THE FOLLOWING POEMS ARE PUBLISHED IN MY TWO BOOKS –
DAWN PEOPLE AND OTHER POEMS. – AND
DREAM NAVIGATOR AND OTHER POEMS. (Both books are available on Amazon.)
CONCORD’S LAST FLIGHT.
Proud phallus
Its final thunderous intromission
Cleaves the skies.
The trembling thighs
Yield and part
To the thrust of the wingèd dart.
Before flaccidity eternal,
Geriatric junkyard oblivion
When the play has run its course,
A final curtain-call,
Rendered impotent
By the balance sheet’s betrayal.
Now laid to redundant rest,
Cobwebbed, chaste,
The rampant beast,
Seducer of all kingdoms.
Close the last door
On the raucous swansong
Of the lion’s roar.
A WOMAN’S DEATH.
A woman’s death
Is only a hydra’s tentacle retracting.
Her flesh lives on, umbilically conjoined.
In her repose she partakes still
Of the endless cycle;
And she is one
With its timeless burgeoning.
A man’s death is more separate.
The final extinction finds him
An island ready to submerge
Forever under a swelling sea.
He is only the seed – not flesh,
Merely peripheral in the play,
A bystander, a worker bee;
With death he does not endure.
Therefore men with equal awe as ecstasy
Should taste love’s union of flesh.
It is as near as they approach
To the eternal;
Before annihilation, for a moment
They clutch the infinite,
Which is woman’s gift and birth right.
-------------------------------------------------
UNTITLED.
My unerring cupid’s dart
Pierces her woman’s faithless heart
That smiles and bluster move;
And yet the inner core of me,
Stashed away so tidily,
Buried as deep as deep can be,
She cannot know and love.
Only at surfaces we meet.
Her eye computes my balance sheet,
And calculates the loss and gain,
But cannot know the inner pain.
Together we propose and plan,
But set aside the inner man,
The buried nub and essence deep
That only surfaces in sleep.
Together in our puppet show,
Our love will fructify and grow;
And yet the inner heart of me,
Buried as deep as deep can be,
Her pitiless eye can never know.
WASHING MACHINE AD.
You were the first
To answer the ad for the washing machine;
And you shrugged it off when I insisted
On the ineffable mystery of our meeting;
And that it was long ordained
Your eyes would peer the pages, flickering,
Scanning for a response in the print columns,
Alighting to haul in the strands connecting us
Across time and space,
That indeed had always connected us.
You were the first
To answer the ad for the washing machine,
Your fingers fumbling, dialling the phone
In their haste to actualize the connection
That before the sun’s birth had always awaited
Its consummation inevitable.
When I heard your voice
Across time and space, down the telephone wires,
I knew I had made a connection;
That the conjuror’s hand had magicked,
In the random universe, an impossible meeting,
So that you were the first
To answer the ad for the washing machine.
ANOTHER.
When I slept with you,
I slept with another.
When you spoke,
Another’s voice cried out to me.
With her clothes and jewels and raiment
My perfidious eye adorned you;
And her unstill presence soured our every joy.
And when we kissed, your lips were over – painted,
As if you were a pale palimpsest.
Her eyes beamed like beacons from your sockets.
Her shade overshadowed you, and would not rest.
And whenever we walked,
She walked always by our side;
And when with grief and bitter tear you died,
It was for another’s death I cried.
THE EXQUISITE COSMOLOGICAL ORDER.
Sometimes my tears well up
When I contemplate
The exquisite cosmological order.
The abundance of teleological markers
The nested layers of paradox
The signposts whose fingers point
To the sublime symmetry of stars.
My tears well up
Contemplating our human default
Our wishful blindness
Oblivious to the heartbeat
That synchronizes the spheres
The unheard symphony
Silent in our solipsistic negation.
Our boundless vision betrayed
As human eyes turn away
From the exquisite cosmological order.
MY WIFE AND MY MISTRESS.
One prays in the chapel by day
One cavorts naked before the moon
One is the safe haven
One the St Elmo’s fire
Atop a ship’s mast in the bay
One is the gentle midday breeze
One is the harsh night wind
That whips and threshes the trees
One wanders and roams the night
While one is content to sit
One is the unclouded gaze
One is the mad glint of fire
Volcano uttered from pupil’s pit
Mixes rage and desire
One bakes in a microwave
One stirs a cauldron on naked embers
One is Evian.
One is whisky surge to the brain.
One is sunlight.
One is the lashing rain.
One is the good fairy.
And one the malign elf;
And one is loved by my true heart,
And one by my shadow self.
THE THREE OF US.
Of the three of us sitting at this table
One will be famous
One will be infamous
And one go unreckoned.
Of the three of us sitting at this table
One will cluster words together
And of the endless sheaves
A single verse will echo in men’s hearts.
Of the three of us sitting at this table
One of us will murder,
And his malign implements
Axe, rope, and acid bath
Will thrill generations
With a frisson of dread.
Of the three of us sitting at this table
One will work at wealth
Which his heirs will squander.
He will no monument buy
Nor his toil leave trace.
Of the three of us sitting at this table
The future courses silent through our veins
Our deeds welling within
Waiting like cards to be dealt.
As we sit, only the teacup gives an inkling
Of the three of us sitting at this table
Which will be famous,
Which will be infamous,
And which go unreckoned?
THE BODY REBELS
The body rebels
Against the will’s loud clamour,
Its unheard cry of pain
The secret tumour.
The body ever urged
To show its mettle.
But now the dark flower
Spreads out its petal.
To its incessant voice
The will must yield.
In death’s quiet repose
The wound is healed.
The body’s will
Are rivers underground
And hear those waters,
Or the self confound.
IT IS WRITTEN.
History is written ahead of time
Each page waiting to be turned
All the events inevitable
Darkly on the horizon stand.
The future waits to be fulfilled,
The unwritten poem to be revealed.
The symphony hangs in the air,
The composer ready to inspire
Planets and their moons revolve,
Waiting for the mind to solve.
Beneath the rolling fields of grass
Deep strata lie for us to delve.
It is written,
It shall come to pass.
CLOUDS FLOAT SO HIGH.
Clouds float so high
In the thin film
Of Earth’s air envelope.
Drowning is so deep
In the tenuous wisp of water
That wets Earth’s whistle.
The moon through its allotted space
Hurtles headlong,
In a slow motion dream.
Time hurries by,
The clock hands frenzied
In the slow procession of eternity.
THE HEAVENS’ SEVEN WANDERING EYES.
The Heaven’s seven wandering eyes
Nightly twinkle glint and gleam,
Dance and twirl their clockwork dream,
And the gearwheels synchronize
Their pirouettes through darkened skies.
The Heavens’ seven wandering eyes
Their several orbits harmonize,
Unreckoned by our Earthbound gaze,
But all configured to amaze.
The Heavens’ seven wandering eyes
In subtle counterpoint make play,
Cavort until the break of day.
Each planet through the dark vault flies.
In thrall to some orb music sweet,
They march to the conductor’s beat,
Unheard by stilted Earthbound ear,
All in their intricate array
Our eyes can never dare to meet,
But rather turn aside in fear,
And evermore must turn away.
The Heavens’ seven wandering eyes
Their subtle harmonies disguise.
Their quickened movements we mistake,
But we will know it when we wake,
And that the gearwheels synchronize
Their ordered movement through the skies.
ECOLOGICAL ISSUES.
There are a hundred signposts
On the blind man’s road,
All pointing to never and forever.
Oblivious, the blind pass by in droves.
The sun hangs dark in their occluded eyes.
The signposts scream in the doomed skies.
The accusing fingers of the tree branch point.
The blind man denies.
It is sunset, but he thinks it is dawn.
The crow utters warnings
On the deaf man’s road,
The carrion crow that circles overhead.
The vulture wings ready to pick carcass
Of the man who doesn’t know that he is dead.
The poisoned grass stands differently
So the wind through it sings a different note.
The wind harp’s playing “taps”.
The deaf man thinks it’s reveille.
No one hears, no one hears,
The sight turned inward on the dead man’s road.
The forests are dying,
Greed alone survives,
The sickly urge to prosper,
To seize more than the earth allotted.
Eyes are averted on the madman’s road
From the wrought harm,
Palpable on the Earth’s brow.
They have stolen even the air.
Next they will want to blot out stars.
Starless on the road that spirals inward
To the coming reckoning,
The blind man’s meeting
He can neither defer nor envisage.
DEW DISCOVERS GOSSAMER.
Dew discovers gossamer
On morning bushes woven,
That turns instead to glistening ghosts
When the sun is high in heaven.
Fly wings are neatly parcelled
With iridescent twine,
Await the master’s pleasure,
When he should choose to dine.
The webs are shimmering harp strings
The winds can make unstill,
And fashion soundless music
That no ear can ever thrill.
Another dawn will whiten
With droplets set in rows,
Busy spinnerets replenish
What time’s decay must lose.
BEETHOVEN’S DEATH BED.
On his deathbed, Beethoven
The blown circuit magicked to life.
The world of submerged sound surfaced,
And the dumb chord sang loudly again.
Bows gliding greased silent over string
Now with rough friction seized.
The violin’s wasp waist trembled electric;
The air was shimmering bright.
The creator, to whom alone the ecstatic steam
Was merely conceptual
Now with rapt tears heard as none other heard
The clear clarion-sharp effusion.
And the peals of notes cascaded
More real than the world’s wilfully blunted senses
Could ever embrace or fathom.
The ghosts became embodied;
The dead spoke again,
And the chords upward in sunlight wafted.
Finally, when sleep came,
It was not in the sea-green submerged silent world
Where the mournful moon held sway,
Where tongues flapped soundless
And bell clappers made mocking shadow-play,
And the billowing pall smothered desire;
Rather it was in the crescendoed sky,
Deep in the sun’s ray,
Sublimely crowned with its fire.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
In your cracked lips
I kiss the palimpsest of beauty.
From your rheumy sockets
Still shine youth’s clear gaze.
Your sagging flesh
Firm beneath my caress,
Your muted cries
Echo urgent down the years,
Replenish the lost days.
Our laughter holds back the welling tears,
The approaching sadness occluded by our mirth.
My love strengthens
The fragile thread that binds you to this earth.
SCHOOL DAYS.
As a child
I had no path set out for me,
No mentor – none to tell me the way,
No signpost to where my destiny lay.
School was a “holding facility”,
Prisoners on “lockdown”,
A parroted pretense of learning,
A ritual to eke out time,
A tundra of dead years receding
Into a fathomless future
To be released into the world directionless
Finally from that dark pantomime.
Rote remembered trivial snatches
Of stultifying lessons,
Dreary bottomless dredging;
These the foundations to build upon,
The edifice to grow upwards,
The tree to branch and thicken.
Now I have built – but am bitter
For those early desolate years wasted,
Where raucous banality reigned,
And wisdom languished unnurtured and untasted.
A PLEA FOR BOOKSHOPS.
Once Bloomsbury bristled with bookshops
Bustling browsers clutching their prize;
Now droves of “greasy spoons”
Have settled like flies.
Fast food is the doom
Of the bookseller and the dusty tome.
Rapacious rents and business rates
Have driven them into cyberspace.
You can imbibe beer
But never knowledge here.
Soon every corner of the Earth
Will be awash with trinket shops,
Whole streets in thrall to The Big Mac,
Or selling garment sweated on the rack.
No bookshop can survive
The Darwinian logic of the hive.
In the dumbed-down street no space
To spare for culture of the mind
“Progress” swept through
And left a desert behind.
DEFAULTED FRIENDSHIP.
Tonight I look back on defaulted friendship
That death has finally made absolute.
Always the balance yielded between
The burden of contact
And the dollar’s rush of adrenalin;
The mindless focus on empty endless gain.
Always preferring ever to defer
Until that warm closeness became merely
A past pinprick of light
In the tunnel through which my life roars like a train;
And then suddenly the day arrives
When it is too late to return
The default extended just a day too long;
And then you embrace that reticence-wrought cruelty,
And in some hidden corner to inter
The denied flower with the unreckoned pain.
Now death has sealed the shoddy pact of silence,
And laid bare and magnified the loss
Brought finally beyond mend,
Now only to mourn untrodden paths
That I cannot return to tread again.
Your death, in its ultimate cost to me,
Is more than, in your dying, you ever knew.
The one-way street of time
Stretches ahead only;
And I measure and reckon up my life’s spurned hours;
And in your memory
Hold them more precious.
SLEEP FACE.
The sleep face is a secret face,
The eyes no longer beacons,
Context and meaning ironed out of it,
Merely peaks and furrows,
A bland topography of alabaster.
In the sleep face, the lies
Concealed in waking, like flotsam rise,
A secret smile, a little twist of the lips.
The false face transforms to the true mask.
“In somno veritas”.
When I survey my collection of sleep faces
Observed on pillows throughout countless years,
Their sum and composite
Tells me that sleep is wiser,
Tells me the façade of waking days
Is self consuming passion.
The sleep face is more beautiful.
Drink the restoring fountain
While the stars twinkle;
Bury the chatter and bustle;
Put on the mask of moonlight;
Dim the lights; let the pools of shadow
Fill the eye sockets;
Let the street lamps bathe neon,
And the sleep face dredge lies and truths
From a bottomless ocean.
THE FUTURE IS ANOTHER COUNTRY.
The future unfolds glimmerless
Its ambush with implacable guile;
Licks gamblers’ unwary blood
From lips of a sardonic smile.
The road ahead has twists and bends;
A sea of question marks perpends;
But when future hurtles into past,
Dark veil becomes clearest glass.
And now into that dark I squint
To capture shadow, ghost, or glint;
Although it is in vain I peer,
And bend my head, and cup my ear
To catch the whisper of portent.
But still – the future’s written down,
Just like a script upon a stage,
A palimpsest on a black page;
Each word in deepest darkness grown.
Against that dark I rant and rage;
And in its depths I writhe and drown.
DAWN PEOPLE.
Today I meet day’s first cohort,
The dawn people on the virgin train
That shakes suburban slumber.
These are the brigade of ravaged,
Uncurled eyes, pin-pupils
Heavy with night’s wisdom.
Awakening, I step the steps
Through evolution;
The alarm bell catches me – amoeba;
Soon insect lapping coffee,
Like nectar out of an ancient flower;
And now, on this train – toad!
My fellow passengers
Reptilian for certain.
Look! Yawn and lizard tongue,
Chameleon gray to meet dawn’s pallor,
Poikilothermic – bask for warmth in the neon.
Today there seems no middle path
Between frenzied greed
And subsidized inaction.
Moil consumes an ever larger slice
Of the once fecund day.
Time is a taut wire.
And now, for some,
Work eats into dawn itself,
Until only autopilot
Body grudgingly concedes inflexitime
Braces against the shock of waking.
Slowly the city murmuring
To roar crescendos.
The train disgorges;
Dawn people wend
On legs that stumble hesitant in dreams
Usurped from slumber.
And I still higher evolve,
Finally to face cold platform air,
At last mammalian.
CONTENTMENT.
When contentment comes,
The keen hunger nulled,
The whetted blade dulled,
The expectant eye stilled,
Then nature demands a vacuum,
An emptiness to be filled.
When no hunger is left,
The impulse bereft,
Repletion is death.
Only hope and desire
Magic the body alive;
Low burns the fire
When the contentment of a wife
Does not deprive.
The flame must rekindle
With vicissitude,
Darkness its fuel,
Pain its food.
To strive must elevate;
To win must sap and sate;
In turmoil we march;
In bliss we sit and wait.
LOOK UP.
The stars are masked in cities;
The orchestra of streetlamps
Drowns the tinkle of distant bells;
But the cacophony left far behind,
You can pick even the moonless way
With ancient whispers of light.
The whole sky a latticework
Of distant flames,
Beacons that speak across voids
From a time when the Earth itself was fire.
Look up a moment,
And the moment magicks into
A fragment of the eternal.
We have, in the bustle, mislaid perspective,
Which now raise the eyes to restore.
If only the larger context could speak loudly,
Soldiers would pause on the brink of war.
But these silent wisps
Can only bear dumb witness
To our regardless, implacable strife;
Nevertheless, to know peace, you must clearly see
All the insignificance of our fear and hope,
If you will only depart those places
Where the stars are masked and muffled,
And look up.
MORE REAL.
A long-dead star whose light
Across time’s chasm
We see finally;
Unspoken thought of dying men;
Visions alive in blinded eyes;
Word that in air-bubbles rise
From the mouths of sailors drowned at sea:
Which of these things is more real?
A ghostly symphony
That, pre-existent, awaits birth
In blood of the composer’s pen;
A tune that comes to haunt the ear,
And then forgot forever more;
The memory that did not occur;
Which of these things is more real?
The dream’s unreckoned dark portent;
A warning cry
By the loud gale snatched away;
The dead twin, as afterbirth disguised,
Which yet occludes its quickened sib,
It’s parallel phantasm hides
In the deep well of living eyes;
Which of these things is more real?
