Where is love?

Amended again 6th August

To the north waves in barley, 

Mirror shadows heading deep 
Into Megdale, across grass

Pollen holding fast, against the air.

Tenuous life, ploughed into furrows

is committed. Deferring to the soil.

While on the barley fetching breeze
Scents, lost souls, machinery faults

Catch the larks and buzzards
Spiriting them free of my passing.
High above this private enclave
Cupped by low hills: enthusiasm

No longer mumbles in the barns. 
The light fading over common land, 
In common with all lands, warms
The heart before the chill begins.

Amended work in progress, 16th July:

To the north waves in the barley, 

Mirror shadows heading deep 
Down into Megdale. 'cross grass

Pollen held by nothing but air.

Tenuous life, ploughed into furrows

is committed. Caught-up in soil.

While on the barley fetching breeze
Scents, lost souls, machinery faults

And ......

So where is love in all this?



To the north barley waves ascend.

Where is love? Southerly shadows

Climb. Grass pollen, not yet ready

To fly. Cattle low behind the hedge.

The sun has moved across the sky.

Where is love? Elsewhere? Barely.

Hidden high above the heavy sun?

Likely not. Ploughed into furrows

Caught up in chalk soil. Committed.

Carried in the barley furling breeze.

Canary Wharf

A newly lucid awareness

Of beauty and youth

Falls in with my aching

Steps, as I pass by.

Happenstance denied
That that isn’t lost to me

While here in abundance

Exquisite and poised

That that is drifts on.

And I slip further out

To the margin

To the waiting

To what will be done.

Rework of 'A New Year's Funeral' - is it better?

The stumbling fool carries his prayer book

Confident up over the chipped stone step,

Torn pages doling comfort,

Smothering grief as required by His love.

Quoting custom, mumbling winter’s return,

Losing his way among the stones and psalms,

A young things’ modern elegy,

Covers with a veil maddening incompetence,

But he calls right the snow that will chill buried bones,

And cause the church cat to put off its hunting,

Measuring the days in life filled sleep,

Until it’s over.

20 Feb 2012

New Year Funeral

The stumbling fool carries his prayer book

Confidently over the chipped stone step,

From broken pages ministered comfort

Falls on grief as required by contract.

His supervisory over-sight, fails

Far from the coal-face, lets indolent words

Scatter careless thoughts, dumps soil by the road.

Mawkish young things in modern tears praised him

Placing a veil over others’ silence.

The fool said custom foretold fair and bright,

And while most unspecified words are false,

Winter has returned to chill buried bones

And the churchyard cat has put off hunting.

Of yesterday’s tomorrow, what remains?

Retrospective

Before a drunken night

He’d gone to the docks

Astray, in a landscape lost.

Beerily ferile together,

Gone the stilted indifference

Of earlier retrospectives

No longer sterile and alien.

The small together they share

Is intimate and isolated.

She, thin and profane,

Has gamine eyes,

Is fuckable.

Where do I sit if there isn’t a seat?

Where do I sit if there isn’t a seat,
Your lap of ice with a moth-like sheet?
It  powders me with a fine silver dust;
Shift along, I can make do for now
this space is enough for a finite end.
Absurdly distant you make waves
over me, while arguing for God.
Casually restrained and precise,
Articulate even, but not nice,
a Net Present Value with a discount
for evil is no argument for death.
Once we sat in the sun, a train
Came and soon you waged war.
I remember we talked, Darlington
Ninety seven, your wings’ silvery
mark is on me and millions more.


Dec 13th, 14th and 24th 2010

A measure of my capacity to love

To impose order on the arrhythmic tick
Of our expanding metal
Or for threes and fours to fit the slick
World view you profess,
We have kindled, I have burnt much away,
Embers in the stove
Remain but order is not the order of the day.

I take pleasure if it comes in the night:
The singing edge
Of my hearing, metallic methane light
Playing in the dark,
Retinal wisps skipping at will while I listen
To strangled breath,
Until day comes and drowns the kitten.

I do love you though you are not mine
And I am not yours.
While you sleep, work or not, bring wine
Lilies, anxious fires or pets
I slip into something which may coincide
With your choosing,
Unsure of the fit and what it will hide.

Valentine's Meal

I have this brooding irritation.
Gut deep, it manifests as acid
That follows cold crawls of sweat,
Evidencing you under my skin.

Cowardly indefinite I decline
Valediction and circle you,
Elliptically erratic like dust -
I book a table despite me.

The journey allows us to vent,
For me to agree to drive home.
You'll have wine and cognac
I'll keep to a cliched whine.

Before we pick at the meagre
Degust of an oversold kitchen,
We amuse our mouths with bitterness
Exchanged like saliva or cum.

We spit olive stones into fingers
And order our parable, chosen
For morally bankrupt times:
Faux, pre-prepared and indulgent,

Over sauced, over seasoned and dull,
We eat and become under whelmed.
All the while all alone and encircling
Each other’s disappointments again.

Easy pickings for old crows
Covertly re-asserting their nests.

I Covet Perfection in all Its Forms

I hear loneliness when she saunters by
Or she’s blown with a mute’s brittle loss
Senescing gold colours autumn lets fly
Her beauty, wrought in naked perfection.

I covet perfection's myriad forms
The arc of a waist, the crossing
Of limbs athletically honed, but born
Into degeneracy I am flawed.

What questions define my purpose as man?
Those quiet Godlike ones haunting the night,
Silken spectres of a dismal lover’s hands
Or those that probe desired retribution?

