Still trees stand proud by the neck of the river:
The gloaming, all gloom, defeats their shape,
Knocks out all colour –
Sounds:
Rushed water’s wash,
A child’s sharp cough,
Scuffled leaves.
… depths of their slumbers, the beech, chestnut
Feel out their warmth in silent contemplation,
Gathering in hours.
Held in an anvil of quiet the evening goes nowhere,
Waiting in expectation for a pause
That never comes.
March 00
A still evening walk with two young kids
I’ve drifted across a day like a cloud,
Wasted the wealth of hours,
Washed my face in dreams
And touched on the Infinite Almighty with a prayer.
Other days I’ve rushed like a tornado,
Smashed through the minutes,
Seen time flit away
And finished with a bang not a whimper
As my exhausted head hit the pillow.
Who is to say which is right ?
2002
A frantic day, or a calm day; all part of life’s rich experience. Enjoy both 🙂
A small tight star in the lone sky
Winks
As the smell of smoke drifts across the air.
Leaves rustle.
The lights are on,
Voices murmur.
The dark,
Heavy as a hand,
Subdues the quiet.
A blackbird calls, chased off by silence.
There – a single scuffle –
We hardly dare breathe.
Heavy as shadows, the cats stare
As Innocence eats their food.
6/10/99
It was one of those very still evenings, and a baby hedgehog emerged into the light from the kitchen to snuffle noisily in the cat’s food dish
Casting about in shadows,
A distant bat holds to its One Course,
Intent, flickering moments across an ebbing sky
Circumnavigated by the certainty of trees, sky, air
In a furious fling that dances and captures and must tear
But from this distance – bloodless –
Is a scattered sign that even in suburbia
The leading edge of mystery begins with a small thing
Going about its duties in an unthought way
– as if my hand could reach out and touch more
Sept. 2001
Watching a bat at dusk.
This illusion that we’re all HERE
Doesn’t tie in with the concept of space
And nothingness between atoms,
Not to mention dreams, love, hate and hard work,
Tea at 5 o’clock
And the evening news.
Did I miss something?
We’re just a collection of empty space between atoms, whirling around stars …
These squares are all an illusion,
Light reflecting onto cells in the eyes,
A brain that interprets distance
And makes sense out of chaos.
Reality is a maelstrom of particles
Dancing in a loose bonding around each other,
Held in a fraction of time to seem a door,
A carpet and what I stare at – a lino floor.
Reality isn’t quite what it seems.
It was in the dark that the old moon shone –
By day it hid.
Snuck behind the trees in its still, slow journey,
I wondered how the world turned …
You could sharpen a knife on the gathering frost,
Take home pocketfuls of stars for sweets,
Stretch your ears to the wild shores in the silence.
It was just a moment, too deep to understand:
All I had was the moon,
Making its slow journey.
25/01/2011
Wondering about life, on a still night
Grass harvested from the moon,
Herbs that grew on a glacier in the Andes,
Pollen that floated from Everest,
2 hours shopping,
2 hours in the kitchen,
10 minutes eating,
1 hour washing up,
3 hours crying –
I HATE cooking!
November 2007
Don’t take this too seriously. It’s just a personal view.
Being a man’s O.K,
But the raging horses are a nuisance:
You can’t let them run wild or they’ll tear you apart,
And if you coral them they respond by kicking the fence down –
So all that’s left is to get with the good woman
And let her tame the beasts.
S**ual urges
A blackbird said a word
And that word burst into wondrous song,
A blackbird said a word,
And that word was just for me.
A blackbird said a word,
And that word was just too beautiful:
I thanked the blackbird for that word –
And blackbird then thanked me.
July 00
The sea stirs silent in a ripple
On meddled shore, still dream hung, sun worn,
Ships outdone by a shadowed pall
As they sit like giant ghosts on the horizon.
In the beckoning of our nets shrimps flick dismay invisibly,
Fleet sand sparks leaving clouds of smoke
To tell us that they’ve gone
Into silence.
A hazy, still day by the sea, shrimping near Portland, Dorset as vast ships sit on the horizon.
Here: this is a poem.
I made it from fifteen words
Arranged in a square.
The meaning is the context –
You can call it two sentences,
I call it Art,
Sold
For 1 million.
Just like that pile of bricks that sold for one million
What is a dream?
A dream is a goal, an inspiration,
A dream is where hope lives,
A dream is something to chase when life drags us down,
A dream is a song in the wilderness,
Good flowering from the mud of evil.
That is a dream.
Get yourself a dream,
Touch God and pray,
And never, ever let your dream get away.
Everyone has to have a dream.
I can wrap myself in a world of words,
Knotted around my head in a colourful spelling of character and place,
Mood and time,
Feelings of fascination –
A world where the only sound is mine,
Where the only dance is the dance of ryhme,
Where the rythm’s chase is sublime
And the capture of a word in a sentence
Means more than all the weight of politics,
Almost as much as a star falling into place
Or the kiss of a summer’s leaf upon the wind.
Writing poems
There’s a reach towards the heavens,
And in the sun within my eye
A door to greater things,
And a distance I must fly.
