Middling Wood

Aday without wind,
Rare in these parts,
Usually, the Easterlies soar low over the cliffs,
Flecking spittle from the breakers in the bay,
Whipping the slavering sea
Into vaunting emotion of water,
Baffling the sails of the tall ships
That billow in brume and brine,
Rabid, rearing, ravenous,
Rippling in the rock pools
Where children crouch with nets,
Innocent of the wind's razor,
Rivulents of retreating waves
Carving runes in the soft sand,
And high above,
The hawk harried in the middle air,
As mournful soliloquies of gulls
Bounce about the clouds
Like cries of lost souls.
In the white painted cottages of the town,
The wind sweeps leaves along the narrow
Cobbled streets, moans among the chimneys,
Tapping on windows, whistling 'neath doors,
Trickster of indifferent night,
Blasting across green baize of fields
That tumble 'neath shadows of giants,
Ruffling the feathered grasses,
Riffling the young wheat,
Blustering among the skirts of the women
Outside the chapel, strong-boned on its hill,
Who snatch at their prim bonnets
And curse the wind in the most Christian way,
As their brown hair makes cobwebs of their faces.
But today, there is no wind to roar across the flat fields,
No wind to cuff the ears or freeze fingers,
Or tear the coat from off one's back,
And bereft of breeze, idle lie the tall ships,
Limp in the despond of the glass-eyed sea.
On this day,
A day without wind,
Gladys Thomas dies in her little cottage by the strand,
And, in the well-peopled inn on the quay,
Whose squeaking sign for once
Has ceased its pendulate swing,
Old Finn raises a glass of scotch to her name.
"Folk'll say," he opines,"she jest gave up fightin',
But when ye spend yer life pushin' agin the wind,
Ain't nothing' will fell ye save Death hisself."

Tomorrow I will be a different person,
That's right, I'm going to be a new person:
No more weed, no more booze,
I'm going to clean up my act,
Get my head together.
I'm going to care better for myself,
Dress smarter,
Own my future,
Maybe enrol in college.
I'll listen more and talk less,
And stop reacting to every goddam slight,
Oh, and I'll start eating better to,
Cut out the junk that makes me want to puke.
I've been to the mall, bought new jeans,
Nice clean shirt,
And my trainers are sooo white...

Next day arrives,
And I take my new self for a stroll,
Get a few curious looks from the deadbeats,
But who cares?
They're not my friends anymore;
They pull me down, man. To be honest,
They've held me down all my goddam life!
Outside the liquor mart I bump into Kandi.
"Hi, Kandi," I say.
"Hey, what's with the new image, Larry?" she says.
"I'm starting over," I tell her, "meet the new me."
Kandi gives me that funny look,
Scans me the way girls do, like some kind of beam,
Puts her hand on her hip all nonchalant,
Shakes her head,
"Nah," says Kandi, "You're still a jerk,
But, hey, you're a jerk with friends.
Say, bro, let's go smoke and talk bull."
So, I spend the day with Kandi,
Zoned out on the proverbial sofa with the blinds closed,
And a stupid-assed TV that nobody watches,
And resign myself to being a jerk for another day.
Tomorrow I will be a different person.

Mr Polly reclines snugly against the seat
Of the train that waits at the station, amid
Banging of compartment doors, shouted farewells,
Ebullient waves, blowing of kisses,
And the rituals of human departure,
At length terminated by the peremptory whistle
Of the guard...
And the train lurches, stretches like a tired old dog,
Finds its breath.
It is summer, the window down,
Admitting the warm airs,
A sharp beam of sunlight slicing obtusely across his trousers,
Picking out the fuzzy threads of the blue and yellow seat,
Perfumed by a thousand bottoms,
And the rich browns of the wooden trim.
He is alone, the entire compartment to himself,
The Mongol hoardes of commuters still labouring at their desks...
Plain folk don't travel First.
He folds his crisp newspaper,
Fishes in his pocket for a pouch
That he unfurls with care,
From his oher pocket procures a pipe
Whose walnut bowl glows warmly in the mid-afternoon light,
And this is duly filled with a generous portion of leaf;
A silver lighter, monogrammed in florid script,
Winks in the sunshine.
Mr Polly puffs in sympathy with the train
As it rattles out of town into open country,
Ravilious country,
Skirting the ovulate hills of the Downs,
Dotted with barns,
Furrowed fields frowning in thought,
A white horse etched in chalk,
On a cropped hillside,
Meandering river drowsily dreaming,
While far away, a lonely lighthouse stands sentinel
On the crags beneath the cliff.
Turning his face to the sun,
His smile spreading like the dawn,
He succours the fiery temper of his pipe,
Enjoying the sensual illegality of the moment,
An Englishman's seigneurial right to flout
The lesser laws of Man...
The convention of defying convention.
Like the elusive pimpernel.
They seek him here, they seek him there,
But when he alights at the little village with its pub,
All that is left is the delicate perfume of tobacco
Loitering among dust motes;
The man himself is gone.

My grandma told me about the people of the wind
Who cross over when the veil is thinned,
They walk by night and melt with sun
And walk again when the day is done.

They move in mist and tumbling rain,
Snaking through the fields of grain,
Lapping the milk from the upturned pail,
Barn door banging in the guts of the gale.

Fool the young man who walks abroad
When the wind his high, to pleas ignored,
He disappears into the hills,
And where he be God only wills.

Many a farm lies by the way,
Whose owners saw not light of day,
And if you're good or if you've sinned,
It matters not to the people of the wind.

Folk there are who have the sight,
Keep their children close and doors locked tight,
Dim the lamps and watch the clock,
And answer not the ominous knock.

For comes the dawn, crows the cock,
Scratches cover every lock,
The painted door raked by nails,
And wailing echoes through the dales.

And now my baby whom I rocked
Is missing and the door unlocked,
And would, if I could, my lack of care rescind,
For he's been taken by the people of the wind.

Love endures amid the ruins of loss,
It's fondest moments our memories emboss,
Of laughter in the sun, dressing to kill,
Loafing lazily by lapis sea,
Experiencing the thrill
Of sailing off Cyprus with the wind in our hair,
Cavorting in fountains, our tops all bare,
Revelling at midnight, bringing back boys,
Waking hung-over, allergic to noise,
A cicada's song, sung but once,
The sacred stupidity of unstrung youth,
Love and friendship, my sweet, are the only truth.

How many a mile hast ridden, O knight,
How many hast thou passed,
And how many must thou ride, O knight
Till thou reach home at last?

Black is the risen storm, O knight,
And bleak the showers of hail,
Hunched the wiry blacktorn ’top the hill
In the violence of the gale.

Barren be the furrows, O knight,
Striped by jealous nails,
Battered be the ships at sea
And torn their midden sails.

But in my forest glade, O knight,
Gently rays the sun,
And mellow the moon that shines so pale
When the day is done.

Slender are the rushes, O knight
And tender is the grass,
And yellow the banks of celandines
About this lake you pass.

Tarry for an hour, O knight,
Tarry a' the day,
Thrice the sun shall wheel the sky
And still with me shall stay.

I'll charm thee with my pipe, O knight,
And sing of sad romance,
And thee I'll treat with chansons sweet
From trouabdours of France.

And I'll take thee in the lake, O knight,
And in the lake we'll play,
And doun the depths I'll take thee, knight,
Ne'er to see the day.

So, this is how it ends,
Hanged on the rope of time and years,
Sentenced to senescence amid boos and jeers,
Hardly worth the ceremony, the public expense,
The courtroom packed with figments of my past,
And no-one to defend me... I'm the last.
After all,
What resistance can I offer as I inch toward the ledge?
Brain frafile as Venetian glass,
Teetering on the coffee table's edge,
Limbs that creak like a book
Begging to be read,
And another twenty years until I'm dead.

"I am nothing, ma'am,
The 'nothing man' is who I am."
A blank white face with bowler hat,
Black dots for eyes and mouth,
A rheumy-eyed oldie who's mind's gone south.
The world's moved on,
I've missed the bus,
Only me now, no longer 'us',
Thronged in the company of the mad and the poor,
Walking through a city I don't know anymore,
In a world that's become too dangerous to live,
What would I give
To turn back the clock to a more familiar time
When I coold think and my thoughts would chime?
Back to when I was somebody more,
And folk would say 'hello' when I walked in a store,
Not this silly old loon waving his prop
At miscreant teens messing at the stop.

"I am become irrelevance,
Destroyer of fun,"
Oppenheimer did not say,
Though he might if he'd had my day,
A mote in the eye of Beauty
Where Beauty is God,
And God hates tramps,
And I study the crazy paving of my face
By light of lamps,
A beached whale pining for the ocean
It will never see again,
Slowly drying on the sand in torture and pain.

What became of the boy I was
That brightened at the kiss of summer on his legs,
Who ran and played in wind and sun,
And never went home till the day was done,
Who gambolled in shorts
And got muddy playing sports,
For whom a bicycle was freedom?
Yet am I not witness to the mystery of Existence?
Have I not marked each and every season
By the way it moves me?
And studied the heavens, each and every orb
Set in its appointed place?
Have I not observed the restless bee,
Caressed a budding blossom,
Felt the cool, keen blades of grass protest my feet,
And tasted honey in my mouth?
Am I not a part of the beauty that I see?
Does that for which I feel
Feel not for me?

That boy exists still...
Somewhere...
In the tangled knotweed of memory,
Resisting the gravity of Death,
But always the sentence is carried out,
The slowest execution Nature can conceive,
No Roy Cohn to get a reprieve,
To appeal my innocence of the crime of living,
As I stand before the drop
That will plunge me in despair,
And after that, who'll care?
Maybe I'll just blow away like a paper in the wind,
Or creep into exile like the biblical sinned,
No reporters, no camera crews...
No one remembers yesterday's news.

She is become the rose,
Divine Mystery veiled in fire,
Holy blood graaled,
Hid by briar,
Saint's heart seared, smoking still,
Pierce me, bright angel, with blazing lance,
Give me your fill.

She is become the rose,
The ripening vulva,
Opening to desire,
Glow of a salt lamp,
The knowing incandescence of a nebula,
Birthing planets by strange decree,
Aphrodite rising from the clam,
To the alto of the lilting sea.

She is become the rose,
Sultry rose,
Seething with thorns.
Courtesan of kings,
She knoweth the secret government of scents,
Lamprey circling the red-rayed lamp,
Smelling prey, her thighs damp,
Coyly disrobing, giving the eye,
She has him where she wants him
But he comes too soon,
Her bitter laugh, discordant bells,
Desiring eyes now empty shells,
He knows she is heartless,
She knows he is weak,
Truth is a flower neither can speak.

She is become the rose,
Domina,
The mote of fire in her eye
And the whip in her voice...
She will defend her honour.
She will advance her children.
In a man's world, she has no choice.
Imperatrix,
Livia looms, crying crocodile,
Poison in her folds,
Her son will be emperor.

She is become the rose,
Classy coquette, attar of desire,
Luring the love-doomed
To the funeral pyre,
Snaring the young naifs
Like pupae of moth,
Hitch them and ditch them,
Cast them all off,
Your life an annal of empty wombs,
Temper flaring like a match,
In your dark catacombs;
Sweet rose, as your are, you cannot stay,
October wind will blow your petals away.

She is become the rose,
Dance pretty rose!
Whirl your flamenco skirts!
Stamp your heels!
Throw back that haughty head,
Voluptuous body made for fun,
Shiny black hair taut in its bun,
But after the dance you will let it down
And it will swirl about your face
Like a rich rioja,
Slender neck banded
By a black lace choker
Lips wet like cherries
As I lie beneath,
And you will tear at my flesh
With your perfect white teeth.

She is beauty. She is vengeance. She is love.
She is become the rose.
She is become woman.

The senator beams in the southern sun,
Shades hiding lines round implacable eyes,
Batting back the light of unforgiving skies,
Hair slicked, dyed to conceal the grey,
That hints at wisdom,
But wisdom ain't going to carry the day,
The South is the land of hellfire and hate,
The Minotaur craves blood, its rage to sate,
Immigrants, gun laws, abortion is hot,
Justice and Medicare don't make the debate.
The folks are riled, there's talk of a riot,
The shops are all closed and strangely quiet,
Confederate flags fly from the masts,
Stickered on pickups parked by the church,
On which bearded militiamen inscrutably perch.

The cameo is ready, the photographer nods,
The pastor, dressed in his smart black suit,
Smiles sanctimoniously for the photoshoot.
The picture's about the family name,
The senator, his wife and his handsome son,
The American family
Is how elections are won.
Forced into a jacket, buttoned and neat,
Billy squints up at the white painted church,
Bleached like a bone in the dog day heat,
Square shouldered men milling about,
Bull-like in business suits,
Gesturing their southern roots,
Combusting in their own ambition,
To be the defenders of tradition,
Heavies strutting, tooled for trouble,
Holsters beneath the Sunday best,
Grey eminences, designer stubble.
The senator pauses from shaking hands,
Brusquely walks over and pulls up his boy,
Absorbed in his art, sketching a tree,
Cool in the shade, content to be free.
"Come here, Billy,
Get in the frame,
For Christ's sake, boy,
Stop looking so lame!"

The senator steps forward, gauges the crowd,
Flotilla of flags, thrill of voices that ebb to a hush,
Amplifiers ring out his speech clear and loud.
"God gave us this land to farm and to drill,
We fought the Union and we're on it still.
Christian values are what made us strong,
And if we don't defend them it won't be long
Before the Feds take back the freedom we won,
The freedom that comes with owning a gun.
Yes, sir!
God and guns are the American way,
So hear me, people, when I say,
God bless God and the NRA!"

The senator is mobbed by the adoring crowd,
Pastors, Patriots, Proud Boys, all,
Touching his clothes,
Like the Turin shroud.
Exulting, he extends an arm to his wife,
Looks for his son through the swirling life,
But Billy's nowhere to be had,
Busy with his artwork, pencil and pad.
"Stop messing around, Billy,
Don't be a schmuck!
If you wanna be an artist,
You're outta luck.
You're gonna study law,
Just like your dad,
Get the right attitude
Before I get mad."

