There’s a deep dark hue
to the worst of dreams.
I’ve been hanging out with the dead.
Those old ghosts are controlling my head
My heart is an open wound
Sweet grapes stuck in old glue.
Baby, I’m crushed, battered and blue
from banging myself on these boarded-up walls
with the juice pouring out on you.
When you were a lop eared rabbit
and I was a battered old bear
we rattled around the countryside
In an unbalanced three wheel cart.
On a whim you broke my heart.
But when my arm dropped off
and all my straw stuffing fell out
you pushed it all back in.
Only a very good friend would care enough to do that.
Poems used to come easy;
I could refine them or not as I wished.
Now I have to struggle and strain using only six lines
To squeeze out some half-born attempt
That ends as a whimpering flop.
I should really know when to stop.
The sound of the sea pulls me deeper and deeper into the deepest sleep,
drawing me down into deeper dreams.
Slowly.
Drowning.
Back and forth all night, the sea sighs and mists my windows
and turns with the drag of the tide.
I rise with the surf and the light.
There’s poetry on the horizon
on a far away beautiful island
surrounded by golden light.
Peninsulas, oceans and islands
blending in shades of soft clouds
fading away out of sight.
Ocean meets air and turns with the tides
and reality hides behind dreams.
Septiums Francis Whimsy, Professor of Celtic Mythology,
Esteemed as an Arthurian authority of some renown,
Made a profoundly important discovery whilst poking around
In an unpronounceable small town in Wales.
He had wandered about in a wood calculating the path of a comet.
While collecting Nitrous Bonnet
(mistaking it for its more fanciful fairy cousin)
He unearthed the Holy Grail.
THE GRAIL!!!
He sat down and wrote a sonnet
In praise of the ancient cup.
But an angel came down from on high
And wafted the old Prof (and the precious cup) up and very far off.
Audacious, ericatious,
delicious and ambitious
faudulent, ebullient,
turbulent, transparent.
Words spoken at random
devoid of any meaning.
Running rampant, freedom and ruination.
Vive la revolution.
Ravishment, ready, replete.
The foghorn off the coast of Trevone
Warns of shoreline and shallows.
It’s a sound that could always lure me back home.
Night or day, its sense of loss swings round the bay
Echoing distance and sorrow.
When my life ends I will hear it again,
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
I don’t want to write a ghazal.
You wouldn’t either with a brain as messed up as mine.
I have forgotten how I wrote them before
And now I can’t fathom instructions.
I’ll tie Celtic knots with Italian spaghetti.
with no sign of Persian delights
or patterns of beauty and promise.
Love is all a repetition of form and illusion.
We fly or we fall as we scribble old thoughts on our walls.
My tutor made a cast of my foot sealed all the way up to my ankle
It was a demonstration of how it should be done
My foot became uncomfortably hot under enveloping plaster
And my arch was slightly flattened under the pressure.
When he cut the mould away it was a relief.
Fifty years later I wonder if my youthful foot still exists
Locked away in the dark of an art college cupboard
Hidden with still life props.
I wish he had posed me on tiptoe like Hermes in the Louvre
Or Peter Pan in the park always ready for flight.
The Dreaming Path 