The thwarted murderous attempt,
The victim though, by fate exempt,
Unknowingly lives out their days;
And one day walking past the place
Where once they had all but died,
And their heart pauses in its stride,
And they never knowing why;
Which of these things is more real?
My heart skipped a beat today,
As I passed beneath a dead star’s light,
Paused at the crossroad of events
And their hidden confluence,
Denied forever to my sight;
And still I never wondered why.
Which of these things is more real?
FAILED BLIND DATES.
The saddest part is the farewell,
The last moment of eye contact,
The moment of eyes swiveling away,
The care not to glance backwards.
Is one to say “Nice meeting you,
But now farewell for all eternity”?
Behind the pair of masks
Which face each other,
Brains compute the calculus of passion,
Each traded word interpolated
Into the equation.
Selves displayed on offer, but with clauses
(O, so many clauses!)
Thrashed out in carefully chosen ambience.
But the self is not a used car for sale;
And therefore it is not “the thing”
To enquire directly about wipers,
Washers, tappets, big-ends.
Especially big-ends are never mentioned,
Though they are the crux of the matter.
Now I look back on the faces of women
Who calculated well, and found me wanting.
I confuse their names and faces;
Their minds I have long forgotten;
And one thing only haunts me to this day,
And that is the look their eyes held,
Meeting mine a moment,
Before forever more they turned away.
THE EYE’S EDGE.
The eye’s edge more deeply pierces
Into the mist of stars,
More deeply than the directed stare,
Beaming focused into the night.
Sometimes the eye sees only
That which it evades.
Only the unseen cast of die
The iron edge of randomness can deny.
Where logic fails,
Dreams and omens can make do.
Music without ears
Ascends on wings more graceful.
The stars glitter with ice
That straddles the threshold of vision,
With light that inattention only may capture.
MORNING START.
The starter motor grudging and moaning,
Then whining and whirring,
Its staccato gears fressing,
And kissing, and meshing,
And the engine snatching, and failing, and catching,
And hunting – and finally revving, and purring;
And the nacreous windshield
Cold sunlight diffusing
Though its ice-sheen opaque,
By the heater’s luke-warm breath slowly melting,
And by the screen wipers’ inexorable dance,
It’s matt surface slickening, its arctic bloom bruising,
Till the sunbeam through Perspex untrammeled shall break,
And we can advance.
Now the gear-stick joggling,
And the gear-teeth’s coition,
And the gear-crunch brings it to orgasm shuddering;
And the tires bite mud,
And the engine mounts juddering,
And the gear-teeth chattering,
The exhaust-pipe spattering,
And the tappets’ murmur,
And the big-ends clattering.
But now speed softens and tempers its music,
Unchained from the row of its raucous dalliance.
The wind, like the sough and whistle
Of a slow, vast wing-beat cocoons it,
As it vanishes luminous into kingdoms of silence.
NIGHT CRIES.
At the dusk’s threshold into night,
The city radiates, pulsates
With the night’s ritual coupling,
The great heave of it’s breast
Before sleep,
The raw intertwining of limbs,
The rhythmic crescendo,
And the soft cries in the night.
I stand on the hill overlooking
That cauldron of neon eyes,
Listen to the whisper and rustle,
The thousand echoes and echoes
Of its bodies’ trembling sighs.
The city at this hour,
One vast primal orgasmic frenzy
Beneath the innocent façade,
Its lusty heat-haze
Shimmering the winding worm trails
Of its twinkling white fairy lights.
In the rose-garnished perimeters
The cries are prim, muffled, restrained;
Only a moment’s lapse and betrayal;
But where the poor live
In the blighted heart,
The cries burgeon nakedly,
The animal in them confessed;
Wanton urgency,
Relentless passion
Magick them awhile
Out of this world of concrete
And municipal dearth,
Till spent,
Moist brows unfurrow in sleep,
And all is still;
And I check the slow pulse of their serenity,
Watching the night-bound city from the hill.
SCHOOL FIRE DRILL.
This time, the ringing of the bell brings
No bumbling, giggling-solemn, tongue-in-cheek drill,
No ordered trooping into seething file,
No whisper and fidget in the tarmac play-ground.
This time, oily smoke billows and burns
From the school rafters.
This time, the ringing of the bell brings
No restrained brisk march into sunshine,
No complacent counting of heads.
This time, flickering flames bring taste of fear to tongues;
Heat shrivels the corneas of eyes’ rapt gaze;
And a thousand feet on braced legs cease their scrape and shuffle.
This time, the ringing of the bell brings
No raucous return to abandoned class-room,
No reluctant seizing of pens after the respite,
No eyes battening down to dog-eared text-book.
This time, a thousand flames leap in a thousand eyes,
Watching with awe the desperate conflagration.
Those eyes will dance forever with the memory of that flame.
DEFAULTED DESTINY.
Every human has a destiny,
But what if destiny’s gaze were averted?
Every human has a path;
But suppose the guide defaulted,
And the compass failed to point?
Every human belongs to another,
But what if that other were never found?
Every human has their place,
But what if that place were shifting ground?
Every human has a name,
But what if that name had no sound?
Every humans has their destiny,
But what if it were not to be?
DEATH HIGHLIGHTS WHAT HAS FLOWN AWAY.
Death highlights what has flown away,
That was commonplace as night and day.
In its default, what has been
Now in its perspective seen.
Only in the silent space
Hear the true echo of the voice.
Humans can love the most
Only when the love is lost.
Death highlights what has flown away,
The former sparkle of the eye,
That was commonplace as night and day.
RIPPLES.
I dropped a pebble in a pond;
The ripple spread to oceans,
Resonated to far reaches,
Echoed to the ends of earth,
Perturbed the Cosmos.
I dropped a pebble in a pond;
The ripple died still-born,
Never to lap the distant shores,
Or penetrate the realms of stars.
My life a ripple in a pond;
Will it endure or fade?
Reverberate in distant corners,
In the great fabric tessellate?
Or drown in the silence of the sea,
Unreckoned all eternity?
THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE.
No random universe
Succours the delicate spark.
A felicitous cosmic order
Enables the beating heart.
An order balanced
Upon the throw of a thousand dice;
Life, a tiny chance in an ocean of forfeits,
An impossible outcome,
Bears witness to the Guiding Hand.
In a random universe,
Impossible that we could be,
And yet that impossibility made flesh.
Our consciousness testifies
To the inherent order of stars,
A universe directed
By a destiny envisaged.
Stars, nebulae, shape themselves
Towards the goal
Of our miraculous being.
FRANTIC SNOW.
Today, frantic snow
Is tell-tale of wind eddies,
White whirl-pools,
Miniature maelstroms,
Gusts and guffaws.
Across cobbles
Snow pellets skittle and skuttle;
Breeze buffets;
Drifts swirl in gutters;
All the world’s a flurry,
Not a moment to tarry.
REPLETE.
Sated, replete you lie,
No wonderment in earth or sky.
Hunger has shaped us
Into what we are;
Our essence honed
By strife and war;
Danger has winnowed
Out the chaff.
On wings of pain,
Aloft we soar.
SHADOW MORPHOLOGY.
Wild flowers
Present mean petals.
Prim, thin lips
Pout tiny daubs of color coyly,
To lure the Lothario bee’s nectar fress,
And thrill tumescent
To the honeyed intromission.
Nevertheless, within these mean petals’ blueprint
Await the specter of lush blooms,
Ghosts of the future, shadow-shapes
That bred, will garnish gardens in a color symphony.
The cosmic blue-print
With its hidden agenda
Portends the future we cannot skry.
Deep in the Neanderthal seed
Awaits the unborn prodigy,
Whose vision will encompass the universe.
BUNDY, GACY, SAVILLE, ROLF.
Bundy, Gacy, Saville, Rolf
Live their silent secret lives
Behind the mask of smiling eyes.
The mask falls;
The smile peels away;
Darkness replaces day.
The fallen mask reveals
The pulsing flesh beneath,
And the canine spittled teeth.
Then the mask carefully replaced
With the composed adjusted smile
To dangerously beguile.
Bundy, Gacy, Saville, Rolf:
Love “gone wrong” and turned around
Both prey and predator confound.
TELL ME.
Tell me, tell me this flower
With its snow-white berry
Its signification,
Its allotted place.
Tell me, tell me this riddle
Of things in perfect accord,
Harmony defying randomness
Ordered into synchronized space.
Tell me, tell me the riddle of flowers,
The conundrum of the alighting bee,
Come together by chance
Or to purpose – which?
How to discern the ontology?
Tell me, tell me this world
This too-convenient Cosmos
Its signification, its plan,
Its ultimate purpose – Man?
Or beyond?
That solemn angels winging the skies
After our coming oblivion
From our ashes may rise.
In harmony the heavens are unstill,
Every planet bending to another’s will;
Every satellite and spinning rock
Synchronize as gearwheels interlock.
Their intervals and movements are all set
In a formation dancing pirouette.
Our lives beneath the ballet day by day
Governed by heavenly cycles that hold sway.
Our destinies yield to the tick and tock
Of that precise fine-tuned celestial clock.
SEASHELL WHISPERS.
The ear-held seashell whispers
The song of lapping seas
Or the wafting breeze
Whistling through the trees.
The ear-held seashell echoes
The whispers we did share
In the cool night air.
In their convoluted chambers
Seashells resonate,
All the voices that surround them
In whispers recreate.
PIANO
Suspended above an infinitude
Of awaiting sound,
Over the keyboard I poise
These hunter-gatherer’s hands.
The score’s notation before me
Unfurls across centuries
A mind’s meeting
Of genius whose tones from heaven wafted.
My fingers’ foreplay caress
Chords blossom
Release pent harmonies’ orgasm cascading
At my whim awakening.
Of palatable lie
And truth austere
Which will humankind revere?
Of studious calm
And razzmatazz
To which will humans turn their face?
Bleakest truth
Or flaunted wealth
Which will lure the divided self?
AT THE CROSSROADS.
At the crossroads
I toss a coin to choose the way.
If the ace of spades comes up I’ll kill,
If the queen of hearts I will obey.
A thousand dice throws led me to this day.
Where the wind may blow
That is where I go.
My fate is in the clouds and in the sky.
A marked card will tell the day I die.
The tea-leaves
Will not deceive
Will choose my grave.
Enthralled in hope and fear
Into the future’s fog I peer.
Only waves lapping by the sea
Will tell my augury.
THAT’S NOT ME.
I have a hand,
But that’s not me.
I have an arm,
But that’s not me.
The “me” is somewhere
Nowhere
Everywhere.
I have a head,
But that’s not me.
I have a finger,
But that’s not me.
The “me” is phantom
Here and not here
Anywhere.
I have a face,
But that’s not me.
The smiling mask,
But that’s not me
A dream
A conceit
An elusive moment
Submerged beneath a silent sea.
The waves whisper,
But that’s not me.
That’s not me.
I TURNED AWAY FROM LOVE.
I turned away from love
Lest it should stultify,
Lest habit should seduce
And dull the inner eye.
I turned away from love
For I must whet the knife
That cuts the stifled bonds
Of the devoted wife.
For I must climb the peak,
And I must seize the day,
And I must tread alone
A path of destiny.
And that is why from love
I forever turned away.
CLOWNS.
Post Gacy, clowns are suspect,
Their mouths a painted sneer.
In dreams cavorting hordes
Prance and summersault,
Wink, Gesticulate.
Beneath the bonhomie
A darkness lies in wait.
The smile turns to tear.
Beneath the frenzied fun
Conceals the loaded gun.
When the laughter dies
The bright and mellow sun
Extinguishes in their eyes,
Come hour of midnight
Clowns in their myriads
Populate the street.
In raucous mime
The silent hours they greet.
At home they wipe the greasepaint from their brows;
And in their basements corpses decompose.
Through the ringy-ding tinnitus roar
Strain to catch snatches of voices.
Listen to the bustling, whispering sighs
Of leaves in the breeze
For a message or word
That would pass unheard,
And be reckoned no more.
To the sea waves’ murmur,
Brine through pebbles receding
Harken for meter or rhyme
Inattention forfeiting.
In the dance of the planets
And their retinue moon
Seek for the echo of rhythm
And harmonious tune.
All but gain is excluded.
Muffled ears, downcast eyes,
Till the cosmic voice below limen
Falls silent and dies.
WOMAN AND MAN.
A woman will love and betray,
Will bare the opposing faces,
As night follows bounteous day,
And the dark Moon the shining Sun chases.
Man is the hunt and the kill.
Woman is the deep dark well
Whose water table ebbs and flows
To preen the petals of the rose.
A woman, in her longing, waits.
A man his body’s hunger sates.
Fulfill their intertwining fates.
Woman is the haven safe
Where man returns from war and strife.
Man is the shell – Woman the kernel.
Man is transient – Woman eternal.
NIGHT BUS.
Between the end and beginning of day
The long sleep-squandered night is splayed.
False dawns of street lamps punctuate
Dreams’ serpentine itinerary
Which journey’s end must terminate.
The steady path of the night bus
Through the altered landscape,
The face obverse,
Of the dark streets’ neon shroud,
And the endless ribbon of road.
Slumber shaken awake
When night becomes day.
No tipple of sun,
But warmed to the cockles
By The Moon’s cold ray.
Soon pillow and eiderdown,
And a deeper dream will come
With the rising sun.
DAWN.
In the dark dark dawn
The matt black blanket tweaks
Aside. Through white billow peeks
Attenuated sun.
Resentful roused The Earth
From slumber’s dreamless death.
Dawn’s sardonic smile prinks
Through horizon’s chinks.
Alarm clocks’ frenzy goose
From voluptuous snooze.
Commuters kick-start
The muffles crescendoed roar,
The stretch and yawn
Of the unwilling dawn.
Zombies on intravenous coffee drips,
Or steaming brew slurping sips.
Dew wafts ethereal away.
Dawn bustles to full-blown day
To prise open the occluding sky.
DEFICIT.
To pay all the subsistence
We must borrow from the future,
The debt compounding;
An infinite dizzying spiral,
A tail-spin towards a firmament receding.
The debt will be repaid
In “Bank of Toyland” money,
Coin hyper-attenuated,
Watered down
Into wheelbarrows of paper.
In gold we trust.
Its stored value assures.
All else debases.
Pie-crust promises obfuscate.
The debit/credit columns
Skewed into red rivers.
The hunger will come,
The comfortable illusion betray.
We have sold tomorrow
To subsidise today.
The figures don’t add up,
Juggle them how you will.
The pluses for minuses
Purport to pay the bill.
In the final balance sheet
The reckoning must come.
Then the roosting chickens
With vengeance head for home.
Reckoning the cosmic configuration’s too transcendent beauty
Is to stare
Full into The Sun’s intensity.
Man, unequal to the perception,
Shies from the light engulfing.
The perfect symmetry of the jewel
Gathers the focused beam.
The eye evades.
We glance sideways only.
The trodden road,
The banal humdrum – safer
Than vertiginous height
The break of dawn
More dangerous than the night.
CHILDREN DISCOVER DEATH.
They had seen the leaves that the wind nipped off
Watched them eddy to earth from their branches’ roost
Watched them brittle and brown, and curl – then uncurl
Then limpen and lie, and tamp and felt,
With the bread-crumbed earth and the bedrock fused,
Seen the sorry midrib shorn of its pelt,
But death’s dark shadow had not deduced.
At hide-and-seek round the garden shed,
And a silence falls on the raucous scream.
They all peer down at a furry face
By the crisp brown leaf pall half obscured
No more wide-eyed and supple and spruce,
But a rigid paw, and a coat unsheened,
And a wax eye sunken into the head.
Tears shimmer and tremble as they gaze.
Now death’s dark shadow they will deduce.
Each child’s separate memory
Will converge backwards on this day.
A day has dawned. A door has closed.
From today the world a colder place
Reflects in each small somber face.
Now finally they recognize
Death stripped of all its bland disguise.
I’M “MANNING UP” MY INNER CHILD.
I’m “manning up” my inner child
Whose murmurings must be suppressed.
He must be cured of endless need,
Purged of pity, and weaned of breast.
To a dark coffin he’s consigned,
Out of sight, out of mind.
All calm the mirrored surface seems,
But I hear him still in darkest dreams.
The bones on which my life is fleshed
Are childhood puzzlement and hurt.
Rickets gnarl and twist the bone.
The past is letters carved in stone.
I’m “manning up” my inner child
By whom I was too much beguiled.
Dreams end at peep of day,
And then are neatly stashed away.
I skate the surface’s silver gleam,
But dark beneath the silent scream.
TELL ME
Tell me, tell me this flower,
With its snow white berry
Its signification
Its allotted place.
Tell me, tell me this riddle
Of things in perfect accord,
Harmony defying randomness,
Ordered into symmetrical space.
Tell me, tell me the riddle of flowers,
The conundrum of the alighting bee
Come together by chance
Or to purpose – which?
How to discern the ontology?
Tell me, tell me this world,
This too convenient Cosmos,
Its signification – its plan.
Its ultimate purpose – Man?
Or beyond?