A long line of cars stripes back to the house,
Sleek sedans with blacked-out glass,
Blocking out the birdsong,
The green of the grass.
Billy sits sullen behind his dad,
Scratching his arm,
Still clutching his pad.
The sketch is a good one
But nobody sees,
He's a prisoner of the family firm,
The life he imagined brought to its knees,
He's the politico's son,
In a world of spin,
He's not a part of the part that he's in.
"The boy's a dreamer," the senator explains
To his meek little wife
Who gave up her life
For her husband's career.
"He's goin' to a school that'll make him a man,
A bit of toughness won't do him no harm
- Billy, stop scratching your arm -
I wanna son that'll make me proud,
Not some loser with his head in a cloud."

On a day in high summer, in flaming June,
Azaleas glowing in the shimmer of noon,
Bells of jessamine in bright yellow showers,
Lipstick red of cactus bloom,
An officer formally calls at the door,
Ushers the senator into a room,
The door closes quietly, his wife left outside,
Something's going on that he wants to hide,
But it'll come out when the officer leaves,
So she arranges some flowers on the window sill,
She always does this when there's a void to fill;
She's close to her husband but not that way,
She's a political wife,
Bound by duty and bound to stay.
Still, something's afoot,
So quietly she crosses the parquet floor
And leans her ear 'gin the wood of the door.
"He just went on a rampage," the officer says,
Over forty dead, teachers an' all,
Shot in their classrooms, shot in the head.
The sheriff's men, they took him down,
I'm sorry, sir, it was out of my hands,
Everyone here understands.
This is the weapon, I believe it is yours,
We'll keep it for prints,
But if I were you, I'd lock it indoors."
Deftly, she moves away from the door,
As it swings on its hinges to open once more,
And the men step out in the plush hallway.
"It's been a hell of a day," the officer sighs,
"Oh, and we found this note,
I think its for you, sir,
This is what he wrote."
The senator takes the crumpled paper,
Looks at his wife, his emotion shows,
He doesn't need to tell her what she already knows.
The paper is stained with the blood of his son,
He can't bear to open it,
But what's done is done,
Either way, it's going to be bad.
"What's it say," his wife croaks through her throat.
He squeezes it out. "I HATE YOU, DAD."
The officer, he cocks an eye,
"Guess life's a series of unfinished sentences,
Ain't it, senator, an' that's no lie."
The senator looks ashen, his expression is flat.
"Why'd he write that?
Why'd he write that?"

Standing on Primrose Hill,
Chalk Farm below,
Waiting for the girl in the red raincoat,
Who I only know from pictures,
And may or may not show.
It is the liminal space between night and day,
Like a playing card perfectly poised,
A moment of breathless reticence,
Before the event horizon,
When the sun cockily announces himself,
Draws his fingers over the glass towers of the City,
Strokes the eyelids of the sleeping,
And birds frantically sing,
But for now, the drowsy dawn
In dreary half-light wait,
The first pigeon yet to wing,
As in the ghosted gloom of tree-hugged lanes,
Orange streetlights immolate
The white stucco houses,
Glowing like dying embers,
In night’s iron grate,
While distantly, and far remote,
The whine of the milk float, on its way,
Plays the first note of the day.
Falling dew damps my face, frozen
By stars' cold cat's eyes,
Encrusted with the rime of those awake
Whom sleep resist,
And the old Victorian lamps wink out
One by one,
I feel cold now in the pre-dawn mist.
The benches that line the path
Untenanted and forlorn,
Save for a couple smooching in their hoodies,
Oblivious of the spreading stain of storm,
The reek of thunder
And promise of impending rain
That plops and pits the parched earth,
Locked together, these two,
Cocooned in breath,
And probably will remain,
It's going to be a wet day again.
Looking here and there,
The paths that at the top converge,
Converge not for me,
The girl in the red raincoat does not appear.
I did not tell her I am a poet,
For she would have asked me to immortalise her,
And she might have said, "Poof!
I am nothing like that at all!"
But oft does language fall
At the goddess' foot,
Poorly provisioned to navigate the arc of beauty,
How impoverished my art, then,
That it fails so miserably,
So, I return to my solitude,
And my warmly lit abode,
Composing lines over the frothy nuance
Of a capuccino
In Belsize Road.

How draws the closing of the day
For one who has trod with stoic steps
This restive earth?
The joys he yearned
Gone and spent,
His bridges burned,
And but a stony hill descends
To sip of Lethe's stream,
As upon a pyre
Turns to ash the memories of a man
For whom Terpsichore weeps
Beside her lyre.

How draws the closing of the day
When the wreathes are laid,
The lament is sung,
The unruly and the fair depart
And the piper paid?
What becomes the straws of love,
Desire consummated, advances spurned,
Pastel petals paper thin
Pressed between pages
That no more are turned?

How draws the closing of the day
For one who walks the theatre
Of mist and mourning,
In the ebbing tide?
On crinkled sheets lain
White webs of wed widows
Lamenting lost lovers,
Dreaming past the weary rain
Outside the ancient awning.
Mind's milk eye,
Clouded by cataract,
Cannot the psalms see,
Ragged runes of holy writ,
Remembers not the tree
That praised their vows
With blossom
And gave love sanctuary.

How draws the closing of the day
For one so bright
Who passes like a shadow
In the dimming of the light?
Who toiled and sang
In the green sprout of life,
Recalls the babe he gave his wife
In the darkness of the night?
See there, the shadows that silent wend
Across the starry field,
Through the lonely farms
And out upon the Weald,
And before them the whiteness
Of a dove,
’Tis the carnival of souls returning home,
Ghosts winding in whispers of grass,
Left-over leaves looking for love.

Dig the plague pit six men deep,
The nameless dead the earth shall keep,
Off they tumble from the cart,
Lawyers, scriveners, gentleman's tart.
With a heave and a ho!
Shovel and throw!
Paint a cross upon the door,
Those inside we'll see no more,
Shroud for the pauper, coffin for the rich,
And naught for the blind beggar in the ditch.
With a heave and a ho!
With a heave and a ho!
Graves to Gravesend O!

Grey barge plying the river murk,
Bringing up bounty for the diggers' work,
Heavy oars ladling through the dark,
Bodies piled high to the watermark.
With a heave and a ho!
Shovel and throw!
Essex marsh and Essex mist,
Sea of souls who'll not be missed,
Who at the shingle shout and cry
At the barque of the dead as it passes by.
With a heave and a ho!
With a heave and a ho!
Graves to Gravesend O!

Death he wanders about the town,
Those he touches, they all fall down,
Bishop's buboes blue and sore,
Prayer didna work for him no more.
With a heave and a ho!
Shovel and throw!
Fair maid with babe scarce out her hips,
Death's black flower hath touched her lips,
Child still fastened to her breast,
Together now are laid to rest.
With a heave and a ho!
With a heave and a ho!
Graves to Gravesend O!

Press a posy to thy nose,
Herbs of lavender smoke thy clothes,
There's none on earth as can escape
This scourge of God that hath no shape.
With a heave and a ho!
Shovel and throw!
An' once the Devil's had his fill,
Then we too shall cease to till,
The sickness take us an' fall ill
An' in our graves lie white and still.
With a heave and a ho!
With a heave and a ho!
Graves to Gravesend O!

Isaw you,
Standing on the shore,
Pale Wedgewood eyes limpid with tears,
A single drop sacrificing its perfect roundness
On your cheek,
Facing out upon
The accusing finger of storm,
Persian grey clouds eliding the glinting tiara
Of the sun's disk,
As I rowed the little skiff out into the bay
To the tall ship,
Sails shivering on the teeming tide,
White manes of waves racing toward you
Over the arcane sea.
Were I such waves as crash at your feet,
I would return as surely,
To the little white painted cottage on the headland,
The single lamp in the window
Shining like a sentinel through leaded panes,
And pause awhile, as dusk falls,
Watching you busy yourself,
Bustling from room to room,
Chopping food, fetching wood to the scuttle,
As a fox in the high covert
In whose eyes are reflected the stars
And the fires of hearths,
Afore tapping softly on your door.
But the sea, the sea,
Has summoned me,
The jealous sea,
Wild remorseless mother, she,
That lilts in the liver and moans in the bones,
Slops saltily through marrow,
Thrumming in deep blue oceans of vein,
And to wave farewell is so much sorrow,
As you climb the shingle bank alone,
Hard rods of rain striking your heart.
This savage sea will tear us both apart.

It wasn't me, I swear,
It really wasn't me,
Who took God's rubber from his drawer
And rubbed his pictures out with glee.
How did I know what they were,
How could I foresee?
I just needed the paper,
And the paper was there for free.
The blueprint of creation,
He'd worked on it for years,
I've never seen God distraught,
Reduced to floods of tears.
"Why does the earth look like a bun,"
God seethed, "when it should be round?
The planets' spin makes a terrible din,
And they spin the wrong way around,
And what are all these blotches,"
He complained, "Smeared about the place?"
"That's interstellar dust," I said,
"You get that in deep space."
"Hmm," said God, scratching his beard,
"A mammoth that's completely bare?
And I never recalled a chicken
Laying an egg that's square.
The way that hippos vary is quite contrary,
And a cat with purple hair is hardly fair."
"You may have fallen asleep,"
I said, "And dribbled on the plans,
Or you popped off to the loo
And didn't wash your hands."
"OH PLEASE," cried God,
"You can't be serious!
Someone's trying to hatch a plot
That's quite nefarious!"
And that was when he noticed it,
The rubber next to the sun,
The sherry bottle opened,
Waitrose No.1.
"YOU!" he glowered redly,
"Have ruined my cosmic plan,
The greatest dream I ever had
Since time and space began."
"I'm sorry, God" I pleaded,
"You have my guarantee,
That by tomorrow morning,
I'll at least put back the sea."
But God was having none of it,
He took me by the scruff,
Threw me out of Heaven's door,
I guess he'd had enough.
It was a little radical,
I think you will agree,
I'm only a minor angel,
But God's plenty mad at me!

Hellebore summer, green and gay
Too soon hath passed along the way,
Like a ghost that walks across my dream,
Would that you return and stay,
And in staying permit me find the secret gate
I hath searched for long and late,
Worn and rough with sun-baked frown,
Beyond which my childhood years await,
In the garden of the great old house
Where peacocks strut to strains of Strauss,
The wheelbarrow rusts against the tree
And girls weave daisies in white cotton blouse,
Cornflower sky of singing glass
Across which swallows swoop and pass,
Wispy clouds, the breath of angels seemed to me,
Falling as dew to jewel the Lincoln grass,
A garden table graced with cake,
Tiny sandwiches that took much care to make,
China service set for six
Scones and jam for hungry hands to take,
But as I tap my cane along the way
’Cross old stone flags at the closing of the day,
I know that garden I ne'er will find again,
My childhood years are forever passed away.

She falls asleep to the sound of rain,
Like the pattering of tiny fingers
On the glass,
Sluicing along streets,
Gurgling down drains,
Salivating from sides of gutters,
The only thing that can wash her clean,
Rinse out the bloody rags of her soul.
She wanted his baby,
Ovaries clenching into fists of hunger,
Following his gaze,
Looking for the rival crouching in the covert,
A brushing of fingers, locking of eyes,
A glance too drawn,
And, if she looked long enough, she would find her...
THE OTHER WOMAN.
The night of the performance, he asked her to back off,
"Too much intensity," he said,
But she knew different.
Now she is on stage with her rival,
That weak, feeble woman who plays victim to lure men,
Her man, and she'll have his babies.
Manifold are thy shapings, Providence!
Many a hopeless matter Gods arrange.
Euripides hovers by the curtain,
Stationary among props and pulleys,
Bald pate nimbused by ancient hair,
Snowy beard the puffy whiteness of cloud,
And he is looking straight at her,
Mouthing dangerous words in the shadows,
As the lights begin to dim, darkness advancing
Through the auditorium like a low storm front,
Creeping across the seats, gathering on itself,
Monstrous supercell squatting toad-like above the stage,
Sucking all pity into its black, thundering heart,
Wrapping iron bars about her skull,
Her face a scold’s bridle of tension;
She is chosen, born for the role,
Favoured by the gods, she will not disappoint.
The serpent twists,
The screw strains,
The blood red mist is up,
No levee made by man can stem this coursing rage,
Come, oh gods, serve to me upon this stage,
The instrument of her demise,
No poison robe to waste the wench,
But knife’s at hand,
Familiar spirit of my pain,
Whose point,
Fulgent from the furnace of my bitter soul,
Shall end the brood mare’s reign.
Vengeance becomes Medea,
Mascara, slick demonic tears,
Unholy stigmata,
Eyes black as storm drains,
Belching misery into the ocean of indfference,
Medea of the bloody knife,
Ripping and whirling, laughing and lacerating,
Stabbing down into vulcanising spurts
Of vermilion violence,
Hellish gargoyle, rictus-faced,
Pissing death from the cathedral roof.
Euripedes applauds behind the curtain,
"Bravo! Bravo!"
But applause is his alone.
The deed is met and done,
Come, oh chariot of the Sun, sweep my feet
To high Olympus,
A woman wronged, I ask no more
Than I stand vindicated
Before the gods,
To whom allegiance swore,
Almighty Zeus, know my heart,
That flutters like a sparrow
And screams like a bled boar!
Tonight, she sleeps to the sound of rain,
The hospital is quiet,
Deserted corridors receding into darkness,
Emergency lights glowing green
With the eerie luminescence of jellyfish,
The night nurse makes her rounds,
Pauses outside her door to listen
To the sighing of the dislocated mind,
And in the lobby, the coffee machine hums a lullaby.

If my poor heart could but speak true,
And not the vain man that I am,
The world and more I'd promise you,
If my poor heart could but speak true,
The constancy of love would offer you,
And in erring be not worth the damn,
If my poor heart could but speak true,
And not the vain man that I am.

Oft have I walked in forests cool,
In chequered shirt with oaken stick
And pack upon my back,
Stood amid the coiling fronds of fern
Among the tall aspens,
Lank legged on mountain slopes,
That quake and crack in strange animation
To the whisper of winter,
Spraying frizzes of red and gold,
Wrapped in papery bandages of bark,
Ghost white in the slanting sun,
That peels like the furled pages of old books,
And watched the burning leaves of autumn
Fall like fiery tears,
Shaping words in the quiet calligraphy of their fall,
The declination of souls silently shed,
Flaring brightly like comets that kiss
But once the rarefied air,
To seek dissolution in the anaesthesia of sea,
And, as they, do I catch fire
As my season draws to close,
Like a match flaring briefly in the gathering gloam,
Inking into memory the canticles of a life,
Poem etched in creases of skin,
Colouring the lineaments of sketches sheathed
In scrapbooks of time,
Afore the dark'ning sky shall shroud me swift
In vestal snow,
And in my solace I shall die,
Beneath the frozen earth to lie.

