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