone maiden flights

Ziggurat

Spiralled ceramic psychosis now calls
Earth-banished deity through grey-mortared walls
Biblical tears flood the disinterred floor
Chastened breath fetid from Uruk's dark craw

Clearing

Eliptic cross now blessed by crows
Soft candles cryptic resin prose
Enshrine the cloistered hooded flock
In oak-arched holy green baroque

Aide

Abject descent of high grandee
Uncivil servant's squalid tweed
Disingenuous dignity
Grave eloquenced duplicity

Mantle Pieces

Thread-bare blunted riven wall
Narcissistic marble scrawl
Faceless clock entombs burred chime
Unwound, struck handless, starved of time

Reinforcements

Straight-backed and stoic stands the magus duty-torn
Uncharted and breathless is his stone horizon born
Last man still standing, beached, brave pennant flies
Betrayed and forgotten wearing hope's faint disguise

Charity

Pitiless child born of blind equinamity
Consumes and incarcerates gilded profanity
Wraiths sucked like sweat through the pores of her dreams
Voiding all senses pervading her screams

Pyre

Far flung incendiary ancient confusion
Ash arboretum sealed in seclusion
Dusk's stippled veil breathes faint song of the dew
Then fades into verdigreed moon-dappled hue

Petty Tyrant

Lascivious mouth shines wet with goad
His furtive fawning envied toad
Unctious grubby greed betraying
Scarce-contained triumphant braying
Artful eyes sneak dark deceit
Enpaunched fat frottaged fingers meet

Moatlock

Untrammelled copula failed windswept steed
Loathsome crennelation choked with weed
Metamorphed verboden dream
Escaped the slavering dusk-split beam

Beyond

The fathomless shunned seek depths unplumbed
The bloodless deserted for lips blue and numbed
The infinities scorned by the uncountable skies
The unknowable erased while the inconceivable dies

Coward

Sentience in sanguinity
Dark heart's oblivion
Last laughing obscenity
Bloodless, shunned carrion

Gazing

Incant your air-scoured solitude
Around the black-teared sun today
Your incoherent viscid-tude
Portents a stoic multitude
I await, enfeathered, enveloped, decay

Hooved

Feckless quadruped, stand your ground
Forgive clear-eyed your enemies drowned
Seek the ephemeral incandescent
Fear only the house of the leaden crescent

Reclaim

No need now to close the door
Encroaching meadow stays no more
Once silent nursery gives birth
Rumbustious nature green with mirth

Scry

By living human eye unseen
Soft crept reskinned unearhly sheen
Blink suspended watery world
Through lensing tears unfeared, unfurled

Pulpit

Blighted shards of liturgy
Hurl fractured swooned cacophony
Apoplectic vitriol
Crow's nest fain rhetorical
Barbed epistemology

Celebrity

With sonorous veracity
Uni-vowelled capacity
Eschew vocabulary
For stumbling syllabary
Of such dull-witted opacity

Schism

Viscous thought untainted by task
Ignorant serenity cloistered sous-mask
Self-delusional beatitude
Unrequited gratitude
Foetal mirrors own brilliance to bask

Twenty Fathoms

Cathedral dreams in aged chill
Slumbered sands reclaim bared stone
Crusteceous gourmands take their fill
Thus crumbled pews join chancelled throne

Refracted

Petulant prism dread light ensplinter
Wearily windowed eosophegal winter
Gutted supremacy newly-mourned plight
Wallowing turpitude embezzled by night

Autrefois

Chrysalis heart for a long-dead tree
Silver-winged centuries daydream the key
Newly-mown grass imprisons child-like me
...and my inanimate, inadequate, intimacy

Faultline

Worthy silent supplicants etched in vaulted gloom unbowed

Agonised precipitate that whispers dappled light enshroud

All lacrimae unseen that flows like sap through human tragedy

The inconvenient buried voices make their distant succour plea

Phenology

From lethargic carbolic
To insipid acrylic
Conjugate from septic
A declension in peptic

Eternity

Futile and fractious bleak immortality
Castrated of whimsy and spiteful of charity
Brutish and senseless
Unrooted and fenceless
Temporally directionless semantic insanity

Cast

Scurrilous rogues with voodoo eyes
Plastic pylons comb the skies
Blood-red marshes fill with clay
Fluted slurry re-turns the day

East

Unpenned words flayed alive
Abrahmic three conspire to drive
Wretched stilted armies down
The sacrosanct in blood to drown

Flail

Stark silhouetted wounded tree
Resin bleed through termite scree
Shocked pink sky upbraids the bark
Weep but soft lest wakes the lark

Flēot

Cartographers slake thirsty eyes
The theft of land by wind-bound spies
Rehydrating righteous wrath
Wend wearily subterranean troth

Underground

Fishing for more than simple complaints
Underground homes for bones of our saints
Sight of the claypit gnaws and taints
Night owl starts, flits and faints

The Fallen

Grazed and contused
Corporeally disabused
Dermis desiderata
Haematic macciata
Aero-lymphatic, exquisitely fused

Delapidation

Dusty space in empty rooms
Silence layers the caulk-rilled looms
Filigree'd minutiae clash
As stricken net veneers the sash

Brightown

Victoriana conurbation, downsland by the sea
A paucity of faucet-terie rends the front ablution-free
The bandstand must withstand unsolicited salinity
Starling shoals at dusklight, airfish caligraphy

Bookbind

Nounsuckers in eloquent stasis lie
Gurning faux pas retrenchant sigh
The last supine seduction cry
Milosz's ravished prose bleeds dry

Rising

The firmament is permanent
Celestial bodies prevalent
Clouded less by sentiment
Than toxic Phoebus' last lament

X

Hedges bulldoze tremored ground
Unearthly circus lurches, drowned
Mark the spot, dig out of tune
A ninety minute harvest moon

Cavort

Time for sweat, froth and snot
Floating, drowning, squealing, hot
Memes abound our bloodlust plot
Until seams explode with flesh, then rot

Wind-up

Clockwork mandarin no face to see
Dispassionate rule by demo-proxy
Neo-colonial-heeled mahogany
Wending wheels of autocracy

Wimper

Bird song sounds through thinning air
Last sentinel unlined by care
One remaining eye to see
Slow motion collapsed humanity

d....doGma!

Rules preventing the Son of Man
From stuttering, venting, cussing, can...
Transcend through binary anagram:

01101111 01100100 01100100 01100001 01101101 01000111

Will

Florid intestate
Unnurtured ingrate
Tortured by pity
Immodiumed and sickly
Lampooned by his own flatulent dictate

Bubbles

From Shoreditch to Camden
Northern line tramdom
The seriously funky
And fashionably chunky
Reek of yesterday's Chandon

Thin Pickings

Parsimony not Retribution
Larceny with elocution
Autumn leaves have turned to ash
Justice pines, no teeth to gnash

Dawn

Blank-eyed watchers, smiling faces
Sold their souls in muddy places
Shod their feet then tied your laces
Heaven's cheap at forty paces...

Lay-by

No beholder needed here
No small child to feel the fear
The oil film on darkened grass
Offends our demonata farce

Look Up

Concrete precipice
Is the new vertiginous
Street-level turgidity
Lashed by vent-riloquy
From the far-off, unseen, edifice

15 Minutes

Androgeny is monotony
Patent leather fame is free
Dysfunctional celebrity
Lurch grinning, toward anonymity

Indigestion

Four knives for thee my killiminster charity
Entrails are free so don't demand parity
The limestone-set face twists in painful hilarity
Dripping its calcified bile into insanity

Meadow

The kindly earth has trapped my face
Far from home and far from grace
Soil below, grass hold in place
Her arms, please mother, me embrace

The Sleeper

Forty winks he said but never awoke
The armchair's halo flickers on alone
Forty leagues he strode on broken glass
The creeping night silhouettes his slippered throne

The Moon

Savaged by the crescent moon
Bleeding a fathom and five too soon
Brought to life with a pewter spoon
The seven grey spinsters wail and croon

Scoundrels

Sloughing old newspapers
They sell me ice scrapers
The smiling escapers
Outwit their mortal makers

Chestnuts

More miles than gallons
More chestnuts than marrons
More flu jabs than talons
More pigeons than herons