When my true love I would court,
We'd dawdle a' the day,
Feed the moorhens on the pond
And watch the rushes sway.

And each summer we would go there,
In the month of May,
As blossom showered the old stone bench
And watch the rushes sway.

In time she bore me children,
And with them we would play,
Picnic on the village green
And watch the rushes sway.

But fate did take her from me,
On a drab and dreary day,
Alone I sit outside the church
And watch the rushes sway.

My children are all grown now,
The years have flown away,
Oh, gentle breeze, take now my soul
As I watch the rushes sway.

Oh wife, you are a screeching termagant,
A harpie sent to test,
I've only seen the worst of you,
I can't believe there is a best.
You never give me any peace,
Your nagging tongue I cannot bear,
Bile spews from out your lolling lips,
You throw plates without compare.
When angry, you screw up your face
Till your pimples turn bright red,
That's the time I run for life,
To seek shelter in the shed,
And when eventually you deign to rise,
I can hear the ceiling shake,
Holy Sprite, please send a removal van,
Away my wife to take.
A dive-bombing gull in all its rage
Would more compassion show,
No fruit shall bless this marriage,
I've lost interest down below.
How you reached this abject state
I really can't believe,
Oh gracious Lord, who woman did conceive,
Give me Adam without Eve.

Oh that the sea shall take me,
And carry me away,
And the wild west wind shall sweep me out
Into the ocean grey,
The little boat shall bear me
Through the rain,
On waves that swell and sway,
And where I'll go, I don't know,
Nor if I'll live another day.
The world behind is upside down,
I've left the game
With no more cards to play,
No refuge have I for me here,
No safe place I can stay.
When you told me we were through,
And love had passed,
I knew not what to say,
I thought that we would walk together,
All along the way.
But now I put my trust in fate,
And the sea will have its say,
Seventeen minutes to Chesapeake
And the boat moored in the bay.

Thus stood Leonidas,
Man of bronze,
Hewn from Ares, in likeness cast,
For this had he been born,
Ordained by the gods of Hellas at Delphi,
Leonidas at the Hot Gates,
Thus had it come to pass,
As the Pythia said it would,
By Apollo touched,
In the sacred grove where the vapours rise,
So stood he is ground, Leonidas,
Son of Lacedaemon,
Xyston in his hand,
Xiphos sheathed, tense to his loins,
Aspis hard against the sand,
Jaw angled like a kopis,
Hawk-eyed, gazing to the fore,
Persian fleet dark against the churning sea,
Forest of ships, bristling in the bay,
Nest of wasps,
Xerxes and his Immortals,
And his black rain of arrows,
Bringing night to day,
Battering the shield wall
That gave not,
And still Leonidas endured,
Whom no man questioned,
Leonidas and his hippeis,
Companions in life and in death,
Fighting arm to arm, shoulder to shoulder,
Red crests floating on Aeolian breeze,
Red cloaks billowing 'bout blooded knees,
As Xerxes in insensate rage
Hurled his Immortals against the three hundred,
Who stood stout before the Phocian wall,
And plied the pass with Persian dead,
And would yet win the hour
But for treachery of one who sought wealth
And comfort of women,
Ephialtes, whose name is venom to tongues of Greeks,
Who shall have serpents for guts,
He, the Trachinian, gaining the ear of Xerxes,
Betrayed the secret path that sealed all their fates,
For which Leonidas would have tied him to his chariot,
Had not doom’s gaunt shadow compelled his arm,
And the counsel of wise Demophilus, the Thespian,
Who spoke and spoke well,
"Come, great Leonidas,
Mighty and revered among Lacedaemonians,
Did you not hunt the winter wolf
In the mountain passes of high Taygetus,
Shivering, girt alone in cloak and company of spear,
And you would shrink before a king?
Master, then, your fear, even as the wolf,
And know that you earn renown among the gods."
So great Leonidas, firming his feet,
And bidding those to leave who would,
Held the way, even to the last,
Beset by spear and lurching lance,
As Persians surged from right and left,
Dark locust cloud of black Immortals
Engulfing the 300 in heaving mass of might,
Bitter the sting of arrow, venom of Xerxes,
But sweet the sword’s song that pierced a Persian heart
And keen the cry of Spartan youth
Suckled on the milk of war from many-breasted Artemis,
And fought them well that day,
Even as fatigue weighed heavy on their arms
And blood ran red as rust upon the sand,
Till Atropos cut their threads,
Their moment passed,
And thus prophesy fulfilled,
They who died for valour died not in vain
That tyranny dare not raise its head again.
O ye men, who dwell in the streets of broad Lacedaemon!
Either your glorious town shall be sacked by the children of Perseus,
Or, in exchange, must all through the whole Laconian country
Mourn for the loss of a king, descendant of great Heracles."

You appeared for a moment
At the end of the Long Walk,
But I knew it was you,
That scarlet dress embroidered with grey,
Hair piled serpentine about your head
Like a torque,
Telescoped at the end of the yew hedge,
Behind which the old oaks,
Burgeoning in leaf,
Reared up, sweet and sappy, like a nave
Over the old stone flags,
Vitiligous blotches of golden light
Pooling here and there
As though someone had poured the sun into a glass
And spilled it in an act of artistic negligence,
Little groves where palms,
Like brash ingénues,
Jostled with uncle-ish elms,
Cadenzas of thrushes and blackbirds
Piping to the desultory rustle of leaves
Like old skirts.
You looked straight at me
– I swear you looked –
Sad hazel eyes that remembered spring,
And then you walked on,
And I ran and I ran
– Oh, how I ran –
But these tottering legs,
Weighted with regret of years,
Cannot carry me now,
And you had gone
... As though you never were,
And I thought, for an agonising moment of joy,
Of this I convince myself,
You spoke my name
In the soughing of the trees.

The city after rain,
Singing streets like washed plates,
Lathered and rinsed,
Spangled by breaking beams of sun,
Lollipop colours of traffic lights
In garish glow of reds and greens,
Pensive drops dripping from ledges
Like runny noses.
The city shakes itself like a dog,
Buses spraying water as they rumble
Over potholes still unfilled,
Soaked cyclists swearing,
Stallholders in the market uncovering
Their wares,
Shopkeepers brooming the tops of awnings,
As the news vendor resumes his cry:
"READ ALL ABOUT IT!"
And folk rush to work in flapping coats,
Goyaesque figures fractured in the crazed mirrors
Of wet pavements,
Folding and unfolding brollies
To flick off the last drops.
Sandie pauses at the Metro,
Lifts her face to the sun,
Booming light like a great trumpet,
Polyphemic eye candescent in the ringing blue,
Feels the kiss of warmth on her skin,
Feels human in that strangely human way,
And even the dressed-to-kill executive allows a smile.
It's going to be a good day.

Pleasure finds where pleasure wanders,
In the green hills of her heart,
Her gentle valleys her lover ponders,
Heaven wrought by matchless art.

My love's a continent to discover,
Of sunny coves and singing tides,
And I her gentle slopes uncover,
To map the mysteries she hides.

Lovers meet by candles burning,
In the silence of the night,
Trailing fingers trace each other's yearning,
My lover's garden is my delight.

Light masks more than darkness yields,
By blindfold, I'll your caves explore,
Lost amid your groves and fields,
But ever my soul cries out for more.

Sunflowers are big and bold,
Gorgeous in every way,
Saffron petals smiling in the sun,
Marking the tides of day.
Once you put them in the ground,
They shoot up soon enough,
Bursting into radiant blooms
In a crescendo of display.
Put them in a vase
On a sill,
They'll fill your home with light,
And that seeded eye, a smiley face,
A flash of heaven's ray.
They're always pleased to see you,
Even when your world is out of whack,
Like that jolly uncle
Who gives you treats
And slaps you on the back.
They don't have dark emotions,
And don't mind what you say,
You can curse to very heaven,
But they'll always love you
And ask if you're okay.
They sway to the music in your garden,
When you mow the lawn,
And when the sun is beaming
And you're busy cleaning,
They'll invite you out to play.
They nod outside your window
To cheer you when you're sick,
And when you're feeling low
And lost the 'go',
They really are a brick.
Sunflowers are ready to take on the world,
And they want the world to sing,
Unlike the shrinking violets
Which are scared of everything.
Who cannot love a sunflower,
I'd very much like to know,
For what flower is so magnificent
Or puts on such a show?

"Alaphants fart at pants," says Al,
"Na," says Ally, "dat's ants.
Ants fart at pants.
Tha an't an alaphant."
"Tha an't?" says Al,
"Damn, dat's bad, man.
An't ya the smarty pants!
Anyways, ma pants are arty farty an' all.
Say, gal, damn gas dat car ta dat ball."

Sometimes I think I could just
Blow away
And watch the apricot hues of dawn
Spread like a bush fire,
Burning iris of the world,
Unfiltered by physical eyes.
Breath upon these lips, cracked and worn,
And I will disentangle,
A dandelion puff exploding in pappus,
Paratrooping the breeze
In the silver sliver of morn;
An albatros riding the thermals
Above the bucking sea.
There is so little of me left now,
That to leave it all behind would be
So easy,
Back pegged, bent in foetal ball
Of monstrous pain,
Haggard skin taut, clinging for a foothold on bone,
Withered muscle deaf to the barked orders of nerve,
So diminished and so small,
So removed from the man of vigour I recall,
And I could forget that I died alone,
Lank legs, hair white and thinned
In this gutter world of the sinning and the sinned,
Tragic tide of forgotten and insane,
Broken flowers rotting in the rain,
And simply blow away,
Away,
Climb upon the cool night air,
The earth below, a cloud-swirled glass,
Blue-limned,
Perchance tell stories to the moon
And make love with the wind.

Come, drink of my cup
That I fill for you,
And tell me, have my words changed you
Or do they come too late?
You, who chase ideals of glory and dominion,
Make war in name of faith and flag,
Who dig graves for tied men,
And sell your 'legiance to the state.
Has love changed you,
Or is love but a tragic flower
To crush beneath your boot
In the chaos you create?
Say, what counsel do you follow
And whom your conscience keeps
As in the watchtower the watchman sleeps?
See! The one-eyed king sags upon his nails,
Crucified on the cross of imperial dream,
As soldiers sit and play at chess
And wash out their clothes
In the bloodstained stream,
Amid the carnage of the ravished and the raped,
The burned out pram
In the shell-pocked ditch,
The legless soldier
Lying in bits in coffin draped
With the flag of the country
That sent him off to die,
Torn by shrapnel that mills
The bone and brain
Of brave and trusting men
Who fought in vain,
Believing in the lie
That is their government's decree,
And even now,
At half the man you were,
The loss of your own eye
Cannot make you see.
The Great Game is the only game
They know how to play,
Whose rules were writ long ago
In another time
By elders far away,
'We're not to blame,
It's simply how it is;
No hard feelings,
It's what we do
To rid the world
Of scum like you.'
Come, sir, you look unwell,
What can the matter be,
Is it that the things you've seen
You cannot now unsee?
Let me take you by the hand
And show you what is hell,
And I shall tell you what awaits
The men whom conscience cast away,
And in torment dwell.
This is what you did,
And this the part you played,
I'm sure you'll feel at home here,
It's the same hell that you made.
I offered you the cup of life,
The wisdom of the wise,
And yet you slake
Your droughty thirst
With vinegar of lies.
Look at the person that you were
And the person you became,
In the end, sir,
The truth is clear,
The truth is very plain,
Those who do not feel,
Do not give a damn,
The greatest monster that ever was
Is the perfectly rational man.

Oh, you perfidious ministers!
Vipers that coil and hide in the long grass,
Shall I call you dignitaries
and accord you the honour you believe you deserve?
You, who think yourselves mighty and untouchable,
that even the laws of the commonwealth
cannot assail you.
Men of power certainly you are, for you live for power.
You feed upon it,
Yet I see not decent men
But ravening wolves feasting on the blood of the lamb.
I see criminals, murderers, rapists, thugs, warmongers,
masquerading as respectable members of society.
Of course, you do not do these things yourselves:
You are the respectable faces of the governments who do them.
You live lives remote from the concerns of the people
who struggle to survive in spite of you.
You believe that you work for the common peace
but you do not:
You make war, crush dissent and trample on the rights of Man.
You delude yourselves that you make the world a better place.
You do not make the world a better place:
you make it a worse place.

You believe yourselves to be civilised,
but you lack the one virtue that makes
a civilised person: morality.
You pretend to be respectable, but you are not:
You bully and squabble like petulant children,
lie and cheat and spy on each other,
and betray your fellow man.
You have sold your souls to power
and your humanity begs on the street.
You are destroyers of innocence,
and it is the innocent who are crushed beneath
the wheels of your nationalist ambitions.
The world survives in spite of you,
and not because of you.
You speak of values, but they are the values
of money, power, greed and self interest.
You proclaim the virtues of public morality
While every act you commit is a sin.

For you, nothing has value in itself
but only for what it can be bought, sold or exploited.
You don’t blink an eye when an entire species goes out of existence,
or an entire forest is destroyed in the name of 'progress'.
Nothing is sacred but that it can be torn up and consumed.
You have religion but you learn nothing from it.
You make promises but you break them.
You subvert your constitutions to extend your power.
You talk of peace but you do not know its name.
You want to control everything
but you suck the joy and laughter from the world.
You do not comprehend the sufferings of the people
whose fates you decide.
You do not deserve the earth that you walk on
and the earth does not deserve you.

All of you sit in judgement on each other.
The murderer sits in judgement on the thief.
The thief sits in judgement on the swindler.
The swindler sits in judgement on the rapist.
Why are you here,
when it is you who have undermined the very principles
of the institution in which you sit?
You who have sacrificed your moral principles
on the altar of power and ‘national interest’.
You pride yourselves on being 'rational'
but you are incapable of changing anything.
It is angry people who change the world,
not complacent elites, dusty stalls of grey men
who dine out on the world’s misery.
The world is falling apart about you;
It burns as you fiddle.
I ask you then: how can you be a solution to the problem
when you are part of the problem?

