One more step
Another note
With its own inflection
Before one departs
To spend quiet time
With the brothers
In this way
The mind is given
Time and space
With the hope
Of achieving calm
And clarity of purpose
The music being
Only a minor distraction
Blue-black dress
Italians to impress
In the wedding chateau
Ink blue leaf
Immersed in flower relief
Over there on the mountain
If not to caress
Or favours to suggest
For the declining years
So much mischief
Beneath the climbing disbelief
The iTunes playlist
Based on Dublin Blues
Is exquisite
Though I may have to buy
More Lyle Lovett
And Blaze Foley
The snow swirls
Turned into a wild flurry
But that too is now over
For we have blue skies
Bright sunshine
Landing on last years
Dried-out beech leaves
Johnny Cash sings
On your mind
From a playlist, set to repeat
TS Eliot
Looks in my direction
From a Wyndham Lewis portrait
This book
Is drawing to a close
But there is another
Holding on
To the coat-tails
As one might say
And then the rain came
Though not gushing down
Rather, in the delicate form
Of a light, and fine, drizzle
So not sufficient
To prevent making a booking
For the Minack Theatre
In mid-September
This during a sortie
To a Penzance of many memories
Also to the Isles of Scilly
The pen
The ink
The time to think
With a lover’s abandon
The month
The day
The hope to play
With love at random
The book
The collection
The space to build
Next come the perforated pages
This then at the end
Of the certainties so to speak
On a blue sky day
Yet without the bands of joy
Instead the notes
Fall, one by one
From Vienna or Havana
With summer coats
For the one by one
From Sienna or Copacabana
Next come the perforated pages
Pasted down through the ages
With the sure-fire certainty
Of a blue sky day
As you have been there
To have tasted the fruits
Of lascivious love
To have dwelled
As you have dwelled
On the mound
Of stupefied love
To have lain there
As you have lain there
In the sensual silence
Of the submission to love
To have smoked there
As you have smoked there
In the wondrous aftermath
Of the engagement of love
After a long time away
And with ink on my fingers
After refilling the pen
I feel a need to consent
To complete this book
Before I set out on my travels
Such that I might
Take the third book with me
Second is an odd place
Not a cherished space
In any of the sports
Which I practiced
And so with this book
Neither one thing
Nor the other
Just more scratching
On the recycled paper
As one listens
To the angelic chorus
Nowhere is where I need to be
To find the nothingness
Which faces the life inside of me
Nothing sets me free
Such as the emptiness
Of simply being able to see
To see that peaceful calm
Which exists, as if by the trees
Out in the meadows
Or playing in the stream
Where light-hearted
Tenderness sets the scene
Finding memories, once seen
Never to be forgotten
What can it mean
This nothingness, filled
With the emptiness to be
I am that other person
Writing a biography
Of the life which I lived
If you wish to call that
An autobiography
Then that’s fine by me
But don’t go on about it
Because there isn’t time
Not even for those of you
Who were inkwell monitors
Or those of you who remembered
Using inkwells, to make
Blotting paper bombs
For shooting across the classroom
On to the teacher’s blackboard
Whilst the teacher’s face
Was focussed on the chalk spot
A wasp hovers by the pond
A pigeon pecks the grass
Before stepping out, as pigeons step out
Across a lawn one thousand pigeon-steps wide
Another pigeon, perhaps the mate
Comes in from next doors garden
Then a magpie enters the scene
Black, white and dangerously fluorescent green
That a butterfly, or two
Remind me of a garden pond
Where someone other returned home
Most unexpectedly
I too am here by chance
By a thousand coincidences
If truth be known
Or if truth may be told
Any one of those decisions
Could have begotten
An altogether alternative path
For the first time
In a long time
I hear children
And the sound of birdsong
It isn’t a difficult thing
To dream one’s dreams
Yet always we must be careful
Just what we wish for
Take care as you tread
On the cusp of solitude
And loneliness, for one repairs
While the other edges towards despair
That we don’t always know
Or half-way recognise
One from the other says much
About the frailties of the human psyche
Where, in her words
I discerned the self same doubts
Which, day after day
One day
I will be still
And in that stillness
I will write
Of the purity
Of the silence
Of the sublime beauty
Of the truth
All captured
On the day
Of sunlight and frost
Of dew and fine drizzle
Which
Once your hair is damp
Will cease
And invite you
To buy an ice-cream
Back with the blue
In such a way
As never having been away
Just like the restaurant
At Gloucester Docks
Seems like yesterday
Of course Wagamama
Does carry that deja-vu
Also being in Sheffield and Lincoln
Yet all are back in the day
All truly before
Blue came along
To bring Berlin
Into my life
With its theatres and its wall
And its bridge over the river
By the gate, and the hotel
Wondering
Where my pen might take me
From the imagined streets
Of Berlin
To that bridge over the river
After several strong shots
Of whisky
In the American’s bar
Such a long kiss
The sort of embrace
Which opened all imaginations
And it was me
I was my own co-conspirator
Narrator, and cause celeb
It was I
Spinning and weaving
In the depths of a writer’s double life
I look
At the nine
New notebooks
It is time
To press on
Time to interrupt the delay
But first
To tell you of the sunlight
To tell you
Of the canons of inspiration
Such strombolic music
To accompany
The bending light
The rainbow waveforms
Emanating
How long to have been away
So difficult to return
Especially as the pen
Is not flowing freely
Yes, the Berlin Blue
Is in need of replenishment
As also is the soul of this writer
On a quite troublesome day
Yet the debt must be repaid
To have lived such a good life
Without giving an ounce of thanks
Is not praise as praise should be
How long then until the next time
What certainty of pessimism
Might cause the words to dry up
Or, to dry out, may read better
There is always a distance
A gradual wandering pathway
Through climbing moorland streams
The new year diet is begun
Music, art, literature
And a little less food
Yes down to sixteen hundred
Calories a day
For the next three months
Mind you, the walking
Hasn’t taken off
Like it should have
It’s just not in me
Not in this dull cold weather
Where I prefer to play
With inkblots
And spots of memories
From the near and distant past
When I encouraged
The Rorschach test
I do intend to begin the new year
With a more inward looking journey
Which is what I am trying to realise
That is, this is what I hope to find
I am not alone in having lost a lover
Of that I am 100% certain
I am though entirely alone in dealing with it
In the way which I try to deal with it
I know that it goes dark outside
Also that that happens earlier
In winter rather than in summer
I know too that loss goes darker
If all that I am is all that I am
Then what am I to worry about
But if I also try to include you
Does that not create a new story
Once upon a time, long ago
I did include you
Indeed thoughts of you preceded all
I was going to have just one more
But then, out of the Celebrations
Bumper Christmas re-seal packet
My hand emerged with a Twix
And a Mars bar, honestly
I had no choice did I
I hate the Twix first
But then, I thought of Fee Griffin’s poetry
Another Christmas gift
But from a more familiar source
Who also gave me
The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Only two of which I will use
To tell you that today is Sunday
And the sun shines brightly
To ward off storm Bella
Who is the real reason why
I did not go to the Mountain
To see the Four Colours of Rock
Neither did I walk around
The Basket Dew Pond
I did not enter the Guardian Shelter
Of woven hazel plastered with mud
Neither did I traverse by the Cuckoo Dome
Which interleaves the inside with the outside
The Shelter for Dreaming though lives on in me
I borrowed it’s name for a poetry collection
It almost became that basket
Which lies between this death and that life
The Tumulus on the Downs
Came before I walked there
Similarly the Air-Vessel Canoe