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