Power does not understand morality.
Power does not understand love.
It does not understand decency.
It does not understand tolerance, mercy or forgiveness.
The only thing Power understands is Power,
and the only thing Power respects is Force.
Verily, love of power is the demon of men.
For you, strength is the only virtue,
and kindness a weakness.
You lie to your people.
You tell them you will make them great again,
and then you drag your nations into the Abyss.
You send young men to die in wars you are too old to fight.
You strut like little boys, parading your stupid missiles
which are but extensions of your own egos.
You send young men to die in wars you are too old to fight.
You invent conspiracies to justify your power.
You set man against his brother and spew hatred in every word you speak.
But I say unto you that greatness does not lie in conquest,
in nations suborned beneath the heel of Great Powers.
It does not lie in the size of your armies or navies.
No, greatness lies in the quality of our thought.
It lies in the endurance of our cultures,
in the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge,
and ever shall that greatness of mind outlive
the rusted metal of your ships.

Arrogance among nations is the graveyard of the peace,
pulling us all into that frozen place of darkness and fear.
But still you play your tired old games,
pluck your harps of war and raise the blood-dipped flag,
and all your anthems are but the funeral songs of youth.
Each generation learns nothing from the last,
the fall of the curtain is the start of a new play,
and folly repeats itself like a drunkard’s dirge.
Cursed be the nationalists who make war
in the name of sectarian identity.
Cursed be the fundamentalists who usurp the name of God
to slaughter and persecute.
Cursed be the Great Powers who snarl and fight
like dogs over a corpse.
You bring war to the Shire.
You still the plough in its progress,
You burn the fields and snatch the screaming child
from its mother,
You drag decency through the street as a woman by the hair,
And you do all this in the name of
'national interest' and 'God's will'.

Verily, wine to the wise
is as ferment to the feckless.
Do you offer us vinegar that you respect us so little?
You murdered the man who showed you the Way of Love.
Soon you shall be the authors of your own destruction,
and what worth then shall be your thirty pieces of silver?
You shall weep tears of bitter aloe as your palaces
burn about you,
and your ashes shall blow on the wind.
Truly, the day shall come when your paper crowns shall slip
from your heads,
and ones more worthy shall wield power in the name
of Truth and Justice.
You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing.
Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.
In the name of God, go!

How humid is the air tonight
That rests like a woman's skin
Against my cheek,
How soft the pillows of my cot
Thar stroke with silk my dreams,
And oft it seems
The very sky doth melt in mourning song
As all across to landward lea
Watercolours run to wat'ry sea.
Heavy the haze that stays the ardent dawn
Whose milky sedge of cloud
Assumes the face of pale Pallas
In the newly-risen morn,
Between whose sleepy lids
Lightning blinks its eye
And trees with thunder tryst
As through the rainy mist
Birds float aloft the leaden air
To dot the washed out canvas of the day
And mount a plaintive call, even as they soar,
Awhile the water's lapping lute song
Strums the shining shore.

The spirit of my love runs free
With the great elk and the deer,
And weaves amid the dancers
When winter nights draw near,
Through the flaming torches
Her pale form I see
And her voice upon the wind doth say,
"My love, remember me."
I would find for me a cliff
Seamed in red and gold,
Created when the world was young
And the stars already old,
And I would sculpt your moonlike face
From the savage rock,
Build for you a monument
And cut it block by block,
And into it would carve your name
In slabs of polished stone
And each letter of your name
Upon it, I would finely hone.
Alas the task so far beyond me,
I sat and wept alone
For how might I immortalise you
With flint and awls of bone?
The tools that I most needed
I could not find at all,
So today, by torchlight, drew your likeness
In ochre on a wall.

I'm a private man who built a house
And filled it with my private thoughts,
That sit on settles and on sills,
All jumbled up and out of sorts,
My thoughts, I locked them all away,
Ne'er to see the light of day,
My mind a lost and lone estate
All walled by wire and broken glass,
And in my private mansion I grow old
And watch time pass,
And at drive's end there stands a gate
'Pon which a rusty sign proclaims,
'KEEP OUT, ALL YOU WHO WOULD DISTURB MY PEACE',
Beyond which the errant ghosts of love and hate
Mill and move without surcease.
No mirrors sit within my house
To tell me true what I've become,
Nor any life doth walk the halls,
Dine at table nor dance at balls,
Save one who should not be
Who on the stair
Turns to gaze reproachfully
And in her eyes fixed such regret
I wish that I could but forget;
For in truth,
Life I fear more than the morn,
'Twould be better had I not been born.
One day this house the earth shall swallow
And nevermore this house shall stand,
Birds shall call and more shall follow,
And a sigh sound out across the land.

I cannot live with this,
The unexploded ordnance of an angry calm,
Like the sulk of rainclouds on a patchwork day,
Your set face, impassive lips primmed
In passionless lines,
The mute roll of unrealised thunder.
How could I not have known
That a woman kills with silence,
And each step is to walk a minefield,
Each utterance to turn the whetstone of her wrath?
I have built an empire
And moved the great chess pieces of the world,
And all for you, my love.
Was it not enough that you basked in my deeds,
My name of everyone's lips?
Were you not enamoured of me
That day you wore flowers in your hair?
You, who have burned more boats than fabled Menelaus,
Victorious at Troy,
And I the last.
Shall it be the dagger or the poison,
The cutting cord behind the curtain,
A scented pillow my dreams to smother,
The gilded lover preening in the privy?
Behoves it not a hero to die tragically?
Then come at me now and give me my tragic death;
Set your dogs upon me,
But spare me the boredom of divorce,
For I tire of these windless days.

O girl, though yet a tightly cloistered bud,
Whorled in beauty, when thou bloomest
In thy season and tilt thy head above the crowd,
What manner of rose shalt thou become
And by what name endowed?

A perfect rose, chaste and white,
As though from milk of heaven thou didst drink?
Cry no! Christ can wait, thy love in bed I need,
For virgin thou canst not always be,
Stay that thought and to a nunnery speed.

A red and winsome rose, like full wine
Drawn from oaken vats,
That courseth o'er with scent and spice,
And of thy nectar I'd drink deep,
And with thy fiery temper play thee dice.

Yet, my warning angel doth remind,
A woman's passion can a gentle nature trounce,
For all thy heat wouldst thou be kind,
And sing sweet madrigals by-the-by
When I am old and nearly blind?

For how long must I live, this wretch,
Bereft of fairest companie?
For want of love, my throat be rough,
But here must stop, for I love wine too well
And thee not enough.

A pink rose, then, both bold and kind,
Sensual lover in my nights, by day of virtuous mind,
Thy full-lipped petals writ in signature of dew,
With softest summer rain asperged,
I would pluck thee when the day the day is new.

Love well and move on, the wise men say,
And in ev'ry minute cram a life,
For course of time love cannot stay
But sports the body of the old
And arranges new the coming day.

The very senses doth love detain
And with stillness seeds the soul,
But all things hath their span and can't remain,
Lovers tarry and lovers part
And bear each other's pain.

Love well and move on, the wise men say,
The lifelong lover wilt thou lose
And new love come thy way,
But though thou think it be forever,
Time takes all things away.

"Hold still, Missy, while ah braid ya hair,"
Old Maman chides,
Glancing sidelong through the drunken glass
Of old windows,
High wind slapping at the panes,
Cataracted by clime and crud,
As the fading light turns the colour
Of blue veins,
The day an edgy one, air tense,
With whiff of cordite,
Thrumming like a distant engine,
Bloated clouds racing like
The grey bellies of whales
Through the grey sea,
And trees setting up a shivering
That tells they know something is coming;
The sky has not spoken, but it will,
And when it does, it will be magnificent.
"It's on days like this, ya see dem," Mamon says
In her dry leathery voice,
"Back in '65, I were sittin' on ma steps,
An' ah saw dem."
"Saw who, Granma?" the brown girl lilts,
Gazing up at the old woman with big eyes;
She's fourteen, the wide world calling her
With the lie of possibility.
"Dem as lies behin' da big house, child,
An' shouldn' be a walkin',
But ah saw dem walk, as Christ be ma witness."
A crack, first of many,
Storm bursting like an aneurysm,
Rain rivetting the punk grass,
Big wet pellets peppering the ground
Like shot,
Drumming on the tin roof of the old slave quarters.
"Ah sin dem, walkin' toward dat grove o'er yonder,"
Maman drawls, filmy eyes misted by time,
"Al' in white shirts an' white dresses,
A carryin' deir saints,
Ol' Mary Chesley, Annie Cawley, and ol' Michael Caston,
Th' blood soakin' through his shirt
Fro' his whippin’ by the masser,
An' dey called on summat terrible
In dem woods,
An' da masser dead in a week,
Al' frothin' an' covered in boils,
An' dem, deir saints taken fro' dem
An' whipped der death fer deir sins."
The sky sunders, baleful flash
Like a photographer's bulb,
Bleaching trees and scrawny grass,
Mocking them with with their own shocked reflections,
And old Maman lets go the girl's braids,
Extends a shaking arm toward the fields
Hazed with rain, and sets up a wild cry,
"Lord preserve me, its dem,
Don' look, Missy, in th' name o' God,
Don' look."
Granny Maman slips to the floor,
In her eyes the look of a shot deer,
Fight gone, waiting for the hunter,
And Missy weeping as she holds the old lady's head,
Old grey nigger hair, springy still, defiant in age,
Old face tanned to leather,
Eighty years working the fields
Sack full o' struggle scored in the skin,
And now she walks the bloody rows
With Mary Chesley, Annie Cawley, and ol’ Michael Caston,
Walks with them, to the sound of thunder,
On a rainy night in Georgia.

I'd steal the very stars from God,
The stars, I'd pluck them down,
I'd bind their lights about thy head
And set them in a crown.

I'd place the moon upon thy throat,
I'd weave thee sandals from the sea,
I'd mine the earth for a robe of gold
And the Northern Lights would follow thee.

If I could do all this and more,
My Queen of Heaven wouldst thou be
And thy light would lift the hearts of men
And thy face would smile on me.

What dreams are these, oh piteous loon?
A fallen fool that canst no further fall,
But lives out his days from hand to mouth
In Bedlam's grey stone wall.

Yet though thou art not mighty
Nor hold existence in thy sway,
Thou art kind and show me charity
And read the hours away.

And so, sweet Julia, wouldst think me less
If I went on bended knee
And asked of thee most privily
Wilt thou my Queen of Heaven be?

What will you do, Lady Blackbird,
Now the poppies are all blown
And winter scatters sleet upon the fell?
The leaves are fallen from the trees
And you have no nest to dwell.
What will you do, Lady Blackbird,
When the sedge lies thickly on the lake
And iron clad groans the earth?
When the white wind scours the fields
And drapes the land in dearth.
Lady Blackbird, you must know,
That autumn, with its fruits and flowers,
Passed by long ago,
Tha apple cankers in the frost
And the worm lies far below,
And in the midst of winter's pall,
So far away, seems to you,
That splendid season of the Fall,
Berries burgeoning on the bush,
Red as red can be,
And elder, black as eyes of birds,
Upon the elder tree,
Glist by sun and kissed by mist,
Dusky damsons, moist in mellow morn,
Brightest holly, hot as blood,
Blackberries teat-like on the thorn.
Though snow doth scar the solemn crag
And sweeps the wooded drove,
Lady Blackbird, this winter you'll survive,
Until the tilting earth announce
That spring shall soon arrive,
Whose warmth shall wake the tender shoot
And the earthworm in its lair;
Life is strongest in the root,
It beats down in the loam,
And all across the southern sky
The birds are flying home.

He comes here to get away,
To the hill looking out over the city,
The cathedral a gothic eminence in the distance,
Rearing perpendicular to grasp
A mystery beyond mind,
The old town clustering protectively around it,
Like penned sheep,
A sea of red tile and Georgian brick,
And he lies on his back,
A grass straw in his mouth,
Gazing up at the ice cream clouds
Scaffolding the blue bowl of heaven,
Passing time as they move past his vision
Like celluloid frames,
But today, the clouds are frothing and boiling
In the high wind,
Rolling like great wheels across the sky,
Above a sea of furious grass,
The cathedral weather cock glinting gold
as it spins,
And he is running with his kite,
Into the wind which takes it
With a snap,
The way the wind punches a sail,
Red streamers fluttering like dragon fire,
Whoops as it soars and whirls,
Ducking and diving like a swift,
The current rifling his hair as the kite
Tugs in his hand,
Rifling his hair as his mother used to, before...
The pain returns but he bats it away,
Through tearing eyes,
Yelling into the maw of the gale,
Opens his arms and lets the wind roar through him,
Leeching the sadness and sorrow
That form dark clots in his soul;
One day, the covetous wind will seize the kite
From his hand,
Bowling it into rushing rivers of air
To the place where lost kites go,
And he'll watch it zig and zag across the sky
Until it is gone forever,
But for now, the memory he holds on to
Is the one that hurts him the most.

It is raining in the Boulevard de Saint Germain,
A steady drizzle that sheens the cobbles
In the quaint little streets
Of the Latin Quarter,
Iron lamps casting their glow
On the rustic brasserie with ochred walls
And blue shutters,
A rainbow of umbrellas bobbing past
With the desultory urgency of painted tortoises,
And in their midst,
Abstracted from the tourist tide,
White clown face, black faux tears,
The fool juggles rain.
Jongleur! Street artiste!
Master of mime!
The drops don't touch the ground,
He catches them so fast,
Whirls them into the air again,
Whirls them so high,
And now and then fixes his eye
On the smattering of coin
On the outspread cloth.
Courting couples pause to point,
The old garçon shaking his head
As he darts between tables,
Gendarme, hands holstered on hips,
Looking on bemused,
While the little sausage dog wees the lamppost
Indifferently,
Humans are weird.
A chorus of cat calls
Thrills through the throng,
Ribald titters r1ppling
Like wind through grass,
But if the fool is hurt, he evinces no sign,
Not so much the crease of an eye,
In the white canvas face,
Blank,
Inscrutable as empty paper,
Just tilts those black wells of eyes
And looks...
Who's the sad one?
But behind the faux tears, we know,
Are real tears,
And in a quiet moment,
As he wipes off his paint
And removes his black beret
And stripy vest,
The fool will whisper the secret only he knows,
What juggler can juggle
A thousand balls at once?

long road winds into cloud, dew falls on mountain, mountain is high,
soaked shirt sticks to skin, rain in my eyes, tears in my eyes, sound of mist,
cloud thick on mountain, how will I find my way home, basan bird?

basan bird sings in tree, sings of home, sings of Aiko, sings of bed,
ghost fire lights bamboo path through forest, basan bird please guide me home,
red bird of dawn shows the way, quiets the mountain, calms the great river.

paper lantern glows by door, windless night, Aiko is steaming rice,
Aiko at the gate, lamp shines on snow, last night you dreamt I would come,
food on the table, fire in her eyes, warm bed, lucky man.

