A Calm Of Love, A Calm Of Purpose

It all became so clear
Although I've watched you
For a long while
Watched you year on year

Taken pleasure in your reflection
A perception to be entirely insincere
A construction, a camouflage
Surpassing disastrous perception

Your wrinkled skin, your golden hair
Finding light wherever the music falls
Can you hear the music
More so can you hear the true affair

It all became without need to instruct
Somehow just to stand in the sunshine
By the railway line
By the overgrown viaduct

By the canal sides of decay and restoration
As old thoughts pass by
As old hopes pass by

Today there is no intoxication or reformation

Other than a calm aloof
Perhaps a calm of love
Perhaps a calm of purpose
Indifference, to the cat on the hot tin roof

On any other day no need for further  preparation
Far enough of a gaze at my own navel
Today though the clarity
Is a turning away from fear, or desperation

In place a settlement, a circle of stones
A plain of reddest sand
Perhaps there too a cactus
An oasis, with a wishing well, and gnomes

A curtain raised, under a singular light
A child with his mother; a brother with his sisters
A writer with his words
And someone, for whom he wishes to write

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Millennia Ridge

Should we take in all before the moonlight
Walk with steady footsteps
Walk over the peoples bridge
Walk over the Millennium Bridge

Should we wake in piles of Egyptian cotton
Wake with sensate satiate breath
Wake over two peoples; two peoples bridge
Ache over two peoples Millennