In my sensitive youth
I felt the stirring,
In the air
And beneath my feet,
Of the unquiet dead.
He asks me quietly
where metal ends
and flesh begins.
Grey hour-glass grains
pour out of
It splashed
Turner
as he bathed
in the light.
It rolls in slowly,
slowed,
A man makes a pot...
He's learned his craft;
it's a good pot.
He paints the pot
and people
On that night
of grit and wonder
I saw boys split asunder
upon a field of schemes
Theirs was
Bullets clamor for peace but leave destruction in its wake.
War defends power's needs but what
Twelve Portland stones
Parade with one of marble.
Knee-high daisies
Chirp with grasshoppers
As
A buzzard, belonging, circles
sun in blue heaven,
covering comfortable green
white with blossom.
The old man offers me
Round hard sweets
From a paper bag:
It crickles, they rattle
Against one
Speeding emergency lights
Fleetingly reflected in
The polished pipes on a bar
Are the colour of
When my name is read out above a sea of red
Know that
Although I’m a fraction of a figure
A line
Two floppy-eared lambs
Moved in next door
To chomp their way
Through the overgrown garden.
Months of pouring out my words in seeming endless stream,
Laying bare the naked fury of my
i can take a stand on knowing go over the top on what i believe like soldiers on a numbered hill but
The devil is a dick
And Jesus likes to party
But he's not a liberal
The good, the bad and the
Rosé has no look in,
being neither one thing
nor the other
in this philosophy of
tears falling
veiled figures
dampening vibrant greens
that embrace marble
grays set in
Warfare - Who Cares ?
What moves us to open our heart
enough to feel the pain of the world
When I gave them to a museum
The curator looked decades
Beyond my right ear
And told me the
There's a black cloud outside my window.
Another in my heart.
Can't see light anymore
Darkness
Who gets to say
Where it started
Or where it might end?
The vast oceanic surge
Churned and
A moment shared, a feeling told.
Our treasured gifts as we grow old. Last moments spent in silent
one hundred years on
a gentle radio
voice observes:
one second of silence
for each lost
the radio announcer reports
the end of the fighting season
in Afghanistan
as autumn is wrestled
cruising above the clouds
over the North Atlantic
the bright soft expanse
like a cosmic hammock
The gallant youth
Paid in advance
For all the letters
After his name.
Unstintingly he
Interior paths
Wander through
Spring sunlight
To a sudden
Chilling shade
Of
Nineteen at the Somme
Twenty at Passchendaele,
All that's left is an oak-leaf,
And that
Journey through
The subconscious
Of men who
Commission statues,
Turn your back
On the
My long-dead mother's horror
Of rat-filled bomb-shelters,
Her claustrophobia, her chilblains,
Hit
The mist blanket
Tucked round the graves
Relents only slowly
To the wan autumn sun.
The
She felt the ebbing tide
And went to the loch shore
To gather sea shells.
She last saw
My leg itches at night.
My fingers sprout nails
To probe beneath
Down to lower