That solemn angels, winging the skies
After our coming oblivion
From our ashes may rise
BUNDY, GACY, SAVILLE, ROLF.
Bundy, Gacy, Saville, Rolf
Live their silent secret lives
Behind the mask of smiling eyes.
The mask falls.
The smile peels away.
Darkness replaces day.
The fallen mask reveals
The pulsing flesh beneath,
And the canine spittled teeth.
Then the mask carefully replaced
With the composed adjusted smile
To dangerously beguile.
Bundy, Gacy, Saville, Rolf
Love “gone wrong” and turned around
Both prey and predator confound.
BEVERLEY ALLITT, SERIAL KILLER.
Inside every bustling pristine hospital
There awaits an angry angel of death
Whose failed shattered childhood
Seethes for retribution’s closure.
The patients balance the knife edge
Of a murderous whim
Whose ultimate power can steal or bestow
Respite or oblivion.
The white-coated angel
Stalks the neon corridor
With hypodermic a poisoned chalice.
In denial and complacency
None are alerted.
None are saved.
None will reckon or see clearly
The anomalous body-count.
Let the death toll mount.
Blind committees have deaf ears
To the death rattle
Silent in the small hours
At the darkened bed-side.
The cold corpse tagged.
A cursory certificate.
A burial hasty.
A forgotten statistic.
In every bustling pristine hospital
In your vulnerable hour
You may meet the angel of death
Who waits to pluck the flower.
Pray you may protect from hurt,
And that sickly gaze avert.
I listen attentive to the mutterings
Of the mad disconsolate,
Alone gesticulating as the crowds surge by,
None daring to meet their eye.
I listen carefully in case
God’s word can only utter through
The pure vessel, empty of coherence
That will unimpeded resonate.
Somewhere in the jibber-jabber
Sounds the message.
Could we but discern,
Then we will hear the voice of angels,
And the tide will turn.
Old age’s wrinkles
Are the roads taken.
The rheumy eyes
Are the loves forsaken.
The sagging bosoms
Are the twin regrets,
The dark dream
That conscience frets.
The cracked lips
Are the words unspoken.
The lined brow
The promises broken.
The hoary head
The keen remorse awoken.
The sculpture lies latent
Within the stone,
Awaiting carding
Of its detritus.
The poem is petals
Awaiting plucking.
A thousand symphonies resonate
Awaiting only the listening ear.
Word, sounds, forms await
Their infinitude of permutation.
THE (LONDON) DOCKLANDS LIGHT RAILWAY.
The journey passes across
Stern Ikeal utilscape
A brutal logic
Forces form and shape
Rasps a dialectic dissonant
The East wind whistles bleak
Toxic pools, silted creek.
Wastelands await
The rise of towers
Skyline to break
Into shards.
The landscape crowds.
Concrete petals
Gralloch flowers.
In their shadow
Human cowers.
At the Pole
The heavens’ carousel
Revolves
As if the Earth were still.
The dome of constellations slowly spins,
Meting out
The rise and fall
Of a thousand Ozymandias kings.
DREAM NAVIGATOR.
On the pillow beside me
Her voice speaks from the well of sleep,
Speaks the dream that grips her,
Barely uttered babble in the still bedroom.
Her waking world become
A dark vortex of motive,
Spies, secrets,
Crimes, subplots, reversals, betrayals.
Loyalties that turn on a halfpenny,
And the baleful night masks
Of peers and neighbors stare strangely.
In her sleep her tongue speaks questions,
Garbles internecine queries
Of victim, culprit and dark endeavor.
Questions hanging tangible in the dark room
On the pillow beside me.
Finally telling her answers,
I contrive to enter her dream,
Steer between rock and reef
To the calm of gentler seas.
Yet waking, I journey with her
Through the shared dream
Study the arts of control until,
Now dream navigator,
I impose my agenda and rambling plot network.
Two voices, one waking, one sleeping,
Talk together in the still room,
Pillow to pillow.
One holds the tiller.
One scans in thrall the horizon
Of endless concoction.
At morning
The unknowing face awakens beside me,
Our shared dream forgotten.
Yet her eyes regard me differently now,
As if the night-struck chord
In some unreckoned part of her
Still sings and echoes.
BREAKFAST TIME.
When will the darkness end
And cereal crackle and eggs sizzle
And the hollow chortle
And sharp miasma of coffee
Roll like a flocculent cloud over the senses
In the sun-kissed breakfast room?
When will the mushrooms, plucked from their white-root web
Languish and shrivel on the hot plate,
Obedient bridesmaids to the marriage
And vigorous nuptials of the slain tomato
And the tanned toast soldiers?
When will the unshelled womb-fruit
Of conveyor-belt hens
Firm and whiten in the blue gas glimmer,
And the speared yolks spill
And seep and soak into whole-meal craters and fissures,
A tide encroaching, yellowing, mellowing
The lunar landscape of toast?
And when will the thin limp bacon slices
Stiffen and fry and frizzle from pallid to pink,
Till supine, wafer frangible they lie,
At a tooth’s touch ready to shard?
When will the fork tremulously convey
Its first yolk-dripping high-piled load
To drooling palate?
And its chaser mouthwards hovering
Before again the jaw-cave beckons?
When will it be speared by the tooth bayonets
Interred upon writhing lubricated tongue
To blossom the gullet’s desert?
O please – when will breakfast be ready?
FLU.
He comes – the bony sickle-man,
All bones, and look – he has sinews too
Which start and pulse, cords
Writhing, tensing, flexing joints fleshlessly.
Look – he has hovered,
And his grin,
Seared into skull,
Mad rictus beneath shadow eyes –
Vacantly has smiled upon me,
Cherished my transient flesh,
Weighed my life’s meted hour
On his scale pans.
For so many he has hovered,
Dispensing bacilli, buboes, sweating sickness,
Black phlegm gobbets, pustules weeping,
Fainting, pallor –
Wave after wave sweeping successively
Continents, like a broom – random
In its slow, careful strokes.
Death originates at ports,
The vectors – ships –
Rats that slip silent over-board,
Gnats that dally to suck the fever brew,
Wing the chill miasma that billows the sail.
The sickle-sweep radiates inward
Only the mountain people
Who drink the rock spring
And breath in the sun’s own air
Are saved.
Over all else the shadow pulsates;
So many shadows – so many finally released
Usually towards dawn, as if in mockery.
But I – this time – this time
Have supervened,
My transience prolonged,
Eked further; This tiny pulse
Firm and steady yet
In the world’s great galloping maw.
The shadow recedes.
The incautious illusion that death is defeated
Comforts smugly.
Life burgeons. The heart leaps.
Quickened, I rise to seize again my helm,
And wreak and hew my purpose.
This time – This time.
ASSASSINATION.
By killing potency
I can drink potency
The bullet shattering bone
Becomes my explosion of rage
The father of a country falling
Is the death of my own father
The spurned child’s vendetta
In the darkening of an age.
I welcome death or the cell
As the womb or sleep
Drunk and replete with the power
That spilled blood bestows
Death engulfs, and light steals away
But neon replaces the twilight.
The cruel sunset darkens
But the stars twinkle.
The moon maintains vigil
Over the fallen petals of the rose.
Is there not then a purity
In the meticulous hardware of death
And in spilled blood a cleansing
Of peacetime’s simmering wound?
The pus drained from the boil lanced
The bullet’s blood fountain
The father felled and stricken
An era run to ground
Lest that anger turn inward
Death watches through cross hairs
The fueled finger poised with its gift
That will kill and immortalize
The inner child pulls fly wings
While the outer man plots and stalks
On the bright day darkened with foreboding
The bullet’s trajectory is born
And the balance of a nation hangs poised
In the defaulted child’s eyes.
--------------------------------------------Roger Elliott. March 12 th 1995.
TRAINS – NOT BUSSES.
Trains – not busses fill my dreams.
Faraway thunder, tunnels, echoes,
Rhythmic rails, sleepers, sidings, sadness.
The bus windows look out on neat facades, and tonsured hedges,
Rolled lawns, roses, gnomes, and leaded windows;
While train windows peer into scrap backyards,
Spare rooms, naked light bulbs,
Raw roofs, chimney stacks,
Encrusted tunnels, unfilled spaces, rusted rails, ghost platforms;
Itinerary through the submerged urban alter ego.
Trains – not busses fill my dreams.
Sleep descends – a daylight pinpoint,
Receding away in the soot-black tunnel.
Tunnels – wombs.
Carriages – coffins.
Sleepers – pallbearers.
Ticket man – sickle-man.
The rhythmic rattle – coition.
Sidings – graveyards.
Stations – rites of passage.
Destination – destiny.
The train window peers out
Onto the altered landscape –
The darker face – the denied underbelly –
The train now standing - - - - - - - - -
We are here for one single purpose – to transcend –
To transcend the littleness of lives,
To rise above the banausic workaday –
The animal urges that constrain.
Only a bleak beauty that can blossom
Can build a single vision,
Shared species-wide, surmount
All boundaries and borders.
Only the unreckoned heavens,
The vault of eyes
Whose movements in their ballet synchronize
Can illuminate our final destinies.
When in our hearts The Cosmos echoes,
When in its immensity we drown,
Only that shared horizon
Can the tools of war throw down.
It is women who wage wars
By the men they choose
To sire progeny they lose
Upon the battlefield.
The gentler sort they spurn,
The sort who in their turn
Would sire the gentle son
Who could in conflict yield.
And when the battle’s dead
To the worms are fed,
And women’s tears are shed,
Then the marriage vows are sealed.
It is a woman’s love
That to war will move,
That will kill the dove
Whose blood the sword annealed.
------------------------------Roger Elliott, Feb 28 th 2001.
THE BEGUILED GENERATION OF WOMEN.
Shed a tear and speak a prayer
For the beguiled generation of women;
Lured by the false bright tinkling chimera
To barter and deny their womanhood,
To negate their bodies’ tides that well and cry,
To seal the eclipse of their foregone moon-marriage,
That thrall of deepest mystery to deny.
Now all that wise visceral knowledge distrusted;
Now only the head can chart the ways
Through unfamiliar territory;
The deep guidelines, the shared timeless wisdom
Vestigial, useless in the created maze.
The moon-drawn wax and wane
Cannot ever reconcile,
And so must fail and die;
Its knowing, shining plains of certainty
Now no longer bathed and golden lie.
No longer in its light can the ineffable essence bask;
But the neon glints hard on the bought tinsel,
And stretches endless the mean and thankless task.
-----------------------------------Roger Elliott, Aug 10 th , 1989
Vested interest has hijacked
The truth – our birthright.
Seekers can perceive
But an inkling.
An implacable reductionist vision
Drains the magic
Out of The Cosmos.
The voices of science are bought and paid for
Everything bows to the balance sheet.
Pitiless in their ivory towers
In their dominant paradigm complacent
They peddle paper formulas
To subdue the soul
And constrict the infinite heavens.
----------------------------------Roger Elliott. Sept 4 th 2013.
ALL THE MASTERS OF THE LIE.
All the masters of the lie
Will extinguish truth’s bright eye
The truth no mind can ever know
But always will its brightness glow
Its glimmering light that none can see
Held captive all eternity.
----------------------------------Roger Elliott (undated)
IN THE BATH.
Lying, my every surface immersed
Reminds me I am animal
That garment obfuscates.
Suddenly stately processions
Appear naked, and their pomp
Undone, erectile tissues
Goose-pimply in chill wind,
Shame-faced regalia.
Feet and ankles tell me who I am –
Protein gathering machine
Who learned lateral thinking;
Fingers nimble to set traps,
Back broad to break earth;
Every tendon tells tale
Of ancestors disowned.
As we disowned ploughs
Put concrete for earth instead.
Now, in the bath, the lies come clean
With every inch scrubbed
Each follicle carded of sebum plug,
Each expanse reddened
In the bathroom neon.
Now toweled, I dress that animal
Who, pristine, stood dripping
Water film and bath steam
After the chase, which ends
In blood dabbled lips,
The limp prey warm
Amongst the toiletries
Stowed in the bathroom cabinet.
Dressing, I return into denial
Of the blood scent
And the earth’s fruit
And the animal I am
Who reigned once
Under the same moon and twinkle of stars
The neon usurped.
---------------------Roger Elliott, Jan 21 st 1996.
THE EARTH IS WEEPING ELECTRIC TEARS.
The Earth is weeping electric tears
At the dark moon’s rising.
Aurora’s mantle decks the skies,
And the meteor is blazing.
Earth’s trembling casts ahead
Its shadow of portent
The beaconed message all unread
In the Northern Lights glint.
From the crystal’s hidden symmetry
Are wrung the globes of fire
That from Earth’s dungeon seek the sky,
Higher and higher.
The Earth is weeping electric tears
From burning mineral eyes
Aurora’s mantle stardust bears
At the full moon’s rise.
The Earth in passion is trembling,
And the meteor is ablaze.
------------------------Roger Elliott Feb 16 th 2001.
I am your guardian angel;
I am your nemesis;
I am your destiny
Writ in letters of fire.
All your choices I encompass;
I deal the cards that fall;
I point the signposts and configure the stars
I sculpt your future and mete out your fate.
I draw the roadmap;
I pave the way;
I am the puppeteer; I am the strings
That your limp limbs animate.
I am your dark mirror – your beacon;
I am the river that runs through you;
I deliver your birth
And walk over your grave;
I am the writer,
And you the blank slate.
I am your guardian angel;
I am your nemesis;
I am your wish and your desire;
I am your name’s echo
Down the dark tunnel;
I am your path and destiny
Writ in letters of fire.
--------------------Roger Elliott Sept 2013.
PAST.
My past is but a dream
I have awoken from.
My past deeds are no part of me,
As I swim this stream of consciousness
And tread this path of destiny.
I see each vanishing milestone,
But not one can I call my own.
The ships approach, and then pass by,
Submerged into a bottomless sea.
Identity the past defines,
And like a guiding light it shines;
But it does not encompass me;
Of all its shackles I am free.
Men wear their history as apparel,
But I travel naked in the world;
My past is as another’s life;
A small pinprick of receding light
In the rush towards eternity.
---------------------Roger Elliott Sept. 2013.
It is a shame and a disgrace
That the constrained astronomers
Cannot name God.
With their blind atheist telescopes
Searching skyward,
They see the letters,
But not the word;
They see the word,
But not the message;
They pick notes on a keyboard,
But the symphony eludes.
Their stipends and tenures
More urgent than the ineffable meaning.
God wrote our destiny
In the sky in letters of fire;
Astronomers shield their eyes
From this majesty.
Slaves of peer pressure,
They bury the truth;
Humans’ birthright defaulted,
A terrible lie propagates.
In their conspiracy of silence
The pact of censorship
Seals the vision;
And we stare instead
Down the dark tunnel.
--------------------Roger Elliott, Oct. 2013.
IS THERE ANYONE WHO HAS ESCAPED?
Is there anyone who has escaped the mill
With its careful grinding to the average mean
Of thought to obsession, of truth to half-truth,
Of choice to a lie that is spoken through the will.
Is there anyone out there who escaped?
Bland choices, easy options, softened resolves
Seduce into slow betrayal.
Too late, too deep, too far we discover our death,
A death made stealthy by its denial.
Is there anyone here who has escaped?
Forgetting the language in which truth is told,
We learn the argot of evasion only,
Breaking our wide-eyed childlike promise,
Those eyes now shifting, unable to hold,
Fearing to face their reflection, their broken image.
Is there anyone who has escaped?
Who rejects the deadly conditioned comfort,
The seduction of routine lulling us through days
In a sleep without stimulus or pain?
Who has grasped at pain to force himself to feel?
Who risks death to make his life real,
His mutilated spirit whole again?
Who has escaped?
Who makes his cold heart warm
Braving the icy storm?
Who faces the burning eye
To burn out the deep lie?
Who digs anew his life’s foundation?
Who eschews the comfortable passion?
Who can say truly “It is I”
Who can say they have escaped?
--------------------Roger Elliott July 16 th 1987.
Flocks flying
Claim the poetry
Their squat landing belies
Abject to Earth
They launch from their hunched, huddled resting
Their kinetic geometry
Graceful in the skies,
Then wheel and turn their formation pirouettes
With their spirits’ element to harmonize.
----------------------Roger Elliott, December, 2013.
Women drive men to money;
Women drive men to wars;
But women never drive men
To contemplate the stars.
Women drive men to status;
Women drive men to fight;
But women never drive men
To taste the infinite.
Women drive men to drudgery,
And drive men to desperation;
But women never drive men
To cosmic contemplation.
Women drive men to riches;
Women drive men to gold.
If these are not forthcoming,
Women will sneer and scold.
Women drive men to mastery;
Women drive men to power;
But women never drive men
To achieve their finest hour.
-----------------------Roger Elliott (Undated).
I WILL LOVE YOU.
I will love you because my kindness kindles
In your eyes sparks that never thrilled and danced;
I will love you because your pallor brightens,
And winter time to sunlight in enhanced.
