Wednesday 29 March 2017

A Void

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Around which our daily life accretes.
Where eternity in depth and time yawns undefined.
Around which an impressionist pastiche
of the multicoloured aspects of life are spun
in an attempt to enrich the who of who we are.
    And yet, at the centre of the me of being,
taunts the Hag in shadows of where we do not go,
for if we did we would chase her around the corner
and the next, for we cannot catch what we fear to face,
in essence, made by us, to define the who of who we are.
We can chase it to where we are not and find the same emptiness.
But not the who of who we are.
    Each paper chase will take us deeper and deeper
into the soul of our sole existence.
How far to chase it down? For once afoot it leads the way
along a Möbius of a mind that folds us inside out,
and vacillating on the never of inside, the never of out,
we are doomed to fail; unable to delineate the mist, for
as the minutiae fade into insignificance we realise that
we may never net the butterfly, fluttering at our heart.
    Down inside the void of us it is taunting still.
If we could only saddle that stallion of mind
we could soar in the white horses of the sky of self
and look down upon all the petty constructs of life,
and turning to the sun and to the stars we could say:
see there, where I walked in suburbia somnambulant,
where l lived the deceit of the quilted street
of everyone's knitted chapter in the book of life,
where the hole of self is dark down behind the spine
and bookmarked as the page of the thought for today.
    So, free-fall down the chasm of that self-same self
and, bereft of all the confidence of that deceit,
burst into the sunlit world of self-awareness,
a meteor across the blaze of Spring,
carrying a heart resurgent unto the me of me.

    Is it that hole that we fill with our God?
Or is it God in the hole that makes us whole?
Or is it simply a hole without which we are not whole?
Or an alimentary canal where the faeces of life
are recycled endlessly around the elementary vacuum
of a vacuous nothing?
    Zero zilch! Eh?
        Take a look,
            and do let me know.

Friday 24 March 2017

The Allotments of Spring

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Apothecary walking the land of sheds and glasshouses,
where gardeners hang on the words of an old-timer's
prescriptive soil in hand, turning on a twist of lemon sunshine, 
that languishes forever on the limpid water butts of mind.
Hard upon the land allotted to each man's time of day, 
in soil-soothed tweed coats and string held trousers,
and boots of fresh turned earth and more.
Of caked hands dried a tan mongrel powder,
leaning on the rakes and spades of spring.
Weaving the thoughts of summer around the sad
azure fires of smell and smoulder, weeping
along the stepping board's twine lines that
appoint the drills for seeds in chitting for a
green sward of cotyledons that will tremble 
in the rough and tumble of the lamb winds of March.
Sun seated between work and rain in a cobweb shed,
or upon the gnarled bench thoughts of every gardener
who has toiled and tilled until the day was sown,
and the sky wished for a perfect sun and rain dish,
off the menu of a nursery of all the dinners of summer.
Fresh drawn from the soil, quick cooked,
butter soft and flavoursome of all the times that have ever been.
The allotment, manured again in the trenches of spring,
rising up to heaven in a quiet hoeing of the soul, and
back home in time for a high-tea, tableclothed,
straw hatted, and buzzing to snooze
in a spring garden tingling on the cusp.

Monday 20 March 2017

Wet Day

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Gossiping, wet, school-run mums,
with their thumping car door goodbyes,
tremble the drooping daffodils to tears.
Seagulls, airshow grade A,
tumble and stall mayday, mayday!
Peeling off, screaming along the wind,
searing comets that hail the day, go on!
Blow, blow and bend the shivering collars
that fail to mop the dripping impudence.
One foot splashing the other foot’s sock
on the way to the cold wet bus-stop pole.
Leaning into the queue of grunts and
snatched up-periscopes of bus-please-bus.
Frog-marched, stumble-tumbled and shoved,
the umbrellas ball along,
slithering between the hissing serpents
that spit at the have-to venture-outs.
Or suffocating in a steamy-windowed bus,
inconsolable in sodden thought,
aborted by an intellect incapable of transcendence
from the dreary reign of this damp dark blanket sky.   

Friday 17 March 2017

A Colouring Book

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A peacock-tailed village fast astride the valley side.
Marinade of young in old folk's coloured flavour.
Perambulating in back bush thoughts,
knee-grazed and child-eyed, with
mufflered men garrulously fag-bent and pint-ward.
Women, scarfed linoleum bright,
shine from cold-coloured rooms,
door-stepped inward/outward facing in schism minds,
scolding the short-trousered ragamuffins in their daring do.
For the transfusion is complete upon the handshake 
of understanding of what lies there, therein. 
The village slag-inked and line-hatched by 
transient-handed generations in sleep and step,
until the morrow weaves another peacock feather
into the nest of next time in mind.
Or so they whisper.

Friday 10 March 2017

Eulogy (as requested)

Eulogy

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Wish me not to rest in peace,
at your goodbye to me.
As I soar away from my earthly lease.
You know it's meant to be.

Say my name aloud, always,
and never whisper it sadly.
You know me in so many ways,
precious days and gladly

keep me high in your mind,
for although I clung to life tenaciously,
I am singing now, as I leave you behind,
there must be no anxiety.

Hold tight the thoughts of you and me,
but with them do not tie me,
for I am about to soar away
and more for you than me I say

that in some golden place 
I will wait and smiling brightly
I will look again upon your face 
and hold you tight and tightly.

There are parts of me more yours than mine,
and I am so much more because of this,
am, not was, you note this rhyme?
I am, you are, it is.

Don't forget my faults either,
you know them better than me.
a part of who I am - come don't dither!
They are also who I am, not who I used to be.

For now, our paths go different ways,
until we meet in another place,
where all will converge in glorious days,
you know it's meant to be, this grace.

So, I tell you now! Hum a happy tune,
as you walk away from me,
but I'll see you later, doubt immune 
time to conjure up a sunbeam see.

Thursday 9 March 2017

New poem

Pentrechwyth village in the 1950s

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Tricycled by boys with their butters crusted,
shop-knotted, pub-signed, and chapel-stepped,
church-fashioned parishioners Sunday bested,
arraigned in visages so long procrastinated.

In door-step scrubbed consanguinity,
with matching windowsills glossily painted,
stone and mortar souls senescent,
insufflated into curtained parlours and suffocated.  

Tiny, resurgent slag-walled gardens,
above scarf-erranded mothers bagging 
shop queues with their gossip listed,
brought tutt-tutted home, in rapture bated. 

Souls, sprig-cobbled and re-leathered, 
red letter boxed and phone box fired, 
fenestrated in sisterhooded whispers,
damp-knickered, and grey-hair gartered.

Seesaw poised and peopled nicely,
precisely homed and personated,
Band of Hope on the one hand, on the other,
public bar smoked pints and blather.

Street light, slingshot, black tooth caries,
gutter drained and Noah inundated,
sodden fields and rotting detritus,
with blackberry-reddened fingers much inveighed.

Rough stoned lanes of the other houses,
in unlit rough dark times inhabited,
hush breathed and hand in hand these others,
village stirred to dark-thicken the gravy.

A lad in this multi-cellular nursery,
outgrows restraint and bursting ranges,
mimicked in reflecting multi-mirrors,
a village villager must be envisaged.

Railing stick rattled, can kicked, 
kicked can, can kicked, and
tricycled, scootered, and Sunday schooled,
all set in stone but with a rubber soul.

From the spring spawn well,
to a cold, curled bed,
from end to end, when all is said,
envisaged the village in which we dwell.