Wired-Less

Sheer excitement

Let me name it laudable (or laughable)

Excited by a telephone number

With a recognisable area code

What right have I

Still to make connections

Are you there?

Is anybody there

The black and white keys

Stroked with such certainty

Sure of a lighter mood, yet

Mindful of a minor refrain

As the hall doorway opens

All cobwebs are dusted

By the flight of her body

In search of the handset

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Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Faith Wrap

Into and out of the darkness

Only briefly to sidle up

To the edge-lines of paranoia

Still to search out beauty

In the scentless black tulip

Still to wonder on truth

In the words of named poets

Into, again into, the pleasures

All hours to dream & daydream

On sounds of pianos and minarets

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Past Present Echoes

All to hear
The ears ring
The wind blows
The pen scrapes the paper
The only connection
Is within

Within these words
Words only of our pasts
Our present futures
Where do they go to
My lovely

All to hear
The ears ring quietens
The wind blows louder
The pen pauses for breath
The only connection
Remains within

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Trains And Thoughts And Dames

I woke at six to be with you

To be with you in spirit

In spirit as you travelled

Travelled to your friends

I woke fair slow to leave

To leave the dreams of you

Dreams of you quietly giving me

Giving me your telephone number

I could call

I could text

We could engage

In simple conversation

For after all

Whatever’s next

If all we maintain

Is self preservation

Home at seven to write of you

To write of you on your cold 

On your cold dark journey

From seven to eleven quite how to say to you

Quite how to say to you, thanks for giving me

Thanks for giving me your telephone number

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Forgetful

Free from intrusion

Able to write

Read

Listen

Take myself off

Into that other place

A journey

Eased by welcome

Eyes closed

Posture restful

Spreadeagled

Without defence

Warm paths

Just before autumn

The love of I love you

On sand and...no

I cannot bring

The word to mind

This happens

More often now

If only the Machair scanned

That would have got me off the hook

...flotsam ...jetsam ...surf

...shingle

Grass or pampas, pray please help me

It was all along the five mile road

Between tar-macadam and sea

The dunes, yes that’s it, the dunes

Don’t you remember

I ran down them and fell

I was totally exhilarated

Some called it love

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Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Yin And Yang

All because it was unexpected

Yet already I was in the frame of mind

Up for it some would say

A good way from the karma

All pathways to the Dalai Lama

Frayed, frozen, certainly broken

All because the response was quicker than instant

Words chosen for their turgid and heavy emphasis

Pouring scorn on the non-expectant

A good way from the laughter

All pathways to the light of heart

Closed off, blocked, impertinently unspoken

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

We Have Someone To Do That

It is, calm

There it is, minus calm

Between the two

There is no continuum

What is broken

What might be repaired

Between the two

Some kind of officium

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Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Frozen Out

It is a low-cut Sunday

The newly slung autumn sun

Floods the stubble with its orange light

The fields, once fresh with crop

Are shorn; for the winter, for the plough

As lovers we slept

Under Egyptian cotton sheets

The dreams though, soon to be abridged

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Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Put Upon Another

Thursday lunch

Crayfish & Rocket

Watching the guy who cleans up clean up

I sit with my own frustrations

But soon I begin wondering

What are his rack-able doubts

Does he talk to himself about a past love

Is the swift sidestep

A sign of more flamboyant times

He reminds me of my own poem

The Fedora from Buena Vista

Already I hear the samba & the rhumba

Maybe he was once a galactico

On the sands of Rio de Janeiro

His sensual slipstream movements

Reminiscent...

A feel of the breeze

With the sun on your back

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Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Crumpled

Dew

And mist dampened leaves

Seen as singular objects of art

A vulnerable disappointed collection

Fearful of the scathing dry winds

Spring 

She promised more

A journey to a collective of joy

Life affirming bows and flexes

Eventful, as all new births are

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Eight O’Clock Rock

Sat on Herons Reach

Before I ever used the word twilight

A place away from my own place

With the sounds, with the rhythms

Of other peoples melancholy

Just to get me in the mood

Before I unroll a paper canvas

Before I open a pack of pastels

Before I retune the car stereo

& think about the lines of love

Later, around midnight; late night radio

My words moved from thought to thought

Heavens above this could be heaven, for

All of the time we have before departure

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Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Timetabled

Geometric shapes

Forged

Language

Pummelled & beaten

Silences

Whispered over the heads of corn

Take me there again

To where the light of time is lifted

Away from the lonely

Where what is maybe mine is gifted

Local

Somehow global

Revolving doors

Revolve

Noises

Shout across the crowded room

Let me escape

For certain as a polygon would

Eventually as only

A once regular theorem could

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Ears And Explorations

On the one line

A long path

Break it up

Break it up

Break it up

A longer story

Of shorter lines

No thoughts thought

Of dissimilar paths

Those ringing sounds of closing down

Traffic moves along the tidal causeway

Winds and rooks and once good looks

Those ringing sounds of closing down

On the one line

A long path

Break it up

Break it up

Break it up

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Irksome I: A Review

Breakfast was cold

It suited the cold stories

I came for poetry

My mistake

This was more like

A chilled

Thriller writers exposé

Dan and Ruth led off

Pouring scorn

On our lack of knowing -

The pictures all hung square

Most people had been last year

I won’t be back; the breakfast was old

& it suited their over told stories

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Den

Harvest time; first we piled the bales high

On the trailer, carted them from field to barn

Sons of farmers and village urchins we became architects

Future participants perhaps for Kevin’s Grand Designs

The main space was deep inside the piled bales

The entrances, and exits, had twists and turns

Part to keep people from knowing of our secret den

Part, as Jenny says ‘to secretly discover our sexual selves’