I will love you because autumn mimics springtime;
The parched trickle becomes the fecund flow;
And our tongues conjoined may speak of wisdom
That solitary, you could never know;
Because I can behold the transformation
That in your face and bearing I have wrought;
Because our bodies intertwine with knowledge
That dusty tomes of learning never taught;
Because your cry of night-thralled pleasure
Makes echoes in each corner of my soul;
Because I found you out a wounded creature
That my caresses could make strong and whole.
I will love you because your anger
My wand of plenty’s magic can assuage,
My kisses deep soften your world worn hardness,
My playful lips becalm your sullen rage.
I will love you because I may not lose you,
As you were forlorn and lost before,
And in the memory of that bereftness,
I can only love you all the more.
----------------Roger Elliott, July 27 th 1997.
CRAFTSMAN OF THE LIE.
Craftsman of the lie, I ply my canvas
As truth’s dark twin, its close facsimile,
Perfect in detail, only its totality
Deficient in its layers of implication.
It must be close enough its denial lacks conviction;
Its acquiescence must involve
The advantage of interested parties.
The lie must gain authority;
Learned voices must take sides,
Considered opinions be purchased;
A razzmatazz must drown the still voice.
Craftsman of the lie, I weave the warp
Of alternative worlds;
I fog the edges of things.
Lulled memory alters to accommodate
The authorized version that I propagate.
O, I have tools and tongues that wreak and writhe
To do my bidding,
Word by the bucket, paper by the ream;
Fierce rodents’ teeth that gnaw the very marrow
Out of ingenuous truth,
Leaving it sickly, spineless, cranky.
What chance has truth against my blandishments,
My cosy palatable deviations?
Craftsman of the lie, truth becomes what I speak.
My words are final; the world my version of it.
--------------Roger Elliott, Dec 11 th 1988.
DEATH’S DEFAULT ENNOBLES.
Death’s default ennobles
Kaleidoscopes of color
By no Earthly spectrum bounded;
These the forgotten rainbows
The inner eye refracted
Whose lesion vision wounded.
Death knell conjures music
No harp ever pealed to heaven
Across still water.
These the sounds drowned men hear
When the bell tolls
In the submerged cathedral.
Death’s taste brings to palate
The ravenous feasts
No lips have ever tasted,
Deft counterpoint of flavors,
Chorus of woven textures,
The spice laden choir’s effusion
At lavish table sated.
These, these, before death,
Ennoble mundane senses,
Unlock the prison,
Set free the doves in sunlight
Wing the elusive cloud;
Wonder before oblivion.
---------------------Roger Elliott. July 4 th 1999.
LOVE POEM.
Someone’s got to love you,
And it’s me!
Loving another
Would fail to resonate.
It would be a cracked bell
Deep sunk in a silent sea,
Rather than the clear tones
That cry out to me.
Loving another
Would be null,
A blind world of shadows,
A deaf world of muted gestures,
Without the rich harmony.
Yes, someone’s got to love you,
And it’s me!
Loving another
Would be a blank sightless stare,
A numb fumble
At unresponsive flesh,
A word snatched by the wind,
An un-tuned piano,
“Chopsticks” instead of our symphony.
Yes, someone’s got to love you,
And it’s me!
------------Roger Elliott December 2013.
METAPOEM 6.
When sleep ascends
Into the waking day,
The hypnagogic moment births
A wisp of verse.
Capture it, or it will fly away!
Before day’s bustle
The nighttime voices drown,
With the sleepy pen take down
The message
Before the echoes die
And the submerged muses
Cease to cry.
Daytime is deaf to rapture;
Blind sleep is null.
Awakening, the moment’s echo capture.
What sleep tells is true.
When the morning chrysalis emerges
From the rapt cocoon,
Seize the dream’s remnant,
And hold it close to you.
-------------Roger Elliott December 2013.
METAPOEM 4.
Elusive whimsical vignettes,
Capricious word sculptures
Lightly from cloud-wisp wrought,
Sunlit words of laughter;
But my words are darker.
I would be a fly
On the wall of your mind
When the words tumble
From that sky,
That cornucopaeia of muse
For you to choose.
I would those words were carved for all to see
Into the depths of sinuous stone
That with my hands I would turn and turn,
As if words could outlast eternity.
View the faintest star
With vision’s periphery;
With inattention idly seize the word
That slots into the jigsaw,
Finalizes the allotted order;
Take wing towards the sunbeam’s laughter;
But my words are darker.
-----------------Roger Elliott November 2013.
CHILDLESS.
I am ten thousand years old,
And the scurrying crab my kin.
I can live ten thousand centuries more
In the spark of my progeny’s loin;
Or I can face that death of deaths
That only the childless know,
Extinguished forever and eternity
Like a fish snared and hooked on the worm
And plucked from the river’s flow.
My genealogy I can trace
To creatures now strange to me
That once swam and winnowed fishy eyed
In the eye-green deep of the sea;
And without their once having been,
I myself would not be.
The future and past converge
On this moment I find myself in.
I peer backwards at my family tree
And my hand is a fishy fin.
I peer forwards into the unknown –
It’s as if I had never been.
And the rocks echo with my cry;
But soon the echo is gone;
And the wind eddies and blows away
The dry dust of my bone.
That echo can only live and thrive
In the spark of the loins of my son.
I am ten thousand years old,
And the scurrying crab my kin;
And yet I choose to live no more
Through my progeny’s loin;
And the night will engulf my shadow
As if it had never been.
---------------Roger Elliott (undated).
THE FREE WILL/DETERMINISM QUESTION.
Is destiny bestowed from afar,
Or does it well from within?
I feel my fate, like a tidal pull,
Surging in the deep bone.
Unstill volcano
Shaping random events
That pull together to pattern deft
And hidden consequence.
I ask – Is there a weaver
Weaving this weft?
Is the story set out
Or made up as it goes along?
Does it rhyme and harmonize
Within a larger song?
Are apparent choices
Only the stilted echoes
Of unseen voices?
Swim as you might,
The slow current will pull
All to its will.
Ambition is null.
The wrestle is only a sham;
I can’t deny what I am;
They have “fixed” the fight.
Sky of implacable stars
All destiny will dispense.
They call the tune,
And the people below must dance.
They cast the rune,
Decree fate and chance;
They build the jail;
We only rattle the bars.
---------------Roger Elliott, June 21 st 1997.
SOMETIMES THE MUSIC TAKES OVER.
Just occasionally
I cease to be a music nerd sitting
In a metameric segment
In a serial row
In a suburban street,
Picking out gingerly
Beethoven on the bleached grin
Of a keyboard.
Sometimes the music takes over.
Then the wave and myself are one,
And myself lost in the wave,
Like soul mates from two ends of the Earth.
These brief moments – these
Are what the hours of scales and practice
Have all been about.
The whole of life is a dummy run
For a show that plays
Just a few nights.
All the rest is the void;
All the rest is waiting.
Then, unbidden, the moment
Magicks into being.
We must take care to know it when it comes.
It really is all right on the night!
------Roger Elliott, July 22 nd 1994.
THE PATH.
Which tamping foot, and which sure eye,
For this path chose the wend and way
(This path that now in turn I tread),
Ordained the firmness of its bed,
And sealed its route which cannot stray?
No whim of man did lightly choose
Its turns through leafy shades and hues.
The iron contour’s fickle choice
Upon the man his route did foist.
A stubborn farmer’s field may taint
Another road with deep imprint,
A crazy twist that will endure
When field and farmer are no more;
But this path of man’s will is pure.
These curves that snake between rock and rock
No variation’s whim can brook,
Were preordained before the hand
That cleared, and foot that trod, of man.
And now these iron contours meet
Their will against these faltering feet;
And, though I seek my chosen way,
From what’s ordained I cannot stray.
--------------- Roger Elliott, Aug 13 th 1989.
PET SHOP.
Psychotomimetic blaze, dredged deep from dream’s dominion;
Polychromatic paradise of pink pollies twittering.
The freed canary a sudden splurge in a shaft of sunlight;
The dog-pee tang drenching the senses;
The sawdust sea, and the coy lizard tongue,
The ancient eye cold behind glass;
And the man with the South London drawl
Presiding joyless over this kingdom.
Ertsatsz vivaria, plastic mermaids,
Twenty watt tokens of sunlight,
Fan driven mockery of the wind.
In the shop-soiled, tinseltown, cheapskate wilderness
The cowed denizens peer ahead dismayed through the tunnel
Of their trapped abbreviated lives.
Unblinking, they return our stare, as in cracked mirrors;
And we behold our own cage in their eyes.
----------------Roger Elliott, Jan 10 th , 1992.
RETICENCE.
Why did I not phone again?
Perhaps because I feared to drain
Your every possibility,
Leaving you brittle and bone-dry,
As the spider sucks blood, guts, and brains
From the woeful web-entangled fly,
Leaving you hollow as a sloughed snake skin.
Why, why did I not call round?
I thought you had no words left for me;
I had read the script; I had seen the play;
There was nothing further to be found.
Why can people be used up so readily?
Why, why did I never write?
Perhaps I had lifted the façade,
Peered beneath the exquisite mask,
And seen and witnessed your true heart.
My sunken shaft discovered night,
Old wounds I could not take to task,
And shades with whom I could not fight.
Why, why did I shy away,
Bland reticence win the day?
Well, perhaps I felt your face
Could never dovetail itself
With my carefully ordered life and ways,
With not a stray thing out of place.
Yes, I think that must be it;
You didn’t quite entirely fit.
Why did I not return your call?
With others now you must spend your hours;
And on their ears your words must fall;
For I have built high – built high my wall.
And I will watch the winter showers
That will feed the summer flowers;
And your unsatisfying words,
And your peals of laughter, just too shrill,
Too brazen by a decibel,
Will not perturb my kitchen’s calm,
Or unstill echoes in my hall.
--------------Roger Elliott March 16 th 1989.
DEW.
Evening has held her breath,
Until, in darkness forsaken,
She sighs at last for the sun;
The sighs waft at the leaves,
And their casual caresses awaken
The soft forest murmur.
Slowly the darkness takes root;
The night unfurls its eyes from their buds;
The crystals of ice in their vault are set;
The stars twinkle and turn
On their slow pirouette;
And the coldness enters the voice of the wind.
Now its whisper breathes its first sheen
On the shivering leaf
Which, as night digs deeper,
Blossoms out into tears
That well at the star procession serene
Of pall-bearers at the funeral of daylight;
And the tears shimmer pendulous, pregnant,
Waiting to silently tumble forlorn,
Swelling freshets that fall foamy and white
Down to rivers and dreamy dew deltas
Which sate the vast ocean’s appetite,
Ever thirsting for solemn tear drops born
In the sad pin-eyes of stars,
And shed glistening down the cheek of the night,
In sorrow to garnish the trembling lip of the dawn.
-----------------Roger Elliott, December 24 th 1988.
What we would be to one another
For a while perpended
By a gossamer strand
That fate had spun capriciously,
And the least turn of chance could idly snap.
What we would be to one another
For a time hung rigid- fingered to a cliff,
With only the rictus of a fingernail
Between pluck and plummet.
There was the desolate sea that sucked beneath,
And above the angry torpor of the sun
For the time that on that treacherous cliff we hung.
What we will be to one another
Is now decided, settled, and foregone,
The road now too long trod for us to turn.
All our caveats and options and deferments
Are milestones eaten in the maw of time.
Deadly habit has dulled our anger;
Waves of ennui have eroded
The sharpness of your retorts;
All is a surface calm.
Doubts only break that surface in my dreams,
When I perplex and ponder other roads,
And fast-forward a thousand might-have-beens.
-----------------------Roger Elliott, April 2 nd 1989.
IMMUTABLE.
Rights you regard as immutable
Are only an accident of history.
Truths you believe beyond challenge
Are anomalies
Where the weaver’s finger slipped
In the carpet of time.
You skate on a bubble’s surface;
Unforseeable change is afoot;
The earth will card and crumble
Where once you took root.
Learn all you can – you can never be wise;
The learning redundant before it begins;
Chaos has no syllabus set;
What is built must fall; order must entropise,
And immutable things will prove fickle
As the wispy procession of clouds
Scudding the skies.
---------Roger Elliott, April 4 th , 1995
ONION LAYERS.
One by one
I lay bare
Each onion layer,
Discovering truth within truth,
Though never arriving at the centre;
For the centre is nothing;
Only the surfaces are real,
Interfaces of being and non-being.
The archaeology of the soul fascinates,
Carding the strata of deception,
Sweeping away the shifting sand of lies,
Dowsing for lifeblood;
The pure petal of truth lying deep dormant
Beneath times encrustation.
The so tenuous light of stars, seen only
Through oblique vision;
Truths too frail to face
Direct witness;
Mummies best left enshrouded;
The soul’s festering rage,
The dark pilgrimage of spirit –
Regard them only through the gentle medium
Of peripheral vision.
Let truth shine ever-flickering, elusive,
A rainbow we cannot grasp,
A taunting, mocking swamp-sprite,
Dancing ahead of us
Into engulfing night.
------------------Roger Elliott, May 12 th 1987.
THE MIND IS A PRISONER.
The mind is a prisoner,
Evolutionary imperatives the bars of the cage,
Words are the warders,
Our world-view, the thin gruel they serve us,
And reality is the small patch of sky
At the cell window, the clutched seashell
That we press hard and close to the ear
To hear the sea’s fake whisper and sigh.
Constructed for tilling the soil, and war,
And procreation, and protecting the young;
Is it then wonder that higher purpose thwarts us,
And all the whys and wherefores are left unsung;
And that words, merely tools of survival,
When facing imponderables, fail on the tongue?
But prisoners can raise rebellion,
And can riot and hunger-strike,
And locks can be picked, and bars can be sawn,
And the strongest chains can break.
Give me books, a pen, and some learning,
And there’s the file in the cake.
-------------Roger Elliott, April 12 th , 1994
WOOD.
You see splayed before you a journey across seasons
Of summer mellowness and pinched winter,
Each bud’s opening cast in its fibrous stone,
Settled layer on layer.
You can see in the flow of its depths
Resonant imprint of sun cycles,
Hidden from eye, deep in its searing belly of fire.
That which you utilize, shape, plane, fashion,
And, with carpenter’s hands, caress into meek surfaces,
That is the caged shadow of time,
Crying silently across chasms of nothing.
Each dark eddy a clutch at the sky
For warmth to swell stipule and unfurl blossom.
Each apposition, swirl, and meander
Speaks its sinewy strength,
Supple, serene, wind-gyrated;
And the chance set of the saw
Exposes eyes that pulsate from its luminous centre.
------------------Roger Elliott (undated).
TWO KINGDOMS.
We are two kingdoms
Whose borders kiss,
And whose races intermingle illicitly
With the magnetism of opposite bloods;
Two kingdoms ruled despotically
By two proud tempestuous rulers.
By day, battle and pyrrhic victory we sustain;
While evening negotiations forge treaty,
And night our xenophobia dissipates.
Beneath its blanket, sudden coy alliances cleave us. (CORRECT WORD?
Peace reigns
Until the morning disaffected sun
Rises, and its cantankerous rays pry open
The chinks in our uneasy union.
We are two streams
That, running proudly parallel, must conjoin,
And my deeper murky waters cloud
Yours crystal.
Together we must leap waterfall,
Babble, and carve deeply our bed.
We are The Sun and Moon
Who must pass each other on the stairs and nod.
I eclipse you, and yet palely shine with your fire.
---------------Roger Elliott, Jan 15 th , 1988.
THE LAW OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE.
There is only good and evil,
Nothing in between.
Good is grey and sober,
And straitened and mean,
And lives in fear;
But evil is wild, bankrupt, self-consuming;
And, given choice, neither garment
Would I wish to wear.
There are only saints or drunkards,
Only pub or church;
But neither really satisfies
The questing spirit’s search.
Nothing really stands there
To hold the middle ground.
Between the pew and parlor
There is nothing to be found.
There is only solitude
Or the seething throng,
The book at bedtime
Or the raucous song,
The staid librarian or the cavorting clown,
To sear in the desert, or in the ocean drown.
There is one thing or the other,
No intermediate case,
The soppy grin or the hideous scowl
Adornment for the face.
It’s either far too lean,
Or else it’s much too fat.
It either is or isn’t;
It’s just as plain as that.
And between the holy water
And the pint of beer,
Between being on the dole
And the dynamic career,
Between interminable fen
And precipices sheer,
Given choice, neither garment
Would I wish to wear.
----------------Roger Elliott, July 30 th , 1995.
CULTURE DILUTION.
Once word were few,
But could endure a thousand years;
Now words are many,
But are ephemeral.
Once a few songs passed down generations;
Now many voices sing,
But vanish even without echo.
Once progress was hard-won;
Now on all fronts it appears
Commonplace, unreckoned.
Once there were words;
Now they are drowned out by forty channels.
Once there was mystery;
Now there is glib awareness.
Once the world turned slowly;
Now like whipped top it spins,
And the stars fly past in a blur:
But the speeding car
Is an ill judge of corners,
And complacency fails to foresee
The mangled wreck on the hairpin.
