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