These contradictions fill my heart at rest
Attenuate my world, provide respite.
And so diminished, plucked but unstressed
I am left unresolved, a hanging chord.

Where is hope when sensibility dies?
I’d rather longing than stabilised lies.

Another sombre moment before the door

Another sombre moment before the door.
It opens to expectation. My footsteps
Accompanied by a murmured discontent
Arc toward the dock. Shuttering applause
Flutters in the sterile room, butterflies
Of fear greet my centring breaths before
The defence begins. I look up to expectation
I see gratitude, my oratory bringing joy.
Poverty blighted these lives and yet my deeds
Simple and subtly enacted give them peace.
To regain my composure I reject my weakness,
A truthful voice contains more than is desired,
Give them the certain and logically correct
Their loyal reason will ensure the rest. Each
Impassioned belligerence, spittled from my lips
Each sweep of an arm, salutes and beatifies me,
Justifies our enemies rooted out, made to pay.
No judgement is being passed. Friends don’t.
We were one in our endeavours, my people
And me. The questions asked are uninspired,
Combat for lawyers, weak moneyed men, liars
Let them save a nation, they espouse cliché,
Protecting with dull and uninventive wits.
I am angry with their ingratitude. Shits!
And disrespectful ones at that, tire me.
I refused council, in recess time is mine.
Soon judgement will be handed down. They will
Not decide. I will have my victory tonight.

30th October 2010.

First Class

Alone yet juxtaposed
We triptych, around a
Table of four, whisper
Through an architecture,
Exchanging services,
Our impassively drawn
Faces tuned to deny
Unwarranted contact,
Rushing to commerce with
Other souls waiting while
We are hurled to temporary
Meaning, minuted life.

Amended 30th October 2010

Coalition

It is vital that the descent
is orderly. Meetings along
The way measured, decisions

Are required, treasons done
So as to maintain a unity
Of purpose and guile. Quiet

Consideration, lofty speech
And traded pledges redefine
Our landscape. I supported

The losing team. I disagree
With what we have done, we
Believe in analyses' soft lies.

Haiku

I wrote this on a whim. Montaigne believed marriage to be a cage and I believe that all of us married know this idea. Some cages are traps, some give us voluntary captivity, some we are free to leave for a while and return, some we can bend the bars to fit if poorly made.

I guess that the Haiku could be expanded in consecutive verses each in the 5/7/5 form. I have an idea to try that, to see if I can create a more complete perspective. This is too pessimistic.


Come to me my love
Within my cage my anger
Waits alone for you

Amateur dramatics

It's been a few days since I have posted, and I can't say that there is a justifiable reason. Minor friction between me and my wife today, not articulated, not explicit but palpable with our history to provide context and understanding. So, I wrote a poem to try and describe, this is a draft and so maybe a revision or a few readings will create new knowledge about what is happening between us. One never knows. Here it is, if you read let me know what it says to you.


I alone: twixt desire and being tardy
She upstairs: withdrawn and supine
We, married: still and yet drifting
You (to me): "should do something!"
Me, with disdain: "what, like you?".
“He worries me”, you say to a friend.
Me? But I’m fine just groping within
For clutter and things to throw out.

21/01/10 Wheldrake, York.

I am as bleak today as the frozen road.

I am as bleak today as the frozen road,
The compacted path a concealed cliché,
My way is as hard as rails. The low sun
Rushes to my eye, unrefracted and white
Concealing dirt beneath tracks pristine.

Summer suffocates. Its butterflies'
Fluttering stench seeks awakening.
What will it find? Hard winter is clean.
Something dark sleeps fitfully within:
Safe now, care is requisite in spring.

Edited 7th Jan 2010

Clarification of Position

Such incongruity. We correspond
About a book and yet where I am,
Cold and old age achieve an effect
Not unlike the bullets and beatings
They are meting out where you are.

Let us think of who we are awhile.
Distance, culture, peace, age, death
Many dimensions divide another:
You are where it’s real and I am not.
My body's at home safe and sound.

Swept Aside

The phone or doorbell rings, I walk away
From the debts that call or knock.
In equal measure fortune's whims
Join our unforgiving fiscal sins
To hunt us down.

God only knows how I became so poor
At mortgaging fun's borrowed expectation.
Bad cash decisions sneer costly smiles:
Smile cars, meals and foreign holidays.
Smile and snigger.

I thank the luck of history's draw that
The workhouse is an attraction. But shame
Remains and each domino that tumbles numbs
My family's love I fear. I failed to make a
success of life.

In five tough years half a million
Pounds of tax and wages paid counts
For nothing. Hopeless bitterness and
Anger at those helped are poisonous
Rewards for those

Who are the human costs of greed.
I was greedy and I had hubris too
Qualities that some have put to use.
Their gains and my losses coincide,
Holding you I'm swept aside.

The poem with a few revisions that I couldn't resist.

Godlike Weariness

Falter but don't be flickering marshland boy

You'll have the touch there, you'll have joy.

I hold my thumbs so very tight for you

My nape tucked in my shoulders tensed.

We are both pilgrims with our pilgrim lust,

Our garaged faiths, our loves dispensed.

Your journey's goal has turned to dust,

So slip into the fen. Be brave. The fine

Light that seems to fade will lure you on

Toward a mere forever drained of time.

There you'll not falter nor flick your tongue
At me my boy. I've had enough, all is done.