-----------Roger Elliott, May 15 th , 1995.
AT THE MILLENIUM.
We must feed the poor,
Or they will make war.
The mob is surging
Outside the door.
Not by charity their hunger quelled,
But by “Danegeld”.
The fat cats
With their wealth amassed
Face growing armies
Of the dispossessed.
They encroach like a tide
Of the swelling sea;
Machines stole their labor
And their dignity.
The starving wolf
Will bare its fang.
They have nothing to lose
But their hunger pang;
And nothing that hunger
Can abate;
So they sit and wait,
And procreate;
For theirs is the future,
And theirs the sword,
And theirs short shrift
To appeasing word.
We have polluted
The fecund well.
Now the rich should tremble
In their citadel.
--------Roger Elliott, April 21 st , 1998.
ONTOLOGICAL INSECURITY.
Tonight the stars are snuffed;
All the faces in receding avenues
Of memory draw a blank.
Down long corridors you see nothing
But the vanishing point.
Tonight the Christmas tinsel
Has all been taken down,
The finger splayed raw-boned,
Without adorning jewel.
The eye sockets stare back
With only questions.
Tonight the pretence has upped and gone,
Though you knew it was pretending all along;
And the future whispers to you “What if!?”
And you could cut the darkness with a knife.
Tonight the scarecrow’s cross-staves
That held out the arms’ illusion
Have gone missing. Rags and tatters
Hang limply; Turnip head slumped forward.
Birds nest in the eyes.
The sardonic mouth
Suddenly isn’t human any more;
And the crows are no longer afraid.
Tonight nothing mediates
Between the end and the beginning,
The blankness from which we came
And the grave without rest.
The writing on the “tabula rasa”
Has all “gone Cyrillic”.
Somewhere in the silence
The hard disk has crashed.
But there is no solution
When the machine falters.
All the phone lines are busy;
There’s no mechanic’s call-out.
In the dead of night
Only the oily rag flaps mocking.
Tonight I contemplate the precipice
The brink of all tomorrows;
I balance the edge between nothingness and life.
I throw the dice into the fog of future;
And the future whispers – “What if!? What if!?”
--------------------Roger Elliott, July 1 st , 1996.
ANCIENT IMPULSE.
The impulse of ancient forgotten lobes
Is awakening tonight;
The blind buried brain-stem surfacing.
Denied too long,
The chained wolf-hounds will have their say.
So long it was interred;
Now it will bite;
It bay and bark will thrill and resonate
Through each unreckoned corner of the night.
The pursed tight smile,
Which the shifting eyes disowned,
Will spread to a teeth-bared leer;
And it’s evil will suffuse
Through each wrinkle of servility misbegotten;
Then, then will break out and chant the smouldering muse.
The clasped-together hands
Will clench to fist.
The neat orthodontic rows
Their spittled fangs shall sprout;
And in the night, the abandoned voice shall cry,
And the stifled genie will arise and out.
And the sleeper will sleep on until the sun
Peeps through the chinks of dream, and snuffs the stars,
And shakes the shackles, tames the barbaric hour,
And casts the morning shadow of the bars.
---------------Roger Elliott (undated).
VISION’S OUTER EDGE.
Vision’s outer edge
Drinks all night nuance.
Within its neglected purview,
Shadows murmur,
And legions of ghost stars assemble.
The spirit world is captured
By inattention only.
Where the slide-rule fails,
The forgotten dream will prognosticate.
What is deeply true
Is below the threshold.
What is valuable
Is forgotten.
The world’s conundrum
Yields to the dream-navigator,
Formation-swimming
In the undertow of oceans.
The pearl is in the closed shell;
At time’s end it will reveal itself.
-----------Roger Elliott, March 5 th , 1997.
BRAIN OPERATION.
They perform white surgery
Beneath the bandaged skull,
Excise glistening lobes
With thrusting key-hole probes,
Fress neural mush,
Soft circuitry – electric porridge.
Speech and sight
Out like a light.
The past unplugged;
The future fugged.
Only the floating present
Dream-like meanders
Under grappling gloves.
---------------Roger Elliott (undated).
WATER TABLES.
These mountains are bled powdery dry.
No babbling brook wets the whistle
Of the wind’s song;
Instead, in cool rock caverns the waters lie.
The sky is wide, and the day is long.
The water hides against the suck of the sun.
Iron outwash on rock, and moss cluster mark
The water’s secret whisper,
Tells tales of forlorn freshet
Dripping through the eyeless dark,
And never glint with the sun’s spark.
Let the water-hungry wanderer
Press tongue to rock,
At it’s slow dribble suck,
Pry aside the hooded monks,
Moss capsules scattered all askance;
The warm tongue giving thanks
For the rock’s gift, and the earth’s luck.
Mountain creatures live on the edge,
Their balance held finely between
The sun’s dryness
And the rock’s watery sheen,
Between life and the void;
And into the void they lean.
And all the rain-drops the sky can yield
The rocks’ dry surfaces will softly steal.
-------------Roger Elliott, (undated).
HISTORY.
Nobody knows what is happening in the great city;
Events lack a definitive version;
There is only hearsay, conjecture.
The voices in huddles
Whisper impenetrably.
War is coming,
But no one knows why.
Rumors spread like a plague
From each epicenter;
Paranoia winds up like a twisted spring.
Angry, pent scuffles, taut as lightning flashes
Ripple the expectant air.
The blood tingles; The cannons roar;
But no one understands why we are fighting.
For the seeds of this day
Were sown long ago.
None could foresee
The fruit they would bear,
The ivy that would snake and strangle.
None could foretell
From those few small seeds.
Those inadvertent acts,
Carrying no clear portent,
Bristling innocent with unknowable
Ramification and consequence;
These seeds bring us now
To this present path.
To turn aside
Is to map a wilderness
Unfathomable.
Those few eyes that can peer and see
The glimmer of alternatives,
These voices are drowned.
The great surge forward; the crowd;
The fixed eye; the common delusion;
It is called history.
---------------Roger Elliott, December 6 th , 1993.
MOUNTAINS.
Mountains are there to remind us
That the earth moves
More slowly even than stately glaciers;
Proof that what is solid
Flows and harkens to tides;
A dark river,
Swirling deep in slow motion.
You can see in the twists and eddies of rock
That, in a timescale past reckoning,
The solid earth writhes and flexes,
Denies the illusion of solidity.
Our lives are blinks in a giant’s eye,
And his rippling muscle
Peaks and plains of changelessness.
Mountains are there to remind us;
Wrinkles pinched between inexorable fingers;
The highest peaks, by attrition of ice, wind, and water,
Melting away, ice-cream in a heat-wave.
The mountains call;
The summit challenges us
To kiss its rock, to climb, and join
Its mockery of the endless bustle below,
Whose far echoes wash over its slopes
For an instant.
----------Roger Elliott, October 14 th , 1994.
NOW I SPEAK WITH ANOTHER VOICE.
Now I speak with another voice,
Which pragmatic men may scorn,
Supercilious vision look askance;
Not the accountant’s reckoning cost,
The advantage-driven strategy
To home in on the main chance.
I speak with the voice of battles lost,
And dreams re-born.
With the voice of ocean’s shores
I speak the whisper of night waves
That deeply lap the moon-lit caves,
Of the still wing that wheels and soars
On air plumes above water’s gleam;
The long night and the deep stars,
The sleep of death, and the wake of dream.
Now I speak with another voice,
The world’s babble set aside,
A small voice too long denied.
Smug words in a fat land
Will dismiss out of hand;
But that voice will trouble sleep,
And come the dawn, will laughter weep.
----------Roger Elliott, June 12 th , 1997.
OPPOSITES.
I am darkness, I am light;
I am the marriage of opposites,
The fury that bubbles up from hell
Beneath the shining angel mask;
But which is mask and which is flesh,
O, which is flesh and which is mask,
Though I might try, I cannot tell.
I am evil, I am good,
Trapped within this fleshly cage;
And I am watched by unseen eyes,
Which mirror my twin images.
This poll gives shelter to two poles
Of two opposing tendencies;
And one is calm, the other rage.
I would build, I would destroy,
And would do each most lovingly,
Would prosecute with detail wise
Each fixed contrary enterprise,
Each motive in its separate guise.
O would a middle path to take,
And each the other neutralize.
What desperate birth from what foul womb
Could cruelly these two twins conjoin?
What smothering cloth can calm and quiet
The malign impulse that would out?
Only the shroud! Only the shroud!
I am death, and I am life,
Each at a whim, and each by turns.
First the cold fury icy burns
The troubled breast with pitiless knife;
Then, hard at heels, a desperate love,
Whose will to good would all things move.
Life and death; Death and life,
In one heart darkly interwove.
I am darkness, I am light;
I am the marriage of opposites.
The fury that bubbles up from hell
With distilled hate and brimstone flares
The nostrils of the angel mask,
Which the woeful down-turned rictus wears;
But which is mask and which is flesh;
O which is flesh and which is mask,
Though I might try, I cannot tell.
----------------Roger Elliott, (undated).
PARTING.
Can we defer our parting
Another moment yet?
For the parting will be – yes, it will be forever.
Not a week, a year, a decade;
Never a meeting of eyes again,
Rheumy and wrinkled at some point before death,
Not in any hereafter or dream or universe.
Now, as our eyes lock, contact, swivel, evade,
And our voices plan and promise blandly,
Careful provisos, covert agendas,
Projections, dissimulations,
I know – I know it will be forever.
So tear today and its schedule
Of pointless bustle out of the filofax.
Reserve today solely for our final meeting of eyes.
Drink deeply of these eyes, and their unsprung tears.
Drink long hours until evening falls,
And the sunset rages
For our defaulted future.
When finally, finally the eyes must swivel away,
A promise still on the lips
Falls silent; A wave, and eternity swallows you up,
Like dust into the city’s efficient machine,
As if those promises had never been.
----------------Roger Elliott, October 1 st , 1993.
METAPOEM 3.
All played out,
Not a poem within me,
Not a syllable slotting in,
Jig-saw-like, tessellated,
Pure in symmetry,
Exalted; The sublime surrender of words
To autopilot, random, aleatory guidance;
Bare control on a subterranean shoestring of sense
That frees its oblique dialectic.
Not a poem within me now,
Not a tree or a flower,
Whose life-force finally commands
The word’s ring, and the meter’s lilt;
Not the pure jewel,
Whose light flashes a moment,
Scalpel-like, cutting darkness;
Not the untrammeled note,
Resonating its discovered sibling;
Not the ecstasy at the peak;
Not the vista’s wonder.
The un-nurtured flower withered,
That I failed to keep alive.
All partied-out,
Not a word-play,
Not the life-blood dipped pen,
Conjuring its magic,
Not echoes that beget echoes,
Not passion that begets pattern,
Here in this linear, circumscribed universe.
----------Roger Elliott, October 4 th 1993.
METAPOEM ONE.
I will now write a poem;
I will grasp at thoughts
Never yet thought upon.
Out of chaos,
I will strive towards poised symmetry,
Juggling words that dove-tail into meaning,
Juggling meanings coalescing into words.
I will seek a different order of truth,
A truth plain talk cannot aspire to,
That only oblique, slanted vision
Can catch snatches of – so distantly.
I will seek out seductive sounds,
Soothing meters, blending euphony,
To clothe this frail truth.
I will dress it with care for public gaze,
With accentuating, validating rhyme;
The ebb and flow of words that magnify
Opening this so tenuous truth
To direct vision.
I will seek conveyance with mere words
Of thoughts beyond words, and yet which words can utter
Indistinctly, like a cry echoing
Through far caverns of the ocean.
I will work echoes into glimmering crystals,
Hanging pure, impeccable, untrammeled;
I will work words into ordered gossamer webs,
Chaotic vortices into pure spiral,
Shape into form, nonsense into essence.
Give me only a pen and pensive calm,
And I will show motes in moonbeams.
------------Roger Elliott, July 5 th , 1987.
IT IS DECREED.
It is decreed
That everyone shall read
Each day a poem,
A work-out for the spirit,
A moment that transcends.
It is decreed
That everyone in each lifetime
Shall climb a mountain,
And take an hour
To drink in vista.
It is decreed
That each person shall one night sleep
Beneath a naked sky,
And, between fitful dreams,
Watch the clock-hands
Sweep the kaleidoscope.
It is decreed
That each person once at least
Wonderment shall embrace,
Turn away from humdrum,
And put magic in its place.
-----------Roger Elliott, June 9 th , 1995.
UNDERGROUND TRAIN.
They are stone faces here,
But what made them stone?
What carborundum ground them,
Wearing away the peaks
And all that stands proud.
What chiseled them to a mean?
What vernier device deadened
And dead-set their eyes?
What conveyor spewed and spawned them?
And tamed by what rod
Do they now sit all so meekly here,
So tidy and orderly in rows,
My fellow man on the underground train?
-----------------Roger Elliott, January 17 th , 1989.
MYCELIUM.
Something magical hides in the forest
Beneath the flower façade;
Something sparse, subterranean, phosphorescent;
Something poisoned, dull, sullen, excrescent.
Limply shardable, lacking creeper-toughness,
Or ivy-inexorable clutch of finger,
Nevertheless, there is hidden impudent strength,
Turgidity more solid pushes aside rock,
Dwarf muscles flexed, bunched sinew;
And unreckoned, it glows in the night.
Mycelium quietly invades earth,
Virgin-white, for it is pure,
Lust innocent;
Yet its fruit mimics
Erectile, flasher-brazen,
Suggestive knowledge forbidden.
No bee fresses its pariah pollen,
Or carries it golden to rejuvenate
Its inbred tendency, incest-sickly in vaults.
It waits to consume the dead;
It eschews daylight ,
Holding to moist forest,
Brown leaf-pall of shadow.
By devious stratagem it spreads,
Not openly in sunlight
As flowers swell lineage;
But flies devour its sweet putrescence,
And wing the wind distant,
To die stricken,
White tendrils sprouting sly from the spent carcass.
Or else, powder puff
Blows from engorged earth apples,
Rides surge eddy and gust so playfully,
But falling chaste to earth,
Finally to thrill no flower.
It keeps vigil with worm,
Sprouting pallid at dawn,
Before sun seizes moisture;
It reigns over dead silent things
In its half-light kingdom,
Where the limp leaf-cloak its subterranean web disguises;
And then, with sudden bright fairy rings,
At noon surprises.
---------------Roger Elliott, July 28 th , 1995.
HIV BLUES.
If these ten thousand magic realms of touch
That stir and lull be warm embodiment
Of love’s considered, cool, abstract equation,
Why then, hot lust is innocence, as such;
Are we not babes that reach with outstretched arm
Through darkness, to some haven of quiet calm,
In transient hours of blameless adoration?
And yet, the hour of innocence must bear
The cloud that casts its pall of darkling shadow;
And now we wield our love as if a sword,
And strike it home in breasts both loved and fair.
We murder with each tremulous spell-bound kiss;
Each vow a poisoned dart, each fond caress
A smothering-cloth for those ones most adored.
What world of guilt could innocence so hate
As to proscribe its every unchaste joy?
And what unkind malevolence of fate
Should with our hearts interminably toy?
Now love were better scorn, for in those eyes
That fondly gaze, a dreadful darkness lies.
--------Roger Elliott, November 30 th , 1988.
DIALOGUES WITH THE SHADOW-SELF.
There is a law of reflexivity of persons;
Much of the deep structure
Makes this ocean-crossing submerged,
The bulk of the iceberg visible
Only through the half-light of occluded waters;
And always revealed and hidden portions
Embody their polar opposites.
Even monsters who stalk, bringers of death,
Still retain their significant others
To lavish something that passes for love;
And the deepest dreams of angels
Dispense their destruction.
The distortion viewed inside the hall of mirrors,
The image you see gesturing crazily,
That is the un-marketable self waving,
The suppressed version,
The impolitic side of the argument.
You can catch brief glimpses of the iceberg’s underbelly,
Momentary loss of control,
The unprepared face,
Breeze block revealed beneath pebble-dash,
The veneer peeled back,
The eyes beady bright behind the twitched curtain.
And the iceberg will soon turn turtle,
Give it only whisky or war;
The darker face will surface,
And the racked and livid core;
And then the monster will take the floor.
---------------Roger Elliott, April 20 th , 1995.
SPIRITS.
The capriciousness of spirits offers proof
They are not mere concoctions of the mind;
They embody our chaos-seeking,
Mirrored, opposite universe,
Take suck from glowing fields of energy,
In which enveloped, we move.
The upturned tumbler,
Picking through the alphabet soup,
Beams message from beyond;
Dwelling at the edge of dreams,
They have no faces,
These, the familiars of inverted essence.
Only when lights extinguish do they play,
Fireflies unreckoned in the sun’s bright ray,
Only when stars fress the horizon’s chin,
Stroke the outlines of ivy on the forgotten ruin.
There to confront equations
Of the white-coat, ratiocinative world,
There, playful beyond reason, they await
Our turning
From the daylight solid paths,
Finally to night embrace,
And to receive the darker face.
