Poems (i)
Once
Once, perhaps
You sprang from groaning loins
And squealed your bafflement
Your world a wailing want
Of nipple and warmth
Or
You slid between thighs huge as heaven
A-chortle with delight
Atop your head a downy trace
The very feather of Cupid’s arrow
And now death taps your temple
From
The frenetic infant fist
To
The faltering hand of the ever-convalescent
So long ago
The dewy Eden
So austere
The creeping hoar, the death-tapped temple
Adumbrating dotage
Desuetude
Cessation
Again
Again
The more timorous trees
Cast down their carpets of colourful leaves
And submit in naked obeisance
To the whims and furies of witch-like winte
She of the vaporous breath
And pouches of viri
Lost
I am as lost as a warrior in a warless world
It is awkward to be a hunter
Scouting quiet on the ground of being
Stalking a figment
An explorer
Relentless in his quest
Who has discovered a desolation
An investigator who can report:
Here, in the emaciation of what we seldom call the soul
Lies the matrix of misfortune
I am as lost as a warrior in a warless world
On The Way to the Cross
Against the bloodshot haze of sunset
The yearning steeple stood askew
Besotted he reeled in the teetering town
Past the dark cathedral door
He skeltered
Bending to the Cross
Down below the molten spire
The Church of the Gutted Metaphysic
Bled in shadow
In the night sky
Black as dogma
Sprung the stars
As faint as hope
Besotted he reeled in the teetering town
A Thankyou Note
Hereby
I thank
The thief
Who stole my dreams
Who had away with my happy day
Who tiptoed light
With my lyric night
Thanks, I say
As a Sufi would
Thanks again
May they do you good
Night Song
Upon a cat-moan midnight
Bedded on my rock
Rocked in my bedlam night
Feel all right
O feel all right
How long is my star-sung madness?
Hard rest for my head
Now all the stony stars are silent
All night long
O all night long
In Dead Nights of Dread
In dead nights of dread
I dance with two sisters
And one is called fear and the other is shame
They are twins, and alike
So much the same
That I can never be sure if I’m with one or the other
For all my imploring her name
Through long days of dread
When I’m not feeling the best
Those bad girls pursue me
And throw black stones through me
And tell me I’m lost and unblest
Just As …
Just as
A tangle of foliage
Foils the sun
Dappling
So
My strangle of fear
Thwarts the tomorrow
Interferes with the light
Keeps me
Grappling
In the slow noisy silence
Here on the ground
In the shadow
Lying Awake – Listening to the Rain
The dulcet rain around the black house
Dreamer unsleeping in dream-weary bed
The dark rain like solace around the black house
The bruiseless flesh of a boy in a river
Stray sprig of youth carelessly owned
Lost in white days of older despair
The dulcet rain around the black house
Dreamer unsleeping in dream-weary bed
The dark rain like solace around the black house
The Working Man
Flurried, there he goes
Dressed in his best, just-pressed suit of clothes
Scurrying down the street
Hurrying to meet
Who knows?
Ah, he’s turned towards the station
A frantic agitation
Worry beads of perspiration
He seems to mouth an incantation
For he’s got to catch that train
He’s only late again
Panting and in pain
Caught it, he’s away
Clinging to the strap in the swinging carriage-sway
Prodded, pestered, in the crush
Of the early-morning rush
Another day
Sometimes he dreams of drifting
On the sea sands subtly shifting
Like a bearded, brooding Moses …
It’s the pressure he supposes
Yet uplifting:
To refresh the brain with childish thoughts
He is a youthful-thinking man of course
But ambition is his driving force
There’s the future to consider and the family he supports
And so he spurns each idle notion
And that strange sleep-tangle of emotion
And properly pursues promotion
An Old Pillar
He’d thought the knife-edge of his mind
Would be his prow
Parting sweet dilemmas
He’d envisioned himself a lone, sturdy helmsman, unbeguiled
No sea too anxious but that he rode it surely
No sun too fierce for his destined brow
No truth too savage for his discontented head
No blandishment
No threat
That did not wilt before his merry retort
A happy truant who cared not for the ineluctable
He recalls it
Now
Now, a ghoul
A cobwebbed fool
He writes prefabricated platitudes
In his tidy
Bookshelved
Den
Leaves of Acid 