There’s a song within the moment
When the air and earth stand still,
And in the moment of my listening
I touch upon God’s will.
And as I dream my soul out high
And cross the distant soaring sky,
I’m lost within a purpose
And deaf to earth’s dull cry.
And though I barely sense,
And though I barely see,
I know there’s a frightening beauty
Of fierce intensity.
And this is where my heart must go,
This, where I must flee –
To a strange and silent place
Of baffling mystery.
A spiritual spark leads to greater things
In the black night
In the overgrown houses
Old men sing their cider songs,
Too tired to know that death sits by:
In the black night
In the overgrown houses
The old men sleep fitfully in freezing isolation
As a full moon sucks their breath,
Then prods them to hard stone.
Down and outs, oblivious on cider, freezing to death on a winter’s night in derelict ruins. I volunteered on a soup run for a short while
We’re so blind we cannot see
The beauty in variety:
It has to be explained away
As something that will one day pay!
Oh! If only we had brains
Not trapped in narrow, winding lanes,
And spirits that could touch the sky –
If only we could fly!
The only way we can conceive of the beauty inherent in Nature’s variety is by imposing a monetary value on it or otherwise rationalising it to our advantage.
People who are skilled at bending the law earn oodles of money,
And we call them barristers.
People who are skilled at breaking the law earn nothing,
And we call them crooks.
People who are skilled at observing people who are skilled
Laugh behind ALL their backs
And quite honestly can see no difference.
Legal Eagles are often complete shysters
Wendy, my dear,
You gave me a book
(Which after all is just a thought),
And there wasn’t any thought –
And that speaks volumes
More than volumes.
I was given a book as a gift after I’d expressed interest in it, and the gift was given openly and without any pre-thought
Here’s the heat of a thousand rivers,
Intertwining streams connected
To meet at mini-suns
That gather for the surge
Upwards –
Occasionally the world is clouds
In which we move,
Bubbles of thought,
Heavy bones in the evanescence of flesh.
27/01/2011
Hmm…
Dear God,
Thank you for looking after me.
Please help me to listen to you and obey you.
Amen.
A general, all-purpose prayer that covers all bases
Bad temper, misery, crying:
Half-choked sobs, stifled unhappiness –
Mondayitis, moving house, loneliness in a new city,
There’s not a lot I can do and I don’t –
Bright eyed and fluey you snuggle fully dressed into bed,
Reading, fire fully on, concentrating on the ‘now’,
Perhaps losing yourself
As I dash round in a ball of ‘doing’, half-tensioned,
Driving myself on as I cross out the points on my list –
Mend trousers, write letter, fix lock, make present ….
Funny how the list is nearly always the same length whatever I do.
Just moved to a new city, feeling low – 26/2/89
I was a little bit bored and then I found myself a life
– of sorts
And then I found myself a wife
– of sorts
(Ouch ! She just hit me!)
And then I found myself out
– of sorts
– with my wife
Of sorts
And my life
– of sorts.
Kind of a thought
– of sorts
About my life
– of sorts.
Being out of sorts …
It’s a funny mental right of all Merry Bums to bare arms.
With so many bullets flying,
So many deafs,
U nd 2 pack heat 2 stay alve.
In Ingland even the Please have no arms
(Unless Terry Wrists are around)
Though the Bad Guise ewes them –
Phew deafs, lotsa peas –
U’d think the Merry Bums wood know tis, woodn’t ewe?
Translation:
Gun Law
It’s a fundamental right of all Americans to bear arms.
With so many bullets flying,
So many deaths,
You need to pack heat to stay alive.
In England even the police have no arms
(Unless terrorists are around)
Though the bad guys use them –
Few deaths, lots of peace –
You’d think the Americans would notice, wouldn’t you?
I haven’t a gift,
No structure, no hope –
I’ve ended up feeling
Quite a dope.
Religion is useless,
You’ll soon find that out –
All I can offer is
Endless doubt.
I have no great magic,
No sun for your sky,
But I want to be with you
When life makes you cry.
I want to have given you
Something that’s me,
Something to keep you
Forever safely.
I haven’t a gift,
And I’m feeling sad:
A gift for my kids, God,
Would sure make me glad!
Every parent wants to have given their children something to protect them and make them wise …
I can’t help myself with these poems,
If poems are what they are –
A few words that become a torrent and then subside,
Well up again,
Captured before they ebb away for all eternity:
And in that capture I find some primitive release,
A longing absolved,
A pent-up problem solved.
Writing poems
At the funeral, they cried –
So much sadness pouring out it was a surprise
To know they’d hated him whilst still alive:
But so it goes, the bottled up years of grief
Given relief, the pain of loss,
That bollocking from the boss,
Those months of feeling cross
And times you had to lie –
All, all comes pouring out
In one long cry.
At the funeral they tried
To think of the man who’d died
But found they cried more easily
For themselves.
June 2002
A short and rather cynical poem about people at funerals who aren’t close to the ‘departed’ and who delude themselves as to why they’re upset
I commissioned her
To write a poem.
She wrote it,
I sold it:
Concept Poetry.
Just like concept art – the talentless get the talented to do all the work for them.