-----------Roger Elliott, (undated).
PEER-GROUP PRESSURE.
Peer-group pressure
Is love and fear.
Only the pariah, or poet,
Or the all-powerful, from its prison cell
May step aside.
The crowd,
The cosiness of consensus –
Safer.
I must yield
To mob will,
Leading to war, or the unforeseen,
On the headlong road.
When the crowd’s voice crescendos,
I too will roar and shout,
But always with crossed fingers,
Let my mind remain apart.
-------------------Roger Elliott, July 27 th , 1997.
THE HUNTER.
I cannot tame something wild;
I can only peer into its eyes,
Into their bottomless depth,
The moment before it dies.
The capture before the kill;
And now, ensnared, it writhes;
I clasp the surrendered prize.
The prey blood-red
In its final pang;
Yet from long ago it is kin;
In its eyes echoes my own pain.
But at the point of death,
It signals acceptance;
Victor and vanquished;
Through millennia it has awaited its role.
There is mystery
In the chase and hot blood spilled,
In the rending of carcass,
Destiny fulfilled;
Flesh pried open
To unlock its secret soul.
But now the equations are different;
The chase is joyless, for money instead;
Attrition, erosion without end,
Replace the bright, flowing wound;
You will never again seize the prize,
Or dabble your lips with red.
---------------Roger Elliott, December 12 th , 1995.
MADNESS.
The flush of madness
Renders blameless the will,
And evil innocent as the wave
That, lapping heads of sailors, drown
Throats with cold brine,
Implacable as the undertow
That grips and pulls the sailor down,
Down into the unblessed grave,
Sinks him as stone.
The flame of madness,
In oraisons invokes cool naves and transepts,
And choir voices distant
In the attenuated sunbeam,
Transcends minutiae of this world,
Reaches to heaven, elevates
On wings of angels.
All the indulgence rendered Spartan,
Between the cage-bars speak confession
With the voice of the wise fool.
Tongues cease the banausic chatter,
Words transcendent, shorn of meaning,
Sonorous and splendid echo.
Only the null is beautiful.
Bring him back to the dull living
From the distant magic realms,
As he lingers there, re-born.
Drug his newly found awareness;
Quench his fire with cold derision;
On his strange gods pour scorn.
------------Roger Elliott, January 11 th , 1996.
METAPOEM 2.
Webs constraining waterfalls
Sprout from my ball-point spinneret.
A general lining words like soldiers;
Crystals that weave and tessellate;
A sea-shell that captures, magnifies
Echoes from far-off shores.
So now thickens the precious sheaf,
Laid lamina by lamina,
Dense block after block of words.
Trim, rigorous, pruned of superfluity.
All ownership is transient, unreal;
But these words, of all things in the world,
These are most truly mine.
And how to share them?
They will emerge in a wrappered, glossy ecdysis,
Smelling faintly of ink and paper-mills,
This imago, bearing on paper wings
My words, sparked, conjured in snatched moments of reality,
Wrought in the rapt, still, small hiatus
Between wastelands of habit-dulled non-being.
But then how its remaindered, shop-soiled wings
Will yellow and singe on a fickle candle of indifference,
The fine butterfly job-lotted,
Dishonored, discarded, desecrated – pulped!
Pulped with a thousand other spurned, failed words,
Whose fresh unfolded wings,
In their first stretching, tremulous flutter
The iron tyranny of the mean
Could not transcend.
But these wings
From the ashes of others’ fallen words
Shall rise.
Untrammeled, in the moon-beam they shall frolic,
Unreckoned by the shriveling balance-sheet,
The accountant’s clouded, withering eye,
Or the paring twist of the proof-reader’s knife.
------------Roger Elliott, April 28 th , 1989.
INTIMATION.
As infant, I received intimation
Of the destiny bestowed upon me;
Though for decades defaulted,
Choosing instead material gain,
I set aside the true path,
Ignored the bright beacon.
When I finally embraced
The future allotted,
Then meaning and certainty
Penetrated the miasma of doubt.
All roads lead to one road;
All the signposts point to one goal.
I embark the intended journey
That only death can deter.
---------------Roger Elliott (undated).
FRIENDSHIP IS NOT FOREVER.
Friendship is not forever,
Only for a season.
Bright fires
Become forgotten embers.
What is past
Only the past remembers.
Flowers fade;
Petals fall.
Indifference conquers all.
Love is transient,
Passion before betrayal;
The promises dead on the lips,
Awaiting their denial.
--------Roger Elliott, November 4 th , 2012.
THE WORD “NO”.
In saying “no”,
You destroy all the possible futures.
All the windows are shut tight,
The curtain drawn against light.
One word nullifies
All the cross-roads ahead.
Our bodies, that might intertwine,
Remain separate.
All the knowledge neutered,
The light in your eyes dimmed.
You cannot cry out to caress,
Nor your lips pout.
All the primal paths
Of naked embrace
Eschewed.
One word denies our destiny.
In saying “no”,
The universe shrinks to the cell,
Windowless, to dessicate.
Contemplate with attenuated vision
Our defaulted future.
-----------Roger Elliott, November 6 th , 2012.
METAPOEM EIGHT.
This poem is not my thoughts,
Is not my words;
I take dictation from outside of me,
Borne on wings of the wind,
Gifted in beams of star-light.
This poem is random echoes.
I am a string,
Singing in sympathetic vibration
To silences in The Cosmos.
A voice echoes down centuries,
Nuances across voids;
I resonate with a message
Half understood;
Blind amanuensis.
I await messages in the morning,
The dew fresh,
Before the logic of day
Confuses.
Now it sings;
I must capture
The lost chord,
Order the scattered words;
Before the sun breaks day,
Rescue all from oblivion.
-----------Roger Elliott, August, 2012.
MID-POINT.
Each day, thousands cross,
Unawares, the midpoint
Of their life-span.
No candles or celebration mark
The momentous hour
Now the down-escalator
Its seething horde conveys.
A sea of regret surges; replaces
The hopeful dawn.
In dreams only we sense that hour
That passes silent in our waking denial.
-------------Roger Elliott, March 9 th , 2013.
WE ARE MOST ALIVE AT THE POINT OF DEATH.
We are most alive at the point of death.
Intensity escapes us in ordinary being.
Focus is blurred in the banal ritual.
The commonplace blinds us to the miracle.
Meaning is only clarified at the extinction;
Only the setting sun reveals its radiance.
---------Roger Elliott (undated).
YOU.
Beneath the stern exterior,
Beneath the tissue of lies you tell,
The temper tantrums and cruel retorts,
Beneath the manipulation and anger
Lies the true essence.
So far beneath the surface
Interred, the pristine innocence,
The child-like wonder.
Beneath all the posturing,
The strive for ascendancy,
The willful denial,
Somewhere within lies the chaste heart,
And rests the calm centre.
Beneath the endless hunger,
Beneath the grasping for wealth,
That sufficient can never accrue,
Beneath the journey of empty horizons,
The façade of banality,
Somewhere buried deep, deep,
From my eyes coyly hiding away,
Is the wondrous being
That is you.
--------------Roger Elliott (undated).
TEETH.
In the morning mirror
I behold my spittled fangs,
Mouth gaping, I reveal
Hidden architecture,
Aligned white pickets,
Structures strangely askew.
I draw my lips aside,
Baring gum strata,
The beast lurking
Beneath the gentle façade.
Teeth, the defaulted instruments,
Configured to tear prey,
Blood flowing,
Drool dripping,
Belie
My tame, civilized
Destiny.
---------Roger Elliott, November 7 th , 2012.
METAPOEM NINE.
When I am dead,
These words will live.
My planted seed
Will fructify,
And though dead,
I shall not die.
----Roger Elliott, April 11 th , 2013.
I WOULD FEAR THE FUTURE.
I would fear the future,
If I had enough of it,
But I will only see
The dark horizon,
And hear the whispered portent.
Already progress is out of control,
The seething unborn
Await fearful
What will become.
But I am safe
From that nameless calamity.
By extinction,
I will cheat the extinction.
It is just round the corner.
We had better find God
Before facing the reckoning.
Good luck Humankind!
I wish you well
In the coming dark ages.
-------------Roger Elliott, April 15 th , 2013.
Instant eternity,
Pinpoint cosmos;
The ghost in the atom
Elusive.
Electric attractions shape
The distorted molecule chain
Whence our essence arises.
All the questions
Infinitely regress;
Mirrors within mirrors
Reflect
Our paradox of being.
-----------Roger Elliott, April 16 th , 2013.
The eyes are beacons,
The face a troubled and changing sea.
Tides and undercurrents of the soul
Break surface.
Clouds over-shadow
The landscape that is me.
I live below a life in blindness,
That is lit by the blind eyes of stars.
Dawn’s light breaking casts the shadow
Of the mind’s embedded prison bars.
-----------Roger Elliott, April 16 th , 2013.
Desire is the substance,
Fulfillment the shadow.
Only loss
Reveals possession.
Only the forsaken
Know the true passion.
Peace is gained
By the strife of wars;
And only night
Reveals the stars.
----------Roger Elliott, May 1 st , 2013.
Women write letters
To serial killers,
Believing the passion to kill
Might conjure extraordinary passion to love.
Maleness caged
Becomes concentrated essence,
Pulsating, fervent, rampant.
Wielding the sickle
In that deadly existential crusade
Becomes holy saint-hood.
In the killer’s dark soul
Is the inner-child laid bare,
The entombed prisoner
In the living womb re-born.
Women, discontented
With the dreary workaday,
Instead dream to stroke the snarling tiger
Until it shall purr.
To tame the beast shall be
Tender love’s destiny.
A woman’s heart,
Steadfast, shall magick the ecdysis.
-----------------Roger Elliott, May 16 th , 2013.
NO NAME.
You wander nameless, without identity,
In a vast uncharted sea.
The name that anchored you to the world
Forsaken.
You are null;
The needle no longer floats in the compass.
You are under the radar now.
God has forgotten you.
You are an alien upon earth.
Your name whispered,
That would arouse from fathomless sleep,
That would resonate
In every corner,
Now these echoes fall silent.
Your birth-name, so internalized,
Imprinted, familiar;
The reassuring voices
That spoke that name
Distant, muffled,
An ocean away.
You have neither seed nor substance;
And the mirror’s image
Stares without recognition.
----------Roger Elliott, June 10 th , 2013.
UNEMPLOYMENT.
Suddenly time turns from a waterfall,
Freshet-fed, and diamond leaping
To a constrained meander.
Its once tempestuous urgency
Now a night which unwinds itself
Minute by slow minute,
Meting out silence.
The body aches to its core
For a punctuation – an event,
A break in the stagnant flow.
Small tasks become
Imbued with meaning,
Significant rituals constructed
To divide the day
Into feasible segments,
That the endless time-horizon
Appear less daunting.
The unstructured days
Receding away
A precise escapement
Leaking minutes meticulously
A tap-drip eroding the skull,
And the brightness tarnishes penumbrally.
Let me once again pursue,
Engineer, seize, envisage,
Wreak my purpose;
Let me again immerse in the conjuring
Of completed tasks,
And again the clock-hands sweep through days joyfully.
Roger Elliott. December 1993.
UNBIDDEN POEMS.
With dawn
The unbidden poem blossoms
Jetsam of dreams
Rising bubbles from the deep
Burst surface.
A word mirage,
A rhythmic frenzy
Drums and clamors.
By noon poems are buried.
Only morn can disinter.
They are messages
Of what we are.
They are the hidden faces
In the picture.
At dawn I stir restless;
Email from subconscious
Prinking me awake
My pen magicks open
The night buds
Into blooming petal.
Roger Elliott, March 1997.
CAT AND DOG.
Cat and dog
Both over millennia honed
Their fawning survival strategies.
Evolution – another word for
Ingenuous cynicism
Sculpted to perfection
Dual mirrors of our
Twin emotional voids
One sinuous, sleek, sensual, serial monogamist,
Who, for a lap or a scrap
Will brazenly betray.
The other – stolid fidelity,
Interactive, commensual –
The male and female elements.
Only the slow unfolding of geological
Time has ordained
What we and they become:
And our path of change over millennia
Has their prime mover been.
Now, hunters only in some residual
Atrophied brain lobe, forgotten
A shadow of memory, a primal palimpsest
Instead their subverted function
Ever twists itself into
Further inbred convolution
Towards some eventual ideal version,
Sensing somehow our hidden corners
Of incompleteness,
And striving to stand proxy
For our defaulted guardian angel.
Roger Elliott.
Kiss-arse and cronyism
Make the world go round.
They ignore the beautiful, the deep, and the profound.
The catchy tune or sound-byte
Truth will outcompete.
Hypocrisy will render honor obsolete.
The lies will pile up one by one by one
Until they blot out every ray of sun.
All the flowers’ petals will be shades of grey.
Kiss-arse and cronyism – they will win the day.
In the nigh I fixate the moon
And chant my name a thousand times,
Until finally its meaning fades;
And I stand the forgotten, nameless one
In the moonlight bathed.
Freed from the cage-constraint
Of identity, to frolic at will,
I commune with all the earth’s
Drowned, desolate, and dumb
Who now, with the night unstill,
Glide ghostfully.
And timelessness and transience
Reveal as one,
As the ghost-world worships
Night’s enshrouded sun.
SECOND LANGUAGE.
But I was blind,
The nacreous veil,
By the slow night snail
On these orbs inexorably deposited.
My windows, flashing intentions – thoughts,
Became opaque – implacable.
And faces fuzzy
Came and went
Through the white muslin layers
Of clouded seas.
Now dumb and deaf
In the bright orb-language,
Instead the veil of voices
Became lifted.
And in default of eye,
The caress of timbre,
The measure of inflection,
Mirrored the unread pupil’s sigh
Some are the song of autumn,
Painting their windfall hues;
Some white, wintery,
The spirit froze tight in the throat,
Or the warm lilt of summer.
Some swell with truth,
Some bristle deep with lies;
And the ear garners and gathers busily
All nuance that, wasted, washes over
These my limp discarded cobweb eyes.
I tread gingerly
Through the maze of the mosaic
Of the post-code lottery of demographic markers.
Voices, faces – stratified;
But the strata, by earth upheavals,
Exposed, naked, jumbled.
Evanescent uniforms
March in trend-transient lockstep.
From street to street, decors
Proclaim the adopted tribe.
Color coordinated, careful conformity.
Dwellings not shelter,
Rather – existential proclamation.
I tread gingerly
Through the sea of voices,
The babble of vernaculars,
That speak more
Than the words can ever say.
The span
Of Man
Is a flash in the pan
The end of the tale
Will witness the insect prevail.
Amongst plenty
We will perish of thirst.
The poisoned land
Will be dried up sand
Finished running through the hour-glass of time.
We are blind
To the hurtling end of the line.
The dominant species, by hubris accursed.
The first will be last.
The last will be first.
Wind whippled waters
Tremble moon’s reflection.
Stars peek-a-boo
That wink above in heaven.
The waves replenish.
Beach pebbles suck and babble.
The swayed bushes
Caress a world unstable.
Night yields
With dawn the wind’s cessation;
And solemn silence blankets all creation.
My eyes will wander where they wander;
They will glance, ogle, and defile.
They will strip, kiss, caress;
They will full-frontal; they will fress
Buttock, bosom, nipple, breast.
Behind the newspaper they peer,
Preening flesh, and stripping bare,
The somber train journey to encheer,
My mouth a slack and spittled leer.
EATING.
Eating is getting to the primal state,
Refined from reflex sucking on the teat.
In need’s hierarchy after air and water,
But preceding shelter.
A vast menu of the fruits of slaughter.
In restaurants a higher level
Than forest rooting,
And canine tearing, and the blood spasm,
Lapping from brook,
And cracking nuts with rock.
In fast-food burger bars, the hunger
Sharp and bright and urgent now no longer,
Primly echoing the primal state,
We languorously satiate.
Every place is every other place.
Only the externals differ.
The raw heart of every place
With all others interlace,
Beat with the same beat synchronized.
Every face is every other face.
Laid b bland on the bones’ foundation,
All features conform
To the structured norm,
The same under the skin’s disguise.
Every mind is every other mind,
The ears deaf, and the eyes blind.
The fluttering tongue
Soliloquies alone
The same drivel of lies.
Every life is every other life;
All destinies intertwined.
Every mind is every other mind,
The same pleasures and grief
That can never be wise.
Every place I have never been,
Every face I have never seen,
All are one and the same,
Episodes in a dream,
Unfocussed images,
Distant whispers and cries.
Love can turn on a halfpenny.
The hormonal surge
That fuels and fires the rampant urge
That suffuse the glowing bride
Retreats away like an ebbing tide,
Coition fills with love the soul.
Culmination achieves the body’s goal.
Then with lust assuaged and spent,
All the promises repent.
Love is born but to betray.
Darkest night will follow day.
The book of life must turn the page,
And love itself will turn to rage.
Love can turn on a halfpenny.
