Your Castle Awaits You

On the top
Up above Alston Moor
Away from the river
Away from the bridge
On the floor of the valley

I sit, I think
It's a thinking sitting thing
We drink champagne
We drink gin
It's a gin & champagne thing

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Spirals & Staircases

I left few marks
None that you'd notice
I saw that white green grass
On the sunlit Sunday evening

The bark of dog, and song of bird
Muffled words overheard
I have watched that leaf
Throughout the season

Only with reason and mastery unplanned
Do I misunderstand the photographs
The bric-a-brac on white windowsills
Chilled still wine with plain Roman blinds

See the signs of middle class
The traps of middle-aged nostalgia
We are now acquiring vases
At quite a rate of knots

Inkblots are found to be fake psychology
Or so it seems, as some mean spirited
Writer tries to crush my dreams
With few marks left

Least none that you'd notice

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Songs - Times

I didn't check the date
I didn't pay attention to the detail

• Pablo Picasso
• Edward Burra
• Wyndham Lewis
• RB Kitaj
• Frank Brangwyn
• JoanMiro

These are the names that brought me here
Most especially: Wyndham Lewis and Joan Miro

I have missed Conscience & Conflict
Just as I missed the Spanish Civil War
Though that was by three generations
Rather than by just: For those three days

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Floorspace

One lamp bulb is not lit
One painting is in darkness
The blood trundles
Around my calves and my thighs
As if to say it is time to rest

I need not meditate
To feel the twinge in my left knee
Or the dissatisfaction, shown
By the soles of my feet
With the morning's extreme walking

Only the scents, the perfumes
The eau-de-colognes
Only the aroma's
Heavy with wanting, heavy in expectation
Of lifting the weight from my wasteland

It is quiet now, I am alone in the gallery
There is a parquet floor; the exhibition:
So Last Century
Says a lot about misdirected energy

There are more staff than visitors
There are more galleries closed than open
Two days ago the doors closed
On the future, or the past
Of the Spanish Civil War, it seems
The modernists have moved on

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Occupation

The gusting wind tears through the small but flexible tree. The small but flexible tree that has made its life between the yards slabs of reinforced concrete.

Behind the interwoven wire and railing security fence, in front of the stacks of remaindered wooden pallets, to the side, in the foreground so to speak.

There is a brick-wall building, attached to which is a cast iron drainpipe; whose once blue paint now peels to allow the rust.

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