Too long this life have I lived,
That the world has passed me by,
The iron shoes of time and gravity
Weight my wings,
And the whispered voice of oblivion recalls
The song the siren sings,
My being an empty shell washed up
On some benighted beach,
A ghost in the glass of shut-up shops,
And familar comforts out of reach,
This realm the face of a demented lover
I no longer know,
And I would rise above it all
And to the Light I'd go.

Autumn,
Mud in the lanes,
Rickety haycart lurching,
Jolting over frozen ruts,
White sugar of frost on nettles,
Vines sprawling with wine-dark berries,
Today, not the crisp clarity
Of warm, sun-filtered hours,
But sky the colour of weak tea, amnesic,
Befuddled by filthy rags of cloud,
Tattered and torn,
Slithering slovenly in the rook-wracked air,
Birds bursting from out the crazy hair of hedges,
And faces in the knots of trees, watching dispassionately
The labours of men,
The trees are old,
Their minds move slowly but their memories are long,
They've survived civil wars, hid kings and crooks,
Tolerated the sturdy boots of small boys
Slipping up boughs, impertinences of nails,
Tree houses lodged in elbows of branches,
And patiently held court to chaffinches and crows,
Whose eggs, all mottled blues and greens,
Cluster like nuggets in spiny baskets of twig,
While in the ancient orchard, fruitful and fair,
Apples rosy and fat as a goodwyfe's cheeks,
Bathe in fleecy softness of mist,
Awaiting the crescendo of dawn,
That will light their pregnancy
In golds and greens,
Windfalls, worm-eaten, littering the grass,
Like balls from some abandoned game,
Slugs bellying blindly through ripely rotting leaves,
'Mid haze of smoke from bonfires,
Gauzy blue in the fading light,
Carrying scents of applewood across
The tiny churchyard,
Where graves of poets commingle with those
Who could not read, forgotten both
In the complicity of time,
Mouldering verse in florid ink
Awaiting resurrection,
As in the little Saxon church,
The vicar receives the first fruits,
Carefully laid in baskets, and blesses the harvest
In that time-honoured pagan way.

"Life is full of laughter and tears, son,"
our Dad says to me once.
“The bitter and the sweet all mixed together,
and on any given day,” he reminds,
“you’ll never know what flavour you’re going to get,”
prescience lost on a lad in his twenties.
We’re sitting in his car
drinking coffee from a thermos
on a bleak November day,
the churning winter sea thrumming and drumming
below the esplanade, restive, edgy, unpredictable,
and on some days downright sick,
tubercular sea vomiting blood,
throwing up its guts in heaving convulsions
of spittle and weed,
groaning in the pain of its infested lungs,
beating against the sea houses and the coastguard’s cottage
with the rage of a drunken lover,
and yet on a windless day, becalmed,
swelling sensually like a woman,
warm sun setting afire each bead of sweat
on its liquid skin,
and that is how I remember our Dad,
a gentle man, but for his apparent calm,
full of tidal swells and hidden currents,
that swirled beneath, unspoken,
as private and mysterious as the ocean itself,
and although his life took him away from the sea,
he always returned to it,
his alpha and his omega,
not for him the claustrophobia of the provinces,
the overbearing bustle of cities,
but the ever-expanding horizon with its promise
of infinite possibility.

Our Dad,
I remember him in flashes of light,
in snatches of memory as though dredged
from some ocean floor,
not in biography or history,
for a person isn’t remembered by these,
but by the inflexions of personality,
idiosyncrasies of behaviour,
occasions when they rose above themselves,
and we glimpsed behind the mask,
those exquisitely painted vignettes that confer
a momentary verisimilitude.
I recall him from those grainy wartime photos
printed on stiff card,
the youthful soldier posing with my future mum,
I recall the middle aged public servant sweeping
through the door in his soft wool overcoat,
hair immaculately combed back,
and I remember most vividly the later man,
visage less chiselled, more gracile,
a terminus of lines connecting the valleys and ridges
of his face,
intricate as a cuneiform tablet
an entire life impressed into the soft clay of his features;
An enduring memory: a hot afternoon,
our Dad in the back garden,
freckled, sun-reddened belly phlegmatically overflowing
a pair of loose-fitting trunks,
pipe loosely clenched between stolid teeth,
inclined at an angle like a loose gutter,
thin white legs straddling,
in the pose of a cellist,
a bowl of shucked peas,
as though he were some Bactrian Buddha
in a forgotten time-dusted temple,
contemplating existence.
Always the peacemaker was our dad,
smoothing over Mum’s irrational outbursts,
I wasn’t being helpful, or I wasn’t joining in,
when my only crime was to sit quietly immersed in a book,
but for Mum I was withdrawn and it weren't natural,
yet in truth all our Dad ever wanted was a quiet life
and a quiet home he could come home to,
change into his comfortable old cords and woolly jumper,
pop on his loafers,
and light his pipe in the garden
in the incipient chill of the closing day;
a constant presence in my life was our Dad,
solid, and fair with it,
anchored in himself,
with the reassuring certainty of a boiler
screwed to the plate,
could never imagine him not being there,
age’s dark lantern had yet to ray its baleful beam,
and death, a stranger, walked a road of many years.

I am six,
and here is Dad soothing me to sleep,
a great storyteller was our Dad,
called up during the war, stationed in India,
told me stories of his army days, did our Dad,
about how hard the monsoons were,
which came crashing down,
bouncing off the ground like beads,
and how everyone danced in the street,
celebrating the coming of rain,
how they had to stand their beds on bricks
to stop the termites eating the legs,
how the termites would even eat your boots,
given half the chance,
and how one night, a bloody great cobra
slithered into the hut
and one of our Dad's mates
shot it with his revolver,
showed me a photo of his platoon once,
clean-looking young men lined up in rows,
always kept it in his wallet,
perhaps to remind him
of the comradeship of men,
but I didn't see the army man in Dad,
I just saw our Dad.

Grammar school boy was our Dad,
still kept his Palgrave’s Golden Treasury,
cover scuffed, yellowed pages thumbed and thinned,
the binding long since given up the ghost,
and he'd liberally quote from Keats and Shelley,
filling my imagination with the misty roseate glow
of sun-curtained Autumn days,
the drowsy, numbing sensuality of red wine,
making me long for “a beaker full of the warm south,”
of the lure of beautiful, dangerous women luring knights to their doom,
Byron’s voluptuous muse walking “in beauty like the night”,
and Lady Macbeth magnificently unsexed and unhinged,
filled “from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty!”
In those heady days, Ozymandias’ legs
were a regular visitor to the house,
and I imagined myself a Romantic poet
ruffled shirt, replete with frilly cuffs,
and a raffish necktie with a black bow
flopping desultorily over my collar,
residing, perhaps, in some forgotten folly,
or a Martello tower, gull-haunted,
on a stormy wind-soured stretch of coast,
and writing poetry by cnadle
in the darkest chambers of the night;
oh, what an impression those scorching poems made
on the malleable mind of a child!

Meticulous was our Dad,
precise in everything he did,
if he agreed to meet one at a given time,
he’d be there,
as when he used to meet me
off the London train
and he'd be sitting in his car
outside the station in his beige overcoat
and Russian hat looking every inch
the card-carrying Communist,
cheeks spidered with ruddy webs
of broken capillaries
iron grey hair thick on his collar
bristling like badger brush;
Dad's word was his bond
and he never broke it,
trained as an accountant after the war
stole his youth, and the habit stuck,
Sunday afternoons, he'd make himself a mug of instant,
get his bank books out of the big old Wellington chest,
that smelled of polish and old wood,
lay his statements flat on the dining table,
and match up his incomings and outgoings,
what cheques had cleared, what hadn't,
so he knew exactly how much money he had,
mortified if he were out by a penny, was our Dad,
and he always told me, never get into debt,
and when I did,
it was like I'd never listened,
after that, I understood the value of things;
that was our Dad's gift to me.
Particular dresser, too, was our Dad,
come the summer hols,
always ordered a taxi for the airport,
and stepped out in a dark navy suit,
tie neatly knotted,
Mum in her Jaeger dress,
always went for Jaeger did Mum,
and Dad said, proudly, she came out of the top drawer,
her mum's being the only house on the council estate
to employ a paid housekeeper,
so when the plane touched down in Mallorca,
Dad would be descending the airplane steps
in the sweltering heat
looking like James Bond;
class act was our Dad.

I am twelve,
and I am watching our Dad out the French doors,
collecting sticks and branches,
loved a good bonfire, did our Dad,
of a Fall day he'd be out there
in the back garden,
thick duffle coat and bobbly hat,
raking up the filaments of branch
into a teepee on the vegetable patch,
scrunching balls of newspaper in the interstices,
lighting them and waiting
for the tinder to catch,
and he'd stand there for hours, would our Dad,
transfixed in some shamanic trance,
as it got dark,
watching the flames dancing, the embers glowing,
walking around it, poking it with his stick
and then just stopping to gaze, mesmerised,
until the pile collapsed in a hiss of sparks,
what are you thinking, old man?
what memories are you reliving?
Mum called him 'the pyromaniac',
but it's a primal thing, I guess,
this fascination with fire.
Guy Fawkes night was different, mind,
then we’d all be out there,
togged up to the nines,
our Dad nailing a Catherine wheel to the fence,
watching it shriek as it spun,
screaming white tail of fire
manically spiralling in the crackling night,
rockets whizzing into speckled darkness,
pinpricks of stars cold as cats’ eyes,
bursting in a confetti of coloured sparks,
like the Holy Spirit had announced itself,
and a glow of happiness on our Dad’s face.

I am fourteen,
and I am wheeling my bicycle out of the garage,
carefully circumventing Dad’s car,
fussy about his car, was our Dad,
learned to drive in the army,
then taught Mum,
always had Renaults did our Dad,
changed them every three years for a new one,
serviced at the main dealer, no oily rag;
in high summer,
dahlias dancing in vivid reds and yellows,
butterflies browsing buddleia,
and garden alive with the traffic of bees,
Dad’s car, parked on the drive, was the shiniest darned car
in the whole darned road,
Sunday mornings would find him outside
in his 'rompers' on a diamond day,
with his bucket and sponge,
and he'd spend all morning out there
washing, waxing and polishing it,
till he could see his face looking back at him;
didn't know much about engines, our Dad,
but there he'd be with the bonnet up,
looking over the 'guts',
wiping the muck off the manifold,
turning the engine over to guage the sound
like he's a doctor listening to someone's chest;
on the day he decided he wasn't going to drive anymore,
he gifted his car to our neighbour's daughter,
she had it in a ditch the first week,
but "it was the principle" he said;
generous to a fault, was our Dad.
Fascinated by steam engines, too, was our Dad,
and not just steam engines but traction engines,
balmy high August days spent driving the county
to rallies… and there they’d come rolling along,
brawny Burrells and gaily painted Showman’s,
belching behemoths lumbering over the fields
like mechanical wildebeest,
engulfed in a scent
of atomised steam and oil,
and our Dad on the footplate with the driver,
pipe in hand, like a latter-day Casey Jones,
beaming a smile as wide as the sun,
mum cussing him for getting soot on her cardigan.
Too busy clambering on his engine to notice, was our Dad.

Mum died one winter,
a stroke the doctors said,
collapsed in the kitchen at breakfast,
Dad panicked, tore round to our neighbour
who called an ambulance,
sat by her bed all night, did our Dad,
but Mum never recovered, just got worse,
so our Dad arranged for a nursing home
and somehow managed to stretch his pension
to cover the bills,
even if it meant living on cold sausages and tomatoes,
in a lot of pain near the end was our Mum,
knocked out with morphine,
smaller than I remembered her,
as though she had shrunk in the night,
lank grey hair plastered in disarray
on her sweat beaded brow,
and I remember driving up to our Dad
on that last day,
late afternoon as the sun was waning,
casting a pale wash over the fields,
ran over a fox on the downland road,
poor little thing,
saw its shocked body tumbling behind
in the mirror,
grim portent of death's imminence,
and me keeping vigil while our Dad slept,
sitting by the bed talking to her,
though I doubt she could hear...
but she might have...
watching her breathing slow right down
like the lengthening spaces between waves,
and then just... stop, like a clock stops,
and I'd be craning forward waiting for the next one
but it never came,
and that was it, just the night and the silence,
heavy like a dusty carpet,
Dad took it with dignity, didn't cry or anything,
but I could see the life had gone out of him,
playing across his face a symphony of sadness,
been together sixty years,
since before the war, worshipped her he did,
that was the only time I'd seen our Dad crushed,
his vulnerability spread out before me,
like a mural,
because parents never show it, do they,
till they split up or one dies;
silent we returned to the empty house,
no more a home,
pre-dawn light bleakly breaking
on a sick day drained of colour,
blackbirds trilling lamentations
in the damping air.

Now our Dad's gone too,
and there's only the empty wheelchair
Sitting in our garage,
had to go in a nursing home himself
once his memory went and he got unsteady
on his feet,
kept falling backwards on his heels,
his mates from the army,
they'd all gone, and he was the last,
no more reunions for our Dad,
I used to take him out to the park
to feed the ducks,
loved feeding the ducks did our Dad,
and one day, before he got too bad,
he asked if I'd drive him to see the house
where he was born,
and the church where he'd sung in the choir,
and I guess it brought his life around full circle,
strange, in't it, how as we're nearing the end,
we look back at the beginning;
that was my last day out with our Dad,
he got out of bed one night
and cracked his head on the wall,
and I wonder to this day
if Mum had called him
and he was going to her,
and I held vigil for him too,
with my girlfriend;
it feels strange now,
not having our Dad around,
big cuddly old Dad,
he was a great guy was our Dad.
Goodnight, you gentle soul.