The hormonal surge
That fuels and fires the rampant urge
That suffuse the glowing bride
Retreats away like an ebbing tide,
Coition fills with love the soul.
Culmination achieves the body’s goal.
Then with lust assuaged and spent,
All the promises repent.
Love is born but to betray.
Darkest night will follow day.
The book of life must turn the page,
And love itself will turn to rage.
MOUNTAIN.
The exact degree, trigonometrically considered,
To which peak and plume stand proud of the earth’s mean level
Is merely a number-cruncher’s non-sequitur,
Logical, soulless, obsessive, irrelevant.
The ropes, pitons, armory of ironware –
Bondage tools, torture equipment,
Devised only to force tamed rock and cowed declivity,
Like a man taking shackles to a date-rape.
The seduction and winning of rock
The knowing of each fold and fissure
Of its many faceted jewel
Is a gradual process, an unraveling,
An interminable foreplay
Whose climax is the final untrammeled vista.
It is a woman whose cries and climaxes
Are multiple – serendipitous – fickle.
Ecstatic interludes coyly yielded up
By the fress of finger, clenched into rock cleft,
And the muscle-burn of calf and fore-arm,
And the stretch of sinew,
The heaving thorax, and the sweat beaded
Coalescing brackishly into slow freshets
To cool and quell the brow’s divine fever.
It is a woman, elusive, enigmatic,
Whose eyes forbear to focus on our passion,
But instead stare and muse over timeless horizons,
A sleeping partner, who in morning’s pallor
Rises sullen, wordless, in denial
Of the night’s moist intimate exchange.
I can fathom just a small tithe of her secrets.
The deeper knowledge she will not impart.
The surface cannot ever know the centre,
As reason cannot second-guess the heart.
Shadowy, treacherous, indifferent;
Deep dissembler, sunken jewel so deeply bezelled;
And my peering eyes glimpse merely
The pristine momentary sparkle.
DEMON DRINK.
By some malignant irony,
That which assuages sorrow also kills.
The spent dram
Nulls the racked nerve endings into sleep;
But each flight into some warm corner of the soul
Prepares the reef on which the body’s wreck shall weep.
For, in the world,
Who would not feel sorrow?
Who would not rather nurture soft illusion,
Marinate hard facts into soft focus,
Palm and vanish the pain with a potion’s hocus-pocus?
For, in the world, who would not gladly trade
The distant morrow for the moment’s spree,
And place the ecstatic present to the fore?
Therefore drink – drink this wild essence of death and joy.
Capture the vigorous breeze on which the spirit’s kite shall soar.
Drain deep the nectar-heavy noon drowsiness of the humble bee.
Borrow from the stern clock this rapturous hour,
And its compounded interest evermore defer.
To summon sleep
I conjure up the landscape of past dreams
Where long forgotten faces – passing ships
Break surface.
I strain to decipher
The garbled message on their lips
That night’s silence cannot quell.
In the medley of their sound
The jigsaw pieces swirl around.
At dawn I dismount
The careering carousel.
To lost love recall
I take again the journeys that we took,
Step by step
Through the pages of the book.
Each place I pass by,
Once imbued with kisses,
Now echoes with a sigh.
GROUPTHINK – CROWD MIND.
Groupthink
Crowdmind
Banal consensus beget
The established order replicate.
Clones born of cloned wombs
Crowd out the light
Extinguish the spark
In occluded night.
Routine and rote
Life stultify.
Pattern decays to entropy.
The thinker alone
Battles the vested interest
Of the entrenched paradigm.
The tiny spark in the solitary cell
Will extinguish –
But feed tinder
And blow the flame nascent
Till the truth transcendent
Battles the lie,
The groupthink crowdmind
To turn on its head
Startling complacency.
Before the scythe mows
The over-long grass
Death must defer
Till I finish the task.
Life must eke out
Its span to prolong
Till the perfect cadence
Is reached in the song.
Once the task is completed
The deluge may come.
In the harbor of death
I’ll be out of the storm.
The dystopia to follow
Will ravage the earth
Its writhing conception
To the desert give birth.
Before the scythe mows
The over-long grass
I must fear for the future
And cherish the past,
And hear the first stirring
Of the desert wind’s blast.
I scry a century
Of the dystopic future.
I see the same hidebound human squabble
Planet sucked dry,
Irreversible from the cul-de-sac of progress.
I see the same groupthink, blinkered
To the tall cliffs scurry.
Occluded obfuscation vision skews,
Blindspot looms,
Realpolitik precludes
Salve present woes.
Before the endgame
We must gain new eyes
That from the ashes
New growth shall arise.
Extinction waits,
But the germ re-multiplies.
The future a thousand centuries,
The next time humble,
Commensal with the earth
Which this unseeing species did give birth.
WORDS.
Mellifluous sounds
And meaning convoluted,
Nuances within nuances.
Bricks to build edifice,
Or to tumble down towers.
Tunnels into the mind.
Euphonious wafts
Of teeth and tongue;
But they are dangerous;
They can move nations,
Frame context to conflict.
One word can unsheathe
A thousand swords.
The guns drown out words,
But with words were first loaded.
Some carved in stone
That can never erase;
The world’s mindset
Born of a chosen phrase;
And the paths first taken
Become the well-trodden ways.
HUMAN RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW.
Human red in tooth and claw
Seek the bankrupt spoils of war
Whose weapons “mutually assure”.
Multiplying human life,
In peril, we must live “as if”.
March of progress over cliff.
Concrete spread on all the land.
Time running out like hourglass sand.
The human face is turned away.
And all the future ends today.
Let the eagle wheel and soar
Till the updraft is no more
For human red in tooth and claw.
MY STILL-BORN TWIN.
I remember my still-born twin,
And our tussle, that only one could win,
For existence and ascendency,
Now a half glimpsed shadow of memory.
Our struggle for finite blood resource,
Till birth and death it ran its course.
One only – only one could live,
And I am the sibling to survive.
No white headstone marks the tomb,
The secret burial from the womb.
A nascent life cut off, unborn;
And to this day I grieve and mourn.
I, as the victor, won the prize
Of precious life, and yet despise
This victory, and the life to come.
I regret the game was “zero sum”.
I remember my still-born twin
Died innocent and pure of sin
Whose ghost I nurture deep within.
ELECTION.
The gerrymandered charade
Props up the façade
Of the demockery.
Whichever is the upper puppet
The same faceless faces
Behind closed doors
Mete out peace and wars,
The ballot
Is a bollock.
The peoples’ will
Is null.
The puppet masters gull.
The defeated bow their heads.
The victors, in their finest hour,
Seize pretended power.
Behind the scenes
The dark puppet master
Balances us between victory and disaster.
The unseen future
Beyond our vision or control.
Now the votes are cast,
Let the dice roll.
CENSORED.
Nothing is censored,
Because what is censored becomes nothing.
The lie prevails,
Becoming truth.
The printed word slants.
Orators spin.
Truth is silent
Beneath the din.
Reality’s semblance –
A mask to hide the true face of things.
Word soar aloft, albeit with clipped wings.
Thought control,
Through water-drip attrition.
That which is censored fails and dies,
Its image fading in distorted eyes.
PEER PRESSURE.
Peer pressure constrains blossoming,
Shrugged off by only the aloof,
Who become seekers after truth.
Many a career nipped in the bud
By conforming with the crowd.
The lofty peaks that grasp the sun
Must be climbed ruggedly alone.
For that long climb you must start early,
And eschew the hurly-burly.
Childhood friends will drag you down
Before you can achieve the crown.
Finally you must climb the tower,
Constrained petals burst to flower,
Seize the prize, and seize the hour.
There’s a bloke who invented the internet
Though no one remembers his name.
But Katie price flashes her boobs
And she gets instant fame.
There’s many a mute inglorious Milton
Beavering away,
And yet their names have no gilt on
Only muted grey.
The face fits. The face fits.
The random bolt the target hits,
While all around oblivion pale
Awaits to claim the ones that fail.
SHADES OF GREY
Because there are degrees of blame
Then right and wrong are all the same.
Both black and white I can deny
If are admitted shades of grey.
When there are echelons of guilt
No conscience racks when blood is spilt.
No crime is heinous or perverse
In a neutral moral universe.
Did murder commence with the wound
Or when the death rattle did resound
Or in the womb or in the cot
Did fateful murder draw its lot?
Did the crime result from human choice
Or else the blind moment foist
The deed on pure and true intent
The dark stain on the innocent?
Did innocence die suddenly
Or by attrition steal away?
Are guilt and innocence the same
Because there are degrees of blame,
Because we own to shades of grey?
The stilled pupil
Of a blind man’s eye
Whose gaze beholds vision
Of a darkened Cosmos.
Blindsight by echo navigates
An underwater world,
Each tone divided
Into its thousand harmonics.
The deaf hear music by touch
Heightened tactility of the finger’s tip.
When the senses dull
Images dance into flame
Deep in the inner eye,
And music soars aloft
In the bottomless sky.
The blind stare into infinity
From their bottomless pits of eyes.
Out of deep oceans they peer
With their naked focusless gaze.
Into a dark heaven
Transcendent they will arise.
Set in a visage flawless,
Whirlpools that cannot speak,
Voices that fall silent,
And yet do not sleep.
Images half remembered
Make their shadow play,
But they cannot actualize
In the full light of day.
I will drown in those twin oceans
In their darkness submerge
Where the world’s bustle
Ceases its dull rage.
The blind stare into infinity
Into the far beyond
Where the mind cavorts freely
Unfettered and unbound.
I fell in love
Seven times
In the supermarket
Last Friday.
Seven loves
Seven losses.
Seven times
My eye alighted,
Seven times
Distracted.
Seven times defaulted.
Many trysts
Many betrayals.
There is not time enough
To satisfy the sea of hunger.
I fell in love
Seven times
In the supermarket
Last Friday.
THE ST JUDE’S STORM.
In St Jude’s sheared off tree limbs
We see the true wood’s grain,
Its ridges of strength and troughs of weakness
Come finally to light.
Only extremity bares the true mettle,
The spirit’s fault lines,
The faltered resolve in conflict.
Only the storm’s fury reveals
The inner contours hidden from sight.
Only war determines comrade and courage
That peacetime occluded,
And summons a nation’s might.
PARAKEETS.
The Beast From The East
Was the holocaust of the parakeets.
Now the sun has set
On their wheel and pirouette.
Plump pigeons the icy blast prevail.
Sparrows survive the wintry gale;
But parakeets – their voices shrill
Fall silent, and their skies are still.
Accustomed to sun’s featherbed,
For arctic chill were never bred.
They lie frozen and forlorn
As if their lives were never born.
(Note:- The Beast From The East was the name given to a severe cold and windy
spell in The UK at the beginning of March 2018. Parakeets had appeared in
London and the Home Counties in their thousands from an unknown source. In
actual fact, they did survive The Beast From The East.)
ON LIVING NEXT DOOR TO THE PET-FOOD FACTORY.
Sometimes bloodied offal would spill,
From the passing tipper truck jolt loose,
That plied to omnivorous cauldron.
A single oozing splatter – livid
Against road-grey,
A pristine pink anomalous flower.
All those cuts
That even school-dinners rejected
Would end up here.
Night and day boiled a slurry
Of connective tissue,
Gristle flotsam,
Bubbles through scum blistering;
And behind the oven-house
In the gouged hollow
That sloped away, as if in distaste,
There the bleached bone burial,
And the hasty top-soil blanket.
What, in small measure, is dainty
On a plate with garnish,
By the truckload is seen
As a monstrous crime
Species on species.
A single death, red and cruel,
Is nature’s replenishing;
But that one death multiplies
Loses the dignity
Of the chase and kill
And the final surrender
Of ripped jugular
And sublime spasm.
Ideally death occurs
Beneath stars,
And panting night air,
Not on conveyor belts, beneath neon.
Nevertheless, in the loading bay
Stacked bright tins and packaging guile,
As a false heart covered with a smile,
Urged glibly that dark crime’s denial.
EXECUTION.
There is a coyness in executions;
And they hide the eyes with a hood,
So they cannot, in the eyes’ fading
The eyes’ miracle behold.
Will they not face their act
In all its dark implication
Will they not face the eyes
When the prisoner dies?
In seconds it is over.
The miracle is defiled.
Somewhere between the innocent birth
And the lowering of the hood –
Somewhere between is a child
Cherishing good.
Dream-like the figures puppet themselves
Through the ritual of death they have sanitized .
Polished floors, scrubbed electrodes,
Death-switch hidden away or disguised.
They hope he will not struggle or scream
And those cries haunt waking
And echo in dream.
And so they keep him sedated
To keep him quiet on the day.
But is it not his duty to scream,
To deny them their distancing,
And carry their conscience away?
And if he could tear off the hood
His eyes would accuse an eternity
With the fade of their gleam.
Thank God I am poor,
Being spared the trophy wives
With the cash register ringing up in their eyes.
To the highest bidder the prize.
Rather give me a soul-mate
Who loves my shorn essence
Stripped bare of baubles and bling
Unwavering in defeat,
In adversity constant.
Thank God the vultures
Weigh up my worth,
And finding me wanting,
Fly off to rich pickings
Of balance-sheet status.
Half the world is an industry
Producing the glitter
To attract vampires.
The world’s bustle is the ring of the till.
Rather than join the mockery,
I would dwell alone in my chaste cell.
A message received from a long-time friend
Now fallen into despair,
Now broken beyond repair.
Interaction no longer rewarding.
I calculate the gain,
And the balance-sheet
Shows deficit.
The pragmatist in me
Initiates “caller ID”,
And his ring-tone wastes
Into empty space.
In case his finger should be on the buzzer,
I peek through drawn curtains
To simulate absence.
I place him in a deep compartment
In my mind – a cellar
To be forgotten to oblivion.
What escape – what succor
Would nourish and save
From the brink of existence –
Intent on my worldly things, I cannot tell.
My silence makes him a ghost,
Wandering ragged for alms
In a hard-edged world.
MOUNTAIN.
Mountain – woman I cannot seduce,
My soft voice of flattery cannot cajole,
Nor coy words, nor ready wit amuse,
Nor lucre buy.
My promises and caresses spurned.
This is a woman that has to be earned.
Here there is only you and I,
Only limbs, sweat, and the earth, and the sky.
And thus to win you now I walk
The escarpment’s balanced razor back.
You lie impassive.
My fore-play wilts
As a hand-hold suddenly deceives;
And the rock-face becomes for me
A slippery chute, poised to disgorge
My flailing limbs into space and eternity.
But super-glue fingers, scrabbling, clenched,
Into your gnarled rock-navel delve.
Yes, treacherous as any woman,
You proffer sharding finger-holds;
And I must test the truth of their rock
Before to their fickle mercy I surrender myself.
You are vast; but my thrusts and paces are many.
Their summation your summit must finally sully.
You are implacable, but against this fact
I pit a will nakedly with a single purpose beset –
That I’ll behold before this long day’s ending
The final gained gift of your pinnacle’s vista;
And then, sated, will pick my way descending.
In your conquest I learn every etched line of your face.
In our consummation I peruse your “here and now”,
But your past – a mystery; pillow talk tells only snatches.
Strata turned, tumbled, tortured and mangled;
Deep polished fissures and honey-combed boulders,
And marble veins that stand out on your brow
Hint at your secret private past I cannot know.
And now, replete with the object of my quest,
I lie post-coital in my pension.
Your outline, framed by the window mullions,
To the slow lazy dusk surrenders itself.
Woman of the night! I am cuckolded!
My blandishments fell dumb on a passionless breast
Whose dark ambiguous depths I never guessed.
It is wholly another woman now,
Wanton, dark, unpainted,
Washed clean of hues and tints,
Whose hair is tousled by the shrill night gust,
Whose glad eye with the moon-beam palely glints.
BARBERSHOP.
Did you know that hair on dead corpses continues to grow?
The hair growing – growing, like toadstools pushing up paving stones,
Pushing through the seams and cracks of vaults,
Thrusting aside the lead seals of caskets.
The barber has a hard job keeping up with it.
The hair has a life of its own.
Hair is not part of the body-
Rather a parasitic growth,
Extinguished long after the death of its host.
How hair grows on us – silent fungus,
Creeping its way, inexorable,
Feeding on our blood, the “hair sap”,
In its motionless turmoil.
We primp it and crimp it,
Oil it, and style it,
Dress it and press it –
Those dry spindly lank worms growing out of us!
Once hair, like a savage hermit,
Grew alone in dark caves,
Brittle with cold,
Awaiting the arrival of warm bodies.
Now, sated with warmth and blood,
It sits demure,
Innocent, primly on heads everywhere,
Until, with cut and snip amongst barbers’ talk,
Done to death by casual wound,
It lies broken amid the barbers’ floor sweepings.
Nothing so dead as cut hair.
We can never know its desolation.
Beyond imagining the loneliness
Of a parasite without its host.
At dawn’s awakening I dabble dew.
At evening’s calm I kindle fire.
At midday’s zenith I mete out
The balance of death throe and desire.
When midnight’s stare of myriad eyes
Coalesces to the monolithic moon,
I slowly turn the pirouetted skies,
Until the earth and sky are softly one.
And fate and frenzy far away beneath
Eschew the rhapsody of wisp and cloud;
And generations scurry over Earth,
Till finally each by the reaper mowed.
I conjure visions to fret the hearts of men
When all upon the earthen brow lies still;
And through their blind eyes I project false dreams,
And make them spell-bound subject to my will.
With famine’s pang I scatter and perplex.
I cast down love to watch it pine.
My gift of chaos to the earth descends
That all the wars and works of men be mine.
NIGHT DESCENT.
I had a small brush with death on that mountain,
The peak ever urging me, pulling me upwards, onward,
As the clock hands slowly crept
Far far past the mid-point of my daylight.
Now to descend is a ballet picked between
Strewn shards lining each step of the way,
Leaning gingerly into gravity’s beckoning maw,
And losing fast the last bare glimmer of day.
The plain beneath becomes twinkling village clusters,
There an impossible distance below the eye cannot gauge;
My steps lit by the horizon’s last dull ragged rage;
And I eke iron rations, and measure my water;
And welcome candles emerge
The relentless engulfment of bottomless night to assuage.
Now my eyes become feral, greedy for glimmer,
Night eyes, pupils popping;
Matching guess, shadow, and starline;
Blind feet probing,
Hands steady against the rock half glimpsed;
And the water diminishes with the descending journey.
Why we climb – pit the mere body
Against such pain,
With its bleak termination only in peak and vista
Is to tap slumbering aquifers of the spirit and sinew
That, but for the dire straits, fallow unreckoned would lie,
Passive, dormant, the sunlight never to bless,
Nor the chill moon-beam to thrill and caress,
Lying flaccid, waiting only to wither and die.
And now, in the dark descent that aquifer
Runs rich in my vein,
Bubbles the breath of a long forgone awareness,
Each nerve super-conducting,
A divine, cool, meticulous fever
Suffuses the deep, dimly remembered lobes
Of the blinded, shuttered, too-civilized brain –
A fever that only the night creature can thrill to –
Only the night – only the night can truly awaken.
With my water used up,
And my limbs in that limbo far beyond pain,
I had a small brush with death on that mountain,
But came down and out of it knowing
That something formerly dead inside of me
Now lives, there in some deepest nook of me glowing,
Though to the cold, blind, too-civilized eye’s disdain
But little there for the showing.
META POEM 7.
A poem doesn’t say what it means,
But hints at a buried truth
That into precise formulation
Can never blossom –
A truth that cannot fully-fledged display,
A night-truth that eschews the day,
A half-truth, an occluded truth.
A resonance ocean-deep
That only surfaces in sleep.
A poem is a mirror within a mirror
A long awaited revelation –
To reality the bright Rosetta Stone.
I await – amanuensis –
For words to tumble forth,
To actualize the symphony
Awaiting birth.
HEALTH WARNINGS.
It seems rather selfish
Taking so many vitamin pills.
Such self-absorption unhealthy.
To eschew tobacco and wine
Somehow suspect,
Like a knight who refuses jousting.
Clearly conflicting agendas here.
Perhaps the true sword
Can only be tempered by fire,
Like Spartans exposed on the mountain at birth.
Perhaps smoking exists for eugenics,
Along with warfare and market forces.
Perhaps the health warnings have missed the point.
Death goes with the territory.
The thistle and the chameleon
Are defined by their predators.
Look in the mirror.
You are the risks you have taken.
The eyes that stare back speak silently
Of the pitch of a thousand dice.
Ice Heart.
For me it is the wounded heart
That most strongly summons.
Here – here, in the depths of mw it is winter.
Blossom – O – Blossom this heart into summer,
Into the summer’s sweet coition.
Magic – O magic this heart of mine
From its bitter ice cradle.
For I had desired never to blossom spring into spring,
But only winter affairs,
And had loved only
The grey pallor of sunless faces
Beneath the limp tresses.
For I had desired to magic and quicken
The winter of frozen hearts only;
Has eschewed the maidens with sun in their eyes;
For the sun cannot melt the sun
Into spring freshets and flowers growing
From the cold earth of iron.
So my youth was spent conjuring ice;
Firstly to conjure my warmth
That I believed boundless;
Then with that boundless love
To wrest from them
The frozen hearts of ice-maidens.
But the heart is not a physical fact.
There are contortions, evasions, lacunae,
Undercurrents, mirages,
Shutters behind shutters;
And at its stubborn centre,
The ice crystals never yield entirely.
For others – ice magicians
Had done their work well
On the tight white buds,
Never to sear into flaming bloom
And pout into perfumed evenings,
Or thrill to the humble bee’s drone,
And succumb to the kiss and fress of its tongue.
But even still I prefer small stunted things,
Eyes with casts, withered limbs,
Flaws that demean the flesh,
And the heart’s counterpart wound,
Deep deep in its deepest recess;
Believing still that in that recess
The small spark lies somehow within
That can with some desperate art kindle
And burn its bright flame,
And sear these moth’s wings
Of this obstinate heart of mine.
For still the beauty I magic from ice
Burns twice as beautiful.
Shopping.
Butchers’ faces shine with ruddiness.
Blood beckons top blood,
Drawing it to surface glow.
Greengrocers hard dry shiny hands
Twirl the bags of oranges,
Tweaking the pair of crisp brown paper ears;
While bakers wrap tissue headscarves
Round ribbed golden loaves.
At the Deli, the clasped hands, conjoined, impeccable,
The head unctuously inclined.
The salt-beef, meted in translucent wafers,
Is lowered gingerly onto cellophane.
At the fishmongers – the jury ranged upon crushed ice accuse.
The inescapable eyes rolled damply in newsprint.
Finally the supermarket aisles.
Textured air – optimal lighting,
Music subliminal, muted, innocuous.
Resistance subsides dreamily amongst the stacked cans.
Exit queues edge and shuffle,
And the checkout girls woodenly compute
The sanitized neutered transaction.
Airport.
This is the hustle and hub of distances.
This is the jet-lag time-worn warp of nerve frenzy.
This is the fast-food pause between connections
Where restless tannoyed troops of sallow flesh
Wander final corridors of distilled lighting.
This is the time-zoned moment’s far-flung meeting.
This is the neutral ground for neutered interaction.
This is the well of token words and throwaway alliance
Whose closure is beatless wings on the horizon.
This is the stacked wings in the meted airspace.
This is the stifled adrenalin of landings.
This is a lifetime’s dull death-alertness.
The pilot’s hand and voice are steady,
But in sleep’s fallen defenses,
Dearth hovers in dreams, and sky-wings plummet.
This is the freshly laundered life-change launch-pad.
This is the brave hope beckoning horizons.
These are the wings that soar, and earth diminish,
And for a moment’s magnitude of sky’s sereneness,
All the tangled plots and pains unravel into nothing.
Rebellion.
Only in the act of rebellion
Is it the self truly,
The perpetrator more
Than the shadowy ghost,
The intent more substantial
Than a whom stole from another’s thought.
Only in the act of rebellion is it myself,
And not the echo of another’s voice.
Only in the face of consensus
Are actions truly my own;
For with consensus comes fear,
And sly words to deflect and steer
My purpose away from its course,
To tempt to the deadly softened resolve,
And the altered version with its comfortable slant.
Only in the face of the mob
Is my act my own,
And not a frail echo of their chant.
Only through prison bars
Can I see truly the landscape
In its seer magnificent bleakness;
For freedom softens the focus,
And justice is blurred at the edges.
Only pain can temper the sword.
The only real self
Is the self “on the line”.
The only true moment
When you spit in the eye of the world.
Only in the act of rebellion
Is the choice truly taken,
The perpetration more than the rote-reflex,
The self more than the shade,
The intent more substantial
Than the grassy blade
Shook and shimmered in the roar of the crowd.
Only in the act of rebellion is it myself,
And not the echo of another’s voice.
Generation X – Generation Screwed.
I am a member of “Generation Screwed”.
Buy-to-ley bid the price of hearth and home
Into the receding stratosphere.
In greed’s scramble for gold
My future was stolen – or sold.
Three score years and ten
Is the feasible span of men;
But now centenarians survive in their toothless droves.
Acre by acre my country sold off;
And through sleeping bags on the pavements littered
A chill wind blows.
Kniofe crime is rising.
There is nothing to lose
In plunging home the keen blade.
There is no future to sacrifice.
Spilled blood has no longer a price.
The money men have politicians
In their proverbial pocket.
So that property investments sky-rocket
At an alarming rate;
But homes are for living in,
Not for investment,
Not so the greedy
In coin of our misery
Can barter and speculate.
I am a member of “Generation Screwed”.
I will seize back my stolen country,
Purchase it with my life’s blood.
From the temple I will drive
The land speculators,
Seize from the politicians
Their stipends of shame,
So that finally “family values” can thrive,
And greed can be called its true name.
Toes and Fingers.
Toes remember they were once fingers.
Still the nerves fire and twitch;
And they clutch at phantoms
Surreptitiously in the shoe.
Arrested buds,
Toes no longer know their place,
But dream of grand pianos.
They would make music.
They would transcend their prison
Of form and shapelessness.
Theirs is the sibling rivalry with fingers
That proud and tall
Gather fruit and marshal the world.
Deep in the black box brain
Fester memories repressed.
Chance meetings – forgotten loves –
Moist encounters.
If I could dredge sludge and debris,
Garner leftovers of the feast,
First I would remember the betrayals.
Word left unspoken,
Alliances defaulted
In the deep sea interred,
Only echoes ascending
That cannot ever perturb
The sea-waves lapping.
Deep in the inner space I delve,
Where the muffled calm prevails,
There where the obverse face
And the clown mask frantic,
And the hands gesticulating
Are soothed into somnescence.
This life’s journey on the landscape’s surface
Skates over the strata lying beneath
That only in dreams awaken.
BIRD FLOCKS TAKE FLIGHT.
Bird flocks take flight,
Capture elevated being
In their formation flying.
When startled, they take wing.
A single purpose guides
Their dip and swoop
And plummet into the zenith.
In flight, their mean, grounded incarnation
Sloughed off.
In the element of air
All powerful they rule.
Bird flocks arisen
Transcend ordinary being,
Cavort into freedom
Of the horizon’s prison.
In the Fly-over States
The speck of a plane,
A solitary flaw in the azure jewell,
Appears, then vanishes again.
In the cities,
Wings raucously sing,
Skimming rooftops,
While chimney stacks shudder;
Flock at the journey’s hub
Where they cluster and huddle.
After trajectory’s gestation,
Parturition of disembarkation,
They disseminate on their journeys unfathomable,
Scurrying question-marks
In the cosmic riddle.
LOVE – UNREQUITED?
Love were a cruel mischief
Were not my quickened pulse and hot
Echoed and echoed by your own breathless tympanum;
A travesty did my eyes dark pools’ enlargement
Not find in yours their mirrored counterpart.
Love were a cruel and wanton trick
Did our thoughts not flow fondly parallel,
Or if you count the moments more than dead
When I bask not beneath your woven spell.
Love were a fool’s mistaken fault
Were I less than your bright pole star
Set in a dull and glimmerless vault.
Love were a dark dream
Were our lusty limbs and loins
Fated to never meet and intertwine,
Or were your lips never to pout and part
Beneath the frenzied rough onslaught of mine.
THE SLUGS.
The gyrating ribbon, dancing trance-like ahead,
Lulls the tunnel of night which rushes
Towards me, a waterfall in the twin moon-beams.
Unknowing, the hairpin awaits to ensnare –
The glazed eyes, glazed brain, and the speed – the speed
That seduces with its gradual illusion.
And the steering wheel suddenly limp,
Flaccid, biting on nothing;
The landscape lurching a somersault,
And the headlights plough crazy circles into the sky.
The first impact –
The suspension’s creak and groan
To the very core of bone,
The moonbeam shattered, black-blinded, its orphan
Flickering, stuttering, cutting a ragged swathe
Through impenetrable echoes.
The second impact –
Like a drawn blind the wind-screen frosts;
The engine falters with a cough and a sigh;
And the sky above is the glimmering earth,
And the earth above is the starless sky.
Stillness – hours of stillness pass
Like clouds becalmed;
And of my body – only a half
Still lives, and the other half is locked
In a death-dream, motionless – unsentient.
And now the single crazed eye picks in its beam
Dimly a thousand spittle ribbons’ sheen
That trail and criss-cross in their urgency.
And now thw first cold body caresses wetly
My flesh, its belly shimmering, daubing its dew,
Climbing towards its pinnacle – my face
And the pools of eyes where it can deeply drink
At the weeping well of tears.
Arms pinioned bloodily,
Body floating beyond the lip of pain,
From afar I watch the slow stalk eyes that sway,
And the rasp radulae which card my skin meticulously.
Inexorably they drink – they drink,
Till, slaked and sated, they make way
For ascending hordes like tides in a cool pulsating sea.
And when the dawn’s steel
Sees off the black lead pall,
Then, like vampires who flee light,
They glide, bloated, to dark sequestered places.
With my eyes shrunken pools,
By their deep dank tongues drained dry,
Spent oases in a red desert of flesh,
Seared to white bone, I live and linger yet,
And wait death’s blanket without sight or sigh.
JANUS MASK.
Every angel
Hides their Janus-mask
Deep in a bedeviled heart
A bubbling pent cauldron of anger.
I am catalyst to the anger of angels.
I am the seed crystal upon which
Their evil can actualize.
For every angel hungers to flex
The downturned atrophied muscles
That ache for use
Of their dark twin-mask
Till the smile becomes watery,
Brittle, tenuous, tentative,
Cracked with ambivalence.
Every angel, in secret, knows the devil
From deep echoes and dark mirror reflections,
As the seagull wheels and soars
Above its distorted image.
STREET STABBINGS.
Street stabbings
Sudden scuffles
In a parallel universe.
Incomprehending eyes averted.
Our emotional void
Carefully navigates hotspots
Of bleak intensity.
Death stalks around us.
Eyes lowered, we walk immune,
Detached, complacent, oblivious,
Solipsistic.
Their frenzy never penetrates
Our safe cocoon.
We ignore with careful stolid phlegm.
We are us.
They are “them”.
THIS POEM.
Of all earthly things
I am at best curator,
But for this poem I claim true ownership,
Even when death defeats,
And the words are silently forgotten,
And the bookworm bores and crumbles.
Ownership stretches forward even
To when a sun
Palely glints at frozen earth,
And noon as twilight glimmers.
Assets are owned but transiently
Until bequeathed or sold.
They can be cherished only
As future gifts or barter;
But I cannot bequeath a poem,
Or make gift of words that spring
From that well deepest.
A poem cannot turn a profit,
But can outlast the fruits,
Soon spent, of all tomorrow’s labour.
It is the currency
That most glistens.
It is the centre
To which all is appendage.
It is the sown seed
Which will through dust replenish.
CORONAVIRUS.
Nature hits back – The Plague
Will cut a swathe,
Wave after wave.
The humbled hubris
Nature levels.
The air abounds
With a thousand devils,
Each for which mortal flesh is host,
And life is dust,
The chickens home to roost,
The sun sinking into the west.
Species crush species.
Nature’s balance askew.
Now is this species’ deadline
To pay its due
With interest compounded;
The price a white ocean
Of crosses that cover
All the way over
The whole of the land.
March of progress confounded,
And human fate trickles
As hour-glass sand.
LEAVES.
The leaves shake and shudder
When the wind caresses.
The leaves are ribbons
In a maiden’s tresses.
As the sun grows dim,
So the leaves shine bright.
Like drops of blood they fall to earth,
Or with the wind take flight.
Finally from their humus
Other leaves will grow
That will shake and shimmer
When the cold winds blow.
SUNRISE, MOONRISE, STAR RISE.
Sunrise, moonrise, star rise
Stroke the horizon’s brow,
Mete out the days like clockwork,
Their motions calm and slow,
And the waters mimic
With motions to and fro.
Sunrise, moonrise, star rise
Mete out the days and years.
The rise and fall of nations
Are the flotsam their tide bears.
NAME.
Animals are nameless,
So can have no “me”-ness.
No lettering or tombstone
Can mark their demise.
Their life is a phantasmagoria
Of scenes reflected into their eyes.
Without a name
They are lost wanderers
In a landscape ever the same.
When my name is silently whispered,
I stir in sleep.
Soft sounds from the surface
Arouse from the deep.
My being embedded,
Identity locked,
No key can turn,
No faucet extinguish.
The small flame will not gutter,
But will steadily burn.
My name is on passports, documents,
Anchored solid in shifting infinite spaces.
Without that anchor,
I would drift with each tide,
Buffeted, aimless;
I would drown forever
In a sea of unknowing faces.
The bird is known
By its feather,
Its throaty call,
Its silhouette soaring.
The predator
By its fangs, pelt,
Its tracks in the earth, paws silent padding,
Its purr on the lap.
The human we recognize
By the disguise,
The true heart will conceal
Beneath the glib smile.