Sand, and just above
Soft shouldered on the sea-breeze
A shuddering gull
Sudden arrival
Alighting delightfully
A bird, a poem
In grey streets the birds
Sing mindless to the morning
Throat-tones of sunlight
Blossom-zapped branches
The zest of spring – dizziness
In every breath
A man in passing
Sniffs at a flowering hedge
A giddy boy grins
Rain dances on a
Million feet; a buried seed
Jigs to the rhythm
Pale sun pretending
The air is brittle and falls
In glassy sprinkles
In the living room
The scent of dying flowers
Edges are curling
My bright wings of hope
Just a dying chrysalis
Pendant and pointless
My bright wings of hope
Just a dying chrysalis
In a cold cocoon
Gone. The lip-smacking
Froth of eager illusion
The dream has curdled
The fanfares of man
Distant pipings on the wind
To a poet’s ear
Untravelled, inapt
Hovelled in my hideaway
Is my vision clear?
The poet: beset
On a rocky storm-swept peak
Waiting to be struck
I wake to a broil
Of words; crowding thunderclouds
Invite my lightning
Green clasp, flushed with the
Colour of the deep flower –
A girl’s excitement
Lifting the rock that
Hides his crime – a shivering
Flash of centipede
Mathematics of
Misery: marriage equals
Loneliness times two
Each morning they smooth
Remake their morality
Tuck in the corners
Bleak sage, ill with truth
Purring sweet nihilisms
In nobody’s ear
Before my ruin
Merrily I danced and scoffed
At hollow warnings
A cold rain cutting
The scorn that killed my heroes
Wintry wayfarers
Train in a tunnel
Hurtling through emptiness
The passengers yawn
Climbers in the dark
Claw up the cliff unaware
They are descending
Addicts of slowness
Strung out on their tedium
Living in low gear
Inane youths gleaming
Ride strident on the latest
Wave of the brainwash
Forgetful, futile
Modern man is as modern
As he’s ever been
The enemies of
The System: rabble stoning
Castles in the air
Toilers on the wheel
Of life – looking for tangents
But not radii
The world-shy madman
In a bubble of trauma
Floats blithely on by
They joylessly brood
Who want to be satisfied
Benign and burping
Sweet security
A barnacle’s existence
Crusting an old wreck
Fathers with fury
Zenless mothers with sharp sticks
Torment the children
The age of knowledge
A paper blizzard blowing
Down a shuttered street
Social arrangement
Here and there – and everywhere?
A spectatorship
Twitch of lust, pale thrall
Rhythmic taunt of the stripper
Coloured noise, secrets
Sounds in the city
Scour of sandpaper scraping
At my sanity
In the eyes behind
The smile, a watery sheen
Of distilled malice
Take-off: a final
Shudder of presumption, then
Sitting in the air
Sob high in a tree
The wind snatched a boy’s courage
He called after it
Amoeba to man
A handshake with destiny
Hello and goodbye
Icy lightning in
The eyes – claw in the caress
Love below zero
A lover lampooned
Brushed cool by the leaver’s lips
Indifferently
The man drowned and cold
Had been smiling in the wind
Skating on thin ice
My key to learning:
Not to shrink from the gaze of
My glaring errors
The smell of his death
A high sweet whine in the air
Relatives munching
I want to know: is
He sowing or littering
This man of ideas
In the pulsating
Darkness, all I can hear is
Someone not breathing
The old man cannot
Despite repeated attempts
Shrug off his frailty
Faraway figures
Fading now into the dusk
Those were my chances
Until I burned out
I burned like a skyrocket
Until I burned out
Please know I’m only
Serious in the sense that
I mean what I say
See how a poem
Of seventeen syllables
Can be tedious
This one was written
Just in case you don’t know it
By a long-winded poet
Into the shadows
Tiptoeing, evanescent
The rhymes of nightmare
In my ringing boots
I chanced into this temple
Meaning no offence
Leaves of Acid 