I am sixty-four,
I am standing on the cliff on the headland,
and there is the sea again,
the sea that is the beginning and the end,
slickly swelling like heavy oil,
a woman of beauty and violence,
loosing her hair to the fluting storm,
eater of ships,
boiler of bones in the briny broth,
into whose arms Shelley walked and ne’er returned,
rasping wind raping,
pulling my hair,
wrenching my coat that flaps pathetically
like a wounded crow,
the steady ticking of rain
falling through an hourglass sky,
beating out a requiem on my face,
our Dad is gone, but he is everywhere,
the elements dismember us,
take our clothes, our flesh, our dignity,
until we become them
and join the wild hunt, roaring and surging
over hill and cliff,
sea thrashing like an angered bull,
in the orgiastic madness of Being,
green saplings mightily moving earth
to peer nervously over the trench,
and somewhere, our Dad is part of it all,
his consciousness, his memories,
for nothing really dies…
does it?
Nothing really dies.

Iam a mighty citadel in the midst of strife,
Corruption shall not pass my gate,
The mighty armies of the North,
They shall not breach,
Nor plagues from the South
My walls shall reach,
By my stillness, I hold the balance
Of all things,
And on my hand the sacred rings,
A shining city set upon a hill, am I,
Of scintillant towers and temples tall,
And ever open is my door
To the desperate and the poor,
My soul a sun that giveth light
To those who dwell in darkness,
And in darkness toil in plight,
Nor e're shall walk the byways of the dead,
But the meadows of Heaven soft beneath my feet,
And in Elysian fields the lotus eat,
Cleaving not to evil nor the moral maze,
But joy shall follow me all my days,
And night shall not consume me,
Nor hope devour,
But my lamp gives forth a ray of power,
A beacon of hope and of rebirth
To those who travail upon the earth.

I felt so guilty when I told you,
Your face all the colours of sadness,
As though I had delivered to your gentle soul
A mortal blow,
I could blame it on the stars,
This madness,
But it was me, me!
And all for my restless soul 'twas me,
The intoxication of new love, potent as a drug,
And in that moment I forgot
That still, calm love you bore,
Unspoken in the humdrum mill of life mundane,
The silken thread on which I strung my life,
And oftentimes as I pass by,
I'll stand beneath the old iron lamp
Outside your window in the rain,
Watch you light a candle on the table,
Gathering your children in your arms,
Bundled over a book,
In the glowing orange of a firelit night,
And realise what I lost, where now I roam,
That cursory glance, a loving look,
Knowing, knowing deep down,
I can never come home.

Y ou wrote me a love poem,
The words burned like liquor in my throat,
Lit a fire in my belly,
And my heart warmed like a shrew,
Asleep in its nest of leaves and twigs,
Swelled and steamed,
Like a bread roll fresh from an oven,
Juggled in the hands, it is so hot!
Ah, the effect your words have on me,
Pulling on my emotions as the moon
Tugs at the wide blue sea,
And they travel the earth to reach me,
Travel miles and miles,
Hitching rides on trains,
Crossing mountain passes on mules,
On boats sailing the swell,
To reach this lonesome lighthouse,
Clinging like a limpet, sturdy on its crag,
Whose bright beam sweeps the uncertain ocean
In search of you,
Through illimitable fog
Of time and distance,
Looking for love.
How tenacious are your words,
That they endure such hardship,
For me to press this frail paper to my heart
And wish that it were you.

"Pint of mild, please barman, and one for yourself,
and a packet of smoky bacon, please,
£7.90, ta very much,
tax gone up again, I see,
sign of the times, in't it?
like most things,
technology changes almost ev'ry day,
can't get a hang of those smartphones,
could work the old telephone, no trouble,
and puts people out of work too, technology,
I remember when the exchanges were digitalised,
back in '68,
the bosses came round and told all the girls
they didn't need them no more,
some just about to go on holiday an' all,
weren't right how it were done,
weren't right at all,
and do you remember the old typing pools?
I worked in insurance,
big firm it were,
and in the basement you had the typing pool,
'bout fifty girls in all,
all clacking away,
clackety-clack, clackety-clack,
red nails going like the clappers,
like hens pecking,
and it were like a hen house too,
new girls at the back, told to mind their place,
and you had to be careful going in there,
there was Charlotte, she looked a stunner,
but she had a side to her, did Charlotte,
thought men were beasts,
and one day this young un' called Frank walks in,
looking like one of them wide boys,
cocky-like,
swaggering around full of confidence,
the kind what used to flog nylons during the war,
and he thought he'd chat her up,
well, she strung him along and then stood up,
and turned on him,
gave him a right stripping down,
and our Frank, he went sick for six months with stress,
I kid you not,
and he never set foot in the typing pool again,
and then there was Lizzie --
'Lesbo Lizzie' as we used to call her,
on account she preferred girls to boys,
no one thought much about it,
'twere men what needed to mind themselves in those days,
but no one bothered Lesbo Lizzie,
see, you could have a laugh and a joke with Lesbo Lizzie,
she didn't mind, liked the attention,
though Harris one time set up this young kiddie
to ask her for a date,
that didn’t go well,
but it was Harris what got it in the neck,
and then there was Melissa,
right little spitfire, she were, hot as hell,
but she'd say exactly what she thought,
and if you were a dick, she'd tell you straight
you were a dick,
worse if she were drunk after bingo,
so you had to mind how you went,
me, I was always respectful when I went down there,
'Miss Shaw, could you please type this for me by tomorrow?'
an' no malarkey,
anyways, one year all the typewriters were replaced,
they had 'word processors' now,
and half the girls lost their jobs,
no idea where they went,
though rumour had it,
Lesbo Lizzie seduced the boss’s daughter
and were living together,
but occasionally I'd catch a sight of Charlotte
in the high street, she were preggers and all,
bet her kid's all grown up now,
and I wonder what he makes of the world he inherited,
that little kiddie,
not much of one, I'll warrant,
not much of one at all."

Where have they all gone, the check-out girls,
old Millie in her bangles and pearls,
and little Joely, just out of school,
with her mischievous eyes,
that made old men drool,
"good morning, Mr Simkins, how are you today?"
so busy looking at her I forgot to pay,
but pay I did and went on my way,
stumbling out in November rain
carrying my bags and nursing my pain,
past the office I worked in forty years,
won't be long before that disappears,
seen some changes there an' all,
typewriters that clacked staccato now still,
silence broken by the perennial road drill,
dull click of keyboards and flat plastic screens,
drawl of the photocopier and fax machines,
gone are the telephones with big circular dials,
red rounded handsets chunkily perched
on bulky receivers that trilled as they lurched,
just the toneless bleep of flat plastic phones
and glamorous PA’s supplanting horn-rimmed crones,
and in the centre of town the streetcars are gone,
old rails rusting where once they shone,
all the department stores shuttered and closed,
crumbling brickwork bare and exposed,
tattered posters peeling
off scrappy signboard,
photocopied flyers promising substantial reward
for a cat that’s gone missing six months ago
and where it went we simply don’t know,
bills for a punk band that’s already played,
massage parlours where men can get laid,
and on I walk through pedestrianised brick
trying to balance my bag and my stick
past the new shopping centre,
all concrete and glass,
already got a crack in it – bet it won’t last,
grey, sad and dowdy in the drizzling rains,
blotched with runs from weather stains,
they tore out the guts of our lovely old town,
with its quaint little shops I’d stroll around,
the bustling market where we’d mass and mill,
where stallholders hawked in voices shrill,
and out on the ring road that weaves round the town,
hyperstores nest squatly on islands of brown
as traffic whizzes round them, circling like flies,
and lofty in the distance, the grungy high rise
that springs up like a weed through the busted tarmac,
balconied prisons set back-to-back,
oh, how I wish they were all out of sight,
these deplorable exemplars of planning blight,
all the old neighbourhoods that used to be there,
levelled by developers who just didn’t care,
verdant verges sliced for wider roads
to carry artics with bigger loads,
where, oh where, has it all gone,
the mellow beauty of old brick
and leafy lanes with hedges thick,
of old houses with stately doors
that stood in this place before the wars,
glossed with paint, adorned with brass,
Georgian windows and Victorian bays,
where the sun would reach on most days,
black-railinged balconies over garden squares,
tall ceilinged drawing rooms for discrete affairs?
where's it all gone, the grace and the style?
I haven’t seen it for a while,
everyone rushing, no time to talk,
and when I go out, alone I walk,
so here I stop and find myself,
a shambling figure on a vandalised bench
on a traffic island amid the stench
of an overturned bin liberally strewn
by galvanised gulls – hope it’ll be cleaned up soon,
and some poor sod’s done his tyres as he rode
over a broken bottle in the road.

Hello snail, hello slug,
Now I know why you look smug,
My lettuces you’ve eaten, and cabbages too,
And as if these weren’t enough for you,
My runner beans you would devour,
And chomp them all within the hour,
Nothing is safe from you that grows,
Save my berries – and the birds took those,
You blithely ooze your way along,
And if slugs could sing, you’d be singing a song,
Eye stalks waving desultorily,
Under the leaves where I can’t see,
Leaving your slime on my greenhouse glass,
That I’ll have to wash when next I pass,
And at the end you do a poo,
Words cannot express my contempt for you!
But I’ve prepared my next assault,
And bought myself some household salt,
And when next I see you slide and slither,
You can bet your boots that I won’t dither,
Into my bucket you will go,
And another slug day never know,
For in my salt you will dissolve,
And for sixty pence my problem solve,
And now the smirk is on my face,
One small victory for the human race!

The curlew flies its heathen nest,
Its wail laments the air,
As it circles out toward the west
Crying out in despair,
And on the seething shingle spit,
Aloof the hummock and the dune,
The white lady waits on the grey pebble shore,
Pale as a shroud in the witching moon,
And with ushering words she doth implore
I walk with her that haunted shore,
Betwixt the land and lapping sea,
Where the restless wind doth roam and roar,
And to her must I go, my love,
And when I go, I’ll be no more,
And I would walk into that sea,
Among the rocks and wrack and weed,
Where the voices call, oh call to me,
To spend my soul in the moon-dipped tides,
As ghosted ʼgainst the grey fell sky,
The curlew glides
And shrieks its cry.

Awoman in her power can make you feel small,
A woman in her power can make you not wanna live at all,
She’ll stamp her foot, say that’s the rule,
Ain’t no woman gonna tolerate a fool,
Cos she’s a woman,
Oh yeah, cos she’s a woman.

A woman in her power can make you feel tall,
A woman in her power will hold you in her thrall,
She’ll make you feel like you’ve got the prize,
And you’re the one she goes to for some ‘exercise’,
Cos she’s a woman,
Oh yeah, cos she’s a woman.

She don’t care if you’re Howard Hughes,
She don’t care if you’ve got holes in your shoes,
As long as you’re faithful, she’ll love you,
And she’ll be there beside you when you’re feelin’ blue,
Cos she's a woman,
Oh yeah, cos she’s a woman.

A woman in her power is in the driving seat,
A woman in her power don’t take no s**t,
She’ll sit at the bar with her legs all bare,
“Hey guys, don’t stare, that’s my gal over there,”
Cos she’s a woman,
Oh yeah, cos she’s a woman.

A woman in her power loves going on a date,
A woman in her power scorns you if you’re late,
She’ll work hard for you to make it to the top,
But if you disappoint her, she’ll let you drop,
Cos she’s a woman,
Oh yeah, cos she’s a woman.

She don’t care if you’re Donald Trump,
She don’t care if you’ve gotten the hump,
She’ll stand by you if you stand by her,
And you won’t even recognise the man you were,
Cos she’s a woman,
Oh yeah, cos she’s a woman.

A woman in her power is the power behind a man,
A woman in her power says, “do it if you can”,
She’ll be right beside you when you play the dice,
And she’s the one’ll remind you when you pay the price,
Cos she’s a woman,
Oh yeah, cos she’s a woman.

A woman in her power knows how to play for kicks,
A woman in her power ain’t like other chicks,
She knows exactly when to turn on the charm,
And she knows she looks good with a man on her arm,
Cos she’s a woman,
Oh yeah, cos she’s a woman.

Old souls weep not,
For they hath seen too much to cry,
The many-mansioned tragedies of how we die,
And even when their sorrows well,
Their tears are dry.

Time lends distance to the feeling of pain,
Old Rome with its armies and emperors bad,
Lamentable slaves flayed for a fad,
A schoolbook exercise that evokes some pity,
But makes nobody mad.

But the nineteenth century,
It’s right next door,
And only goes back a few generations or more,
And we shed furious tears for the slave master’s whip,
In a way that we wouldn’t twenty centuries before.

You came to me when the day was late,
And bore a single rose,
But a rose is not a match for fate,
Too late you gave your love,
Too late.
Your love you wildly did profess,
And flowers adorned your hair,
The breeze it played about your dress,
But my life to you I cannot give,
My love I can’t confess.
Our love ran out of time, my sweet,
Though that it was strong,
And would have made my life complete,
But so little time is left me now,
To love would be deceit.
Soon shall come the darkening hour
Oh, will you sit and see me through?
Though the wind come up and the sky doth lour,
Thy hand on mine shall give me strength,
Thy love is like a tower.
Pluck me some music and play me to sleep,
And each chord shall sound
A note in the deep
And when my eyes are closed, my love,
Don't you weep, don't you weep.

The storm wind blows along the coast,
Billows among the leaves,
And I shall die when the wind is high,
And blusters in the eaves,
I want to watch the sky race by,
Sky as grey as stone,
Imagine I see in forms of cloud
The faces I have known,
I want to feel the colours of the storm,
I want to see the wind,
I want to watch the birds flying south
And dance in mist that’s limned,
A yellow moon undressing
Through the threshing trees,
And taste the pale rain that comes
Riding on the breeze,
Sing me out with your sweet voice,
Sing me your lonely song,
For I shan’t be stopping long, my love,
I shan’t be stopping long.
Speak of the love that could have been,
As you stroke this tired old head,
For I fear this night I’ll die my love,
This night I will be dead.