As the winter wore on, and the cattle needed feeding

Our den was dismantled; bale by bale, day by day

First the entrance, then the exit, then the small

Cavern, which had been immense, with boys laughter

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Between Form

Left

That was the essence

Once again I had left

Longing

There again the subrogation

Once again I was longing

Free and straight

Hide bound by geometry

Once again I chose divergence

Isolated

Only mist between us

Once again, free of emergence

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Power Station

There was hardly any differentiation, between the mist of nature, and the mist created by the warm droplets of the cooling towers

We had left the wharf in Lincoln, good and early, to glide along the canal with the sunrise at our back

I had longed to belong to the water, and here I was on a long boat, a narrow boat, crawling through edgelands countryside, moving freely, yet seemingly always in a straight line

You can still taste the coal; not so much as in the old days, not since the power stations cleaned up their environmental act, but, with a big gulp of breath you can taste the damp black, the sulphur is still there to be chewed upon

Any good mathematician would be able to tell you that the cooling tower walls are parabolas, or another fancy word that I haven’t used since geometry classes at PGS

Any poet would be able to tell you that they are metaphors, for beauty & isolation; and that love always dies, and one day they too will die

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

The Love And Death Of Poetry

I love my toes

With the diabetes

Heaven knows

Those long ball throws

All began

In the spring of toes

I love my fingers

Words written

So as not to ring her

Soft touch that brings 

Her nearer now

To my loaded Dillinger

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Flip Aside

I don’t know myself

Although I do know

That I easily get annoyed

And that often I smile

One night in drizzle

A long way from any home

I waited for a late night bus

In a happy state of mind

One day in sunlight

Sat out on the back step

I waited, not knowing for what

In my beleaguered muddle

I don’t know myself

Although I do know

That often I smile, and

That I easily get annoyed

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Back A Life

Zodiac signs from distant times

Did you too once believe in love

On the late night bus

To the party in the field

Then along came the moment

When you felt you almost

Remembered those moments

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Small Joys

Bright lights

In the morning mist

Fence-top & hedgerow

With the lightest dewdrop

Each sous ever so slightly kissed

Resist the fall to maudlin

As if old times pasts are past

Psyche & aura

Become the brightest crop

Vous de vous - to the very last

Distant piano keys

Tap out the sounds of Liszt

Love’s near; autumn days

Decline to faintness, fail to hope

All of all we are the ones left to cope

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Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Hollow Winds

Far apart

Hills, valleys

Epochs of understatement

Sat, stood

Eyes over water

Eyes lifted, up to sky

Stillness & vast frustrations

To have loved

To have lost

Back, to the dammed upstream

Start over

Listen to the rows and arguments

Far apart

Older generations

Impatient with their lust

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Labelled

Is it such a bad thing

In such a long run

To pick out one bad thing

After another

So easy to lose touch

Mostly fragile

Much too shy to say

Let bygones be

The pen now a crutch

For the clutch of sparrow-hawks

That chalk the inner walk

In place of open talk

The one bad thing

That led to another

Doubts intrinsically rose

One hope is to rediscover

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Come Back

Only if it could be said

If I could speak

With a clearer voice

I had a choice, always

But almost always

I was highly excitable

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Best Rest Yet

As if the resonance

Sounds that say

The blood is still filtered

The heart pumps to the brain

& tonight, all that is not forgotten

Can be laid to rest

As if some force or test

Surrounds our rights of way

That why with which we play

Those so dear to us, no fear

Even nearer

Doubt not, we did our best

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

That Time

Draw down the night

In a room of mirrors

Paintings, furniture & lights

Let the lack of sight

Allow freedoms to wander

Free the mind to write

Of all the noises hereabout

Sounds drawn-down, quite

As if the inner world doth shout

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Choice

Why then call it weakness

If it is almost universal

Where was the fork

The road it seems

Is anything but less travelled

Before the bile

Is liberated

Before sick and sour

Soliloquy's take over

Why not call it joyful

Joyful and universal

The fork of joy

Where both roads

Became well travelled

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

At Least A Billion... & One

Towards the sleep

Who knows of who you are sleeping

Not a peep

From those of you who love peeping

I take the giants leap

To the sleepers on the rail track

Learn to earn my keep

With the grim reaper at my back

Towards the sleep

Who knows what secrets you are keeping

Not too steep

For the first fleet-of-foot past weeping

I take the minnows creep

To the quieter, darker corner

Learn to slowly fall in deep

Become as the candlelit mourner

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Northbound West Facing

Silhouettes to passers by

Skylines and shadows

& thoughts to wonder why

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red

Compartment

Grey and silver sky

Effervescent pink

Beyond the clouds

A body of people

Where one person reads

Of a body of people

Imagine; to say goodbye, in your

Mind; as if no more

Than to place leaves on a bare tree

To think again, dwell on those two

In conversation; almost our friends

The ones we never really knew

From the Kindle collection at Amazon 

Upright & Laid Out - Love of Cherry Red