The graves lie tranquil in Friston church,
Shaded by the yew,
Ghosted names erased by time,
Of old worthies I never knew,
And quiet now lie the dreaming dead,
Whom mere weathered stones
And slanting slabs bequeath,
Tired tombs listing, sunk in grass,
Like beached ships pulled beneath,
The wind of their passing stirs no more,
Nor sweeps the chill of dread,
But among the pretty sprays of flowers,
Eternal silence weighs instead,
And here the pathway through the 'yard,
At its end, the Tapsell gate,
And beyond, in shadowed lee of oak and elm,
On summer evenings late,
Friston pond placid lies,
Edged by rushes and grasses tall,
Where sport nymphs and dragonflies,
And lilies all,
And it is my wont in August days
To take the long straight path by flinted wall,
And from that height, through shimmering haze
Of early morning’s misty rays,
Gaze out on the loveliest of all scenes,
Sweeping waves of lea and ley,
Quilted shawl of olives and greens,
Hills rounded as razored chins,
Cropped by woolly wads of sheep,
And beyond, past Crowlink hamlet shady and cool,
Set within its valley deep,
Betwixt the splendid-breasted Downs,
Walk the old and well-worn way to where,
ʼMidst glassy water and breathy air,
Awaits infinity
Of seamless sea and silky sky,
So smooth through lustral daze of dew,
That though the wondʼring mind escry,
No finite line greets the eye,
But merest change of subtle hew,
From indigo of ample sea,
To paler wash of blue,
Streaked with flattened bands of cloud,
Touched as though by softest brush,
As a newborn baby’s rosy blush,
And above, the lightsome sky itself
Cerulean and luminous in the echoing air,
As on the cliffs white and fair,
Decked with thistle and yellow gorse,
The meadow pipit shrilly pipes
And the shy hare bounds its course
Through clustered pink and purple flowers
Bobbing bonnily in billowing breeze,
And the only sound to reach the ear
Is the lazy buzzing of the bees,
While far below on pebble beach,
The spangled sea quietly breathes,
Lounging lazily among the rocks
As the shingle lowly seethes,
And on these Downs an hour I’ll wend away,
Sunbeams warm upon my face,
In the resplendent glory of a summer’s day.

What remains when youth and hope are gone?
Wisdom and memory,
Torpid water hard wrung from cloth of sorrow,
Wisdom of empty bellies,
Wisdom of dry bread,
Steely glint in slate grey eyes,
Face a dry riverbed carved by tears
That come no more with mountain rain,
Ingratitude of children,
Beatings by husbands,
Smoking embers corkscrewing in rancid air
Now the men of violence have left,
And the crude crosses marking graves
Amid stones and dust,
Bodies can be buried but memory mourns like a dog
On the heaped earth of its master,
Claws through soil and sand to reveal truth,
The solitary candle defying the government blackout,
Memory… she nurses it like a doll,
Dressed in the decayed rags of the world,
Equanimity morphine to her rage,
Life is tragic, men are beasts,
Don’t expect more,
The lioness lies low in her cage of tears,
But, oh, what she would do if she once got out!

Love always leaves its sting
To remind you it was there,
It stings you when you’re vulnerable,
Sensitive and bare.

And even when love has died,
The sting will still be there,
To remind you of what you lost
And ask if you still care.

Ain’t no one in this whole darned world
Loved and not got stung,
And the sting, it never goes away
When the song of love is sung.

It lodges deep beneath the skin,
It smarts like hell and hurts for weeks,
But that’s what happens when you play with love,
It sets your flesh afire, yet its your heart it seeks.

"Oh, Sydney, you mustn't take me so literally,"
Berenice complained after one of her tellings-off,
"You act like I'm about to scratch your eyes out."
Funny she should say that...
He always imagined when in bed with his wife
That she was a cat, a big cat,
Golden-eyed leopard, sensual and lithe,
Smooth spotted pelt concealing tense, urgent muscles,
There was that sense of danger about her,
The way she raked her long nails down his back,
The feline way she’d nuzzle her face into his neck,
Softly nibbling his ear lobes between her perfect teeth,
And when he was inside her, she would purr
In that eerie cat-like way
And lick her lips as though desiring
Something more than flesh,
Every night, he would struggle to sate her animal appetite
And still she wanted more,
Writhing and biting in his arms,
Wrapping her thighs about him
As she dug her claws into his skin,
But on this night he freezes,
Cold horror rippling along his spine
As she emits a low snarl,
A guttural inhuman snarl,
And it is then he realises his worst nightmare
Is confirmed,
His wife is not his wife,
But something darker and more dangerous,
Drawn from the deepest recesses of his unconscious,
No, not his wife anymore,
But a living metaphor of terror
Made flesh,
And in that moment his mind mocks him
In his wife’s voice,
“I told you not to take me literally.”

Oh, portentous Night,
Who folds thy jealous secrets to thy gown,
Tight-lipped Empress who wards
The bright suns that glint in heaven’s field,
I am but a traveller in thy court
Of many-curtained cloud,
Who, upon his hill,
Marks the dancing of the hours
And the peepshow moon
Blink its lazy lizard eye,
The candescent windows of the town
But footlights to thy throne,
And I would cheer the comet’s tail
As fireworks for thy barge,
Old Saturn juggling his moons,
While faerie Venus laughs upon her swing,
Glass lantern glowing
Before the blue dust of stars
About which thou sweepest
In slippered feet,
And to thee also am impelled to bow,
Great Queen of Night,
For though the Sun King soon resume his reign,
With trumpeting of light,
Thy Mystery ever shall be my delight.

If I tore off your dress,
Would you smite my cheek
In your violate rage?
Would you?
So that my poor cheek burned,
A rosacea of broken capillaries,
Blood rushing in search of you,
Or would you crane your swan neck
To my lips,
To be brushed by an autumn leaf,
Skin pure and white
Offered in sacrifice
To a satyr’s lust,
Musk of wet earth and damp moss
Where the vixen suckles her young,
Of orchids in rain,
Oud smoking lazily in thuribles of brass,
Hair sweet as wet grass
Whose strands catch my mouth
In a frenzied kiss?
A single act of beautiful violence
To render you naked,
Exposing soft buds of breasts,
The maelstrom of your navel,
Bejewelled,
Like a concubine, mound pouting impatiently,
And when in that second I pull
At the silk of your dress
Will you hate me forever?
Will you?
Or will you master me with softness,
Lazy-lidded eyes revealing warm wells,
Body scented like summer hay,
That I fall back amazed,
A bull felled in its fury?
Yet I have no shame
In stripping you bare,
For such perfection
Cannot be contained in clothes,
No more than sun or moon
Can be concealed,
But deserves to be seen, exalted,
Its light revealed,
Immortalised for the redemption of men
Who are but beasts,
For such base creatures as we,
You are the only thing that reminds us
Of what heaven could be.

If any man desires to obtain a long life, if he would obtain a faithful messenger and see the blood of his enemies, it is necessary that he should first go into the city of Chorazin and there salute the Prince of the Air.

M.R. James Count Magnus

In the year 1646, I, Count Magnus de la Gardie of the manor of Vestergothland, made the Black Pilgrimage to the city of Chorazin and there spake the Wicked Conjuration to pledge my soul to Our Master and receive the gift of Life in Death.

The preparation of the mirror gate

By blood so red,
By belladonna sweet,
By dirt of the grave,
And incense of the crypt,
I do bless and I do consecrate thee, Oh Mirror,
By flowers of death,
By ash of crow,
Be thou blessed and sanctified,
In the name of Satan, Our Master,
And by the Principalities and Powers,
That thou shalt be an eternal portal to the realm of Spirit,
A wound in the eternal universe,
Through which the Powers of the Other Side may enter this realm.
So mote it be.

Invocation of the Draconian Power

By the Dragons of the Other Side,
By the Obscene Goat,
By the Faceless God whose laughter rings among the spheres,
By the Fool that sitteth upon his Master’s throne,
By the clock that spins backwards,
By the venomous serpent,
By the flies that feed upon the corpse,
By the worm that cankereth the apple,
And by every poisonous insect that crawleth upon the earth,
By the dead who dwell in Sheol,
And by the damned who burn in the fires of Gehenna,
By the Satanic Power
And by all that is Unholy and Profane,
I call upon thee, Oh Monstrous Power,
Defiler and desecrator of the House of God,
Rise! Rise! Rise from the Depths!
Rise from the Stygian darkness,
The vault of Hell!
Rise from the Eternal Sea
That swells and presses against the boundaries of Existence!
Who art the stain that spreadeth upon the cloth,
Who seepest through the cracks in the universe,
Who art the shadow that consumeth the Light of Day,
Who art the Wolf that swalloweth the Sun,
Thou Father of Sin,
Thou Author of Madness,
Bedlam cannot hold thee!
Lo! The beast runneth amok in the asylum
And hath stolen the Keys of Heaven!
Then come, Draconian Power!
Through the mirror
Through the wall
Through the corner
Through the crack
Through the gates between the worlds
Come!
Poison me with the venom of ecstasy,
And baptise me in the Waters of Night!
In nomine Drakonis
In nomine Satani et Luciferi

Salutation to the Dweller in the Deep

Hail Saturnian god,
Hail to the Blind Serpent,
Hail to the King on the Iron Throne,
Hail to the Left Hand of God,
Hail to the Angels of Wrath,
And hail to the Demon Lords of Earth
And the Powers that lie betwixt,
All hail!
Hail to the Titan Power, Dweller in the Deep,
Hail to the Proud Angel
That bendeth not its knee,
Hail to the flaming seraph
Who burneth in the darkness,
Hail to His Satanic Majesty
And hail to Our Master,
All hail!

The Dweller in the Deep speaks

I am the Abomination of Desolation,
I dwell among the ruined shells of cities,
Amid the blackened trunks of dead forests,
I sit atop the throne of skulls,
And the ashes of aeons,
And the dust of those who have gone before
Falls as rain upon my head.
I am the Black Sun.
I am Eternal Darkness.
I am Eros become Thanatos, Life become Death.
And I return all who come unto me
To the purity of Negative Existence.

The Supplicant presents himself

I am a brother of the Black Path
Cowled in darkness.
I hath sworn the oath,
I hath signed my name in blood,
On my soul the Mark of Fire.
And I walk the ruined Garden
Amid the blasted oaks of Eden
And the ashes of cherubim.
I abide where God is NOT.
Above me the raven,
Beneath me the serpent,
About me the raging storm and the thunder of night.
Son of Qayin am I,
And Naamah my mother.
Kin to Samael, burning angel of wrath,
And to Lilith, Mother of Abortions;
And I swear fealty to pale Hekate,
Queen of Heaven and Hell
Who guards the gates between the worlds,
And to Lucifer, the Red King,
Lord of the Sabbat, Prince of the Spirits of the Air,
And to Our Lord Satan, Lord above All,
The faceless God upon the obsidian throne
Whose black eyes gaze upon Eternity,
Receive me, O Powers.
Wherefore I petition the Lords of Wrath
To receive thy supplicant
And anoint me with Fire.

Invocation of the Unholy Powers

I call upon the Power of Darkness to enter this Temple.
I who am an abomination to the Light
Call upon the enemy of Life and of Being.
Thou who dwellest outside this universe,
Thou who opposeth the Creation,
I invoke thy terrible strength into this temple.
I invoke Our Lord Satan who sits behind the Veil,
Who art the Seal of Perfection.
I invoke the angel Samael,
Poison of God, Blind Judge,
And Lucifer, Son of the Dawn, who art the Word sent forth,
I invoke the Dark Goddess Lilith who is death and eternal life!
I invoke Hekate, Dark Goddess of the Gate
And Mistress of Night!
I invoke the Black Kundalini who is Messenger and Logos
Whose venon is the Venom of Rapture.
Rise! Rise! Rise! O Serpent of Smoke
Ascend in violence!
Come! Come! Come! O Serpent of Shadow
Ascend and crack the Dome of Heaven!

I call upon the Wrathful Powers
Whose thunder makes the Heavens shake.
I call upon the Great Ones of the Night of Time,
Who dwelleth beyond creation’s bright rim.
I call upon the Black Angels whose spears are arrayed against the stars.
I call upon the Infernal Legions of the Night.
I call upon the raven and the crow, bringers of death and prophesy.
I call upon the scorpion and the spider
The serpent and the toad,
Venom of the Black God.
I call upon the lion that devoureth the lamb.
I call upon the Nightmare that stalketh the forests of the Mind,
I call upon the disturber of sleep.
I call upon Them.
Thou who makest the stars to fall from the heavens,
Hear and come unto me, O Lords of Chaos and Misrule.

Sathan, Sethan, Samael,
I invoke thee, Persecuting Angel, Destroyer of Falsehood,
Adversary,
Left Hand of God,
Who layeth waste the Great and the Mighty,
By blood I summon thee,
By pain and torment I summon thee,
Open unto me the Gates of Hell
And ride forth upon thy black horse
To scorch the pasture and affright the earth!
I invoke thee, Samael, Poison of God, Revealer of Truth,
By the Power of the Supreme Name,
By the Power of Mars,
By the Power of Geburah,
Thou who destroyed Sodom,
Thou who tested Christ in the wilderness,
Come thou abyssal angel,
Dweller in the desert of the soul.
Sear me with Lightning and scorch me with Sun,
Burn me and brand me and set me on fire,
Shine upon me the Eye of the Black God,
That I shall be revealed unto myself.
Quench my throat with Stygian Water
That I shall be Born from the Womb of Night
Cast me into the Lake of Fire
That I shall drown in the Ecstasy of Spirit.
Receive unto thyself thy bride, Lilith,
That the Fire from Below shall join with the Fire from Above.
Lo! The Bound Beast is unchained
And bodies fall from the lightning struck tower.

Thou who wert cast down,
I raise thee up,
O Thou Ministers of Tribulation,
O Thou Lords of Chaos and Misrule,
O Thou Mockers of Laws,
O Thou Instigators of Rebellion,
O Thou Authors of Blight,
O Thou Seething Serpents,
O Thou monstrous wraiths that move in the darkness,
Deepest Shadow without Shape or Form,
Who consumest the Light of Creation,
Enemies of Being,
Enemies of Light and of Life,
Come as thou art,
In whatsoever form thou chooseth,
And speak unto me thy infernal mysteries.

The Supplicant makes his request

Oh thou Principalities and Powers,
Who hath called to me since I was born
Accept me as thy Son,
I, who am a Child of Darknesss,
Call upon thy Name,
Crown me with the gnosis of Spirit,
That I shall have kingship in this world and the next.
I call upon the Powers of the Other Side
To initiate me into the Mysteries of Darkness.
I call upon the Powers of the Other Side
To ignite the black flame within my soul.
I call upon the Powers of the Other Side
To teach unto me the artes of sorcery.
Send unto me an attending demon to aid and instruct me,
To exact vengeance on those who would raise their hand,
And sow terror by night,
For which I celebrate in thy name the unholy sacrament,
The defiled wafer and the cup of blood.

The Dweller in the Deep speaks

Magnus, thou true and faithful servant,
Keeper of covenants,
Who would sup of the wine of immortality,
I give unto thee a spirit abhorrent to nature,
Conceived from the nightmares of the gods,
That hath never lived and shall never die,
But shall abide with thee ever and always,
That hath the form of a man
And walketh like a man,
But hath the face of a lamprey
And the arms of a squid,
Teach it well for it learns,
And shall be the bain and extinction of thine enemies.

The Supplicant abases himself

I hath sealed the Covenant of Blood.
I hath received the Mark.
I hath written my name in the Book,
And salute thee, Lucifer, Prince of the Air,
Lord of Locusts,
Whose shadow darkeneth the earth,
God of barbarous Names.

The Dweller in the Deep gives the catechism

Sayeth unto Man,
The Dominion of the Earth
And the Magistry of the Heavens and the Hells
Are ours,
Born of fire we shall not die,
We rise from the ashes of the worlds we have burned,
We trample upon the shells of men.
The blind shall not see
And the deaf shall not hear,
At the crowing of the cock they shall go down
The earth shall fall from their feet
And we shall exult in the Splendour of His Name.

The Supplicant is victorious

I hath climbed the mountain.
I hath stormed the citadel.
I am a transgressor of boundaries.
I am the Fool gone forth.
I am the voyager beyond the stars.
I am the Eye that pierceth the Firmament.
My staff sustaineth me.
My lantern lighteth my way.
Dark calleth unto Dark.
And in the Darkness I am my own Light.
In the name of the Red King
And in the name of the Queen of Hell,
I summon the Guardians of the Barrier
To open the gate.

Being an invocation of Lucifer and the infernal powers.

First invocation to Lucifer

Come, Lucifer,
Who art the copulating goat and
The serpent that opens the eye of Man,
Infernal majesty who commands all demons,
And whose robes are the crimson tide of lust,
We summon thee from thy dark kingdom,
From the blackness beyond the stars,
Spring forth from the womb of Chaos,
And arise before us in fire and light.

Ave Lucifer! Ave Lucifer!

O Shining One,
Whose voice is as the wind
That blows across the sands of Edom
And whose face is the sun at midnight,
We stand before thee naked and innocent,
Our flesh desires thee,
Our hearts desire thee,
Our minds are open to thy Word,
Give us thy lust
And the strength of a god.
Exalt us!
Raise us up!
Set us on fire that we might burn with thy light!
For we hath been with thee from the beginning
And shall be thine for eternity.

Second invocation to Lucifer

O Lord Lucifer,
Lord of Fire,
Prince of the spirits of the air,
Who hath dominion over all the Earth,
We call upon thee from thy kingdom beyond the stars,
Descend upon us, thy children of Night!
Descend upon us, thy witches!
Illumine our souls with thy Black Light,
Fill our bodies with the ecstasy of thy being,
Brush us with thy black wings, Dark Lord,
And ignite the black flame of gnosis within our hearts.
Dwell in us, Lord Lucifer,
That we might be the perfect instrument of thy Will on earth.

Ave, Lucifer! Ave, Lucifer!

O Lord Lucifer, we ask of thee,
Open unto us the doors of perception
That we might behold thee in thy terror and magnificence,
Open unto us the doors of our minds
That we might see and speak with the spirits of the air
And the great and mighty demons,
Open unto us our inner eye, Lord Lucifer,
That we might see through the veil between the worlds
And speak with those who dwell on the other side.

Ave, Lucifer! Ave, Lucifer!

O Lord Lucifer, Fallen Prince of Heaven,
Light Bearer,
Bringer of Promethean Fire,
Show us the invisible ones
Whom the light doth not reveal,
Bring unto us the dead that we might commune with them,
Bring unto us the spirits that we might have knowledge of them,
Open unto us the Eye of Hekate, that night shall become day.
These things we ask of thee, Lord Lucifer, in thy name,
For thou art the only true god
Who hearest the prayers of his hidden children
As we art thy witches who loveth thee and bearest thy mark
And shall be forever
So mote it be.

Third invocation to Lucifer

O Lord Lucifer, we ask of thee
Bestow upon us thy servants
Power over all malefic spirits
That we might summon and evoke
Command and constrain
By thy authority
All spirits of wrath and vengeance
And those that bring terror by night
And discern their names and their orders
Their powers and their virtues
By the glory of thy Name.
So mote it be.

Evocation of the Unholy Powers

We call upon the Powers of the Other Side to come forth and be present.
We call upon the restless spirits who walk the earth.
We call upon the dead who haunt the shadows.
We call upon the demons who dwell in the realm of Eternal Night.
We call upon all discarnate souls, human and non-human, to attend.
Come forth and reveal thyselves,
Speak and we shall listen.
Appear and we shall behold.
Thou who cravest the attention of the living,
We evoke thee and conjure thee to come forth
And take form in this temple.

We anoint ourselves with the ashes of the Dead and the blood of the Living,
That the Living and the Dead shall meet and make merry.

By the Black Sun that consumeth the Light of the World,
By the Serpent that windeth in the Deep,
By the Great Goat that sitteth upon the Cube,
By the Prince of the Air,
By the Infernal Host,
And by the Angels of Vengeance that cast fire upon the Earth,
We call upon the Spirits of the Dead and the Damned
To be present unto us and heed our Will.
Come thou Shedim, come thou Lamiae, come thou Daimones,
Come thou unshriven dead who linger
Before the Gate in the West,
Come unto us
Thou Howlers in the Night,
Thou Singers of Lamentation,
Who weep under the moon for the Light that is lost,
We evoke thee,
By Falxifer, Lord of Death
By Hekate, Goddess of the Crossroads
Who standeth before the Gate
By Eurynomous and Baalberith,
By Azrael, Angel of Death,
To come unto us with outstretched hand,
And present thyselves in visible form.
We command thee to awaken.
We command thy eyes to open and thy mouths to speak.
Come forth unto us and give us a sign of thy presence.

Come thou mighty and terrible spirits,
Who maketh the wind to howl,
Who splitteth the tree with lightning,
Who maketh the ground to shake,
The moon to run with blood,
And the earth to darken.
Harken and come forth
And teach us the arts of witchcraft.
Come thou tormenters of sleep,
Who maketh the man to fret in his dreams,
The infant to scream in his crib
And the horse to plunge in his stall.
In the names of Lucifer and Hekate,
King and Queen of death and spirits,
We summon thee to appear before us
In visible form.
Come unholy spirits,
Powers of Wrath,
Enemies of Man,
And make thy presence known this night.

Itake the dreams of sleeping souls
And weave them into words,
And pour them into poets’ minds
To set them free like birds,
And every moan and every sigh
And every dark desire,
By my art becomes a poem
To set the heart afire.
I am the bright, eternal muse,
The spinner in the dark,
Spinning yarns of silver light
That coruscate and spark,
Igniting streams of wond’rous themes
To course the drowsy mind,
The playhouse of a life entire,
By poetic art refined.

The stranger cantered in at dawn, rode a pale mare,
Casting glances ʼbout him, looking here and there,
A-ridin' and a-whistlin' his way all through the town,
Oh, a-ridin' and a-whistlin' his way all through the town,
To pick up the contract on old John Brown.

He had no conscience and he had no name,
Life and death were all the same,
He bore the scars and he bore the stains,
Oh, he bore the scars and he bore the stains,
And he rode right off those dusty plains.

He carried a pistol at his hip,
And a loaded rifle not far from his grip,
He moved like a shadow and he dealt out death,
Oh, he moved like a shadow and he dealt out death,
And he walked away with their dying breath.

And in a gloomy tavern with its drinking clan,
He sought a lonely table and met his man,
Who wore a black suit and his face was sour
Oh, his mood was heavy and visage dour,
As he told his story for an hour.

“My cousin was slain in this very town,
And the man who slew him was old John Brown,
And the Sheriff, he put a price on his head,
Oh, the sheriff he put a price on his head,
But I’ll pay my own coin to see him dead.

“Avenge me, stranger, if it’s in your power,
And bring me the man who shot Clancy Bower,”
And the sun lit up the gold as he cast it down,
Oh, the sun lit up the gold as he cast it down,
A thousand dollars for the life of old John Brown.

Old John Brown, he saw the stranger ride,
And knew there weren’t no place to hide,
Ain’t no bounty hunter goin’ to take him down,
Oh, ain’t no bounty hunter goin’ to take him down,
Laid an oath on the Bible did old John Brown.

Now old John Brown, he knew a thing,
The sheriff, he sported a garnet ring,
The ring he cut from Clancy’s hand,
Oh, the ring he cut from Clancy’s hand,
For he lusted after the Bowers’ land.

And as the stranger retired for the day,
He stepped out of the shadows and blocked his way,
Said, “Stay your hand and hear me out,
Oh, stay your hand and hear me out,
And I’ll tell what this is all about.”

And he told the stranger about the garnet ring,
And where the stranger could see the thing,
“Ask your man what Clancy wore
Oh, ask your man what Clancy wore,
On the finger the Sheriff tore.”

Next day, the stranger went to the Sheriff’s place,
To gauge the man and read his face,
And on his hand he saw the ring,
Oh, on his hand he saw the ring,
And at the sight his bloody heart did sing.

Said, “Ain’t that the ring Clancy Bower wore,
Whose murder you set John Brown up for?”
And his gun laughed fire as he shot him down,
Oh, his gun laughed fire as he shot him down,
And death looked no more for old John Brown.

Bleak the winter, nude the sky,
As a drownéd girl whose bloodless skin,
Bereft of roseate dusk,
Fades to grey and darkness dim,
O’er fields nested ʼneath mist and murk
Where sheep pack tight ʼbout weathered tree
And good folk put away their work,
Lone, the strawman rots in rain,
Disconsolate the crow
That from his restless perch
Fearful flutters and caws in vain,
Yet I would cross the marshy moor,
Through plashing pool and muddy mire
To be with you again,
Tread once more the cinder path
To soft lit windows and quaint old door,
Your radiant face an open hearth
And would pass the hours with you awhile,
Lolling like a dog content
In the bright flames of your smile,
And listen abed to the music of the storm,
Too warm, too sleepy now to stir,
The journey home through icy wind,
A journey to demur.

They came and cut down all the flowers
That sang out their colours in the dusty day,
In every town and market place
They cut them all away,
And women wailed and tore their hair
And fathers cried out in despair,
“Wherefore the flowers we did so loving tend,
And of they, who didst defile in haste
This pleasant land by war and waste,
Whom shall pay and whom shall mend?”
Beneath the rotting flowers
That once stood tall,
The seed sleeps,
So weeps the one on whom
All new beginnings fall,
To burst and bloom
Or not at all,
Though sun waits patiently above
Withall,
And whispers her to open by-the-by,
Afore the savage summer drains the earth
Of water dry,
Come, my child, it is your time
To leave the broken rubble of the past
And climb,
To where the light is bright and breeze blows fresh,
And make your bow,
Rise up, my child, your time is now.

So, here you are,
As though you never left,
And without so much as a letter
In all this time,
But then I can hardly escape you, can I?
How the years have flown like geese,
And you arcing back on your low orbit
To pick up a conversation I’d forgotten we had.
Well, time has been kind to you,
Kinder than to me,
A few crow’s feet
Lips less plump than I remember,
As though someone let the air out of your tyres,
And skin so white and glowing you must’ve bathed in Flash,
But, as they say, chemicals are a girl’s best friend,
Yet, I concede, the victory is yours,
You were always the ambitious one,
Melting all opposition before you,
A colossus straddling some ancient port
And all ships must pass between your legs,
A cold comet,
Blazing a sputtering plume of deluded dandies
And libidinous lapdogs,
All of them, burned up in your bright star,
And now here you are, dancing on my step,
Boasting another conquest,
Celebrating your triumph, like bloody Cleopatra,
Frankly my dear, I’m surprised you think I care,
But you always did need an audience –
Is that what I am to you?
Just another besotted fan gawping from the metal barrier,
To cry and cheer as you mince along the carpet,
No, say not the light is too strong,
I have lived in your shadow long enough,
Perfecter of the art of invisibility, that’s me,
A knitting nun singing psalms of praise
To the Blessed (non) Virgin.
Oh, at last you ask, how am I?
Well, my dear, I get by without you,
I have my cats and my comforts,
But you…
Have nothing…
I could ever want.

Lo, the setting sun sets fire the kiln of eve,
Swells effulgently in rosy warmth,
Winking in bright flares ʼmong spangled trees,
Blurs the listening leaves
In mellow fuzziness,
Shadow-draped, the day walks long,
Still now, the whispered breeze
That fanned the summer airs,
And in the quieting branches
The nightingale sings the vespers song,
Butter light, churned in the pail of the dying day,
Melts on church towers, brightens flint walls
And warms the ruddy bricks of houses by the way,
And so, I end this chapter of my life,
My sun gone down, the stage depart,
And in its embers, the ash of plight,
To rest in sweetest sleep
Of sweetest art,
All folly forgiven,
By soft kiss of night.

Hag rid clouds combust, collapse,
Sunk with weight of rain,
Deep-bellied over Innsmouth old,
Circling pack, craving pain,
Leering over wooden wharves,
Timbered houses by the sea,
As lightning’s crooked finger lights
The splitting tree,
Black eel of night
Flashing fire,
Hieros gamos of heaven and earth,
Pandora’s bruiséd eyes weep storms of tears
And in her roiling rage
The sum of all our fears,
And who can say to this day
What monstrous shapes they are
That walk the haunted streets,
Of Innsmouth
On nights of sleet and shower,
What fiends, what eldritch race they be
What old and elder power,
That crawl beneath the rheum-eyed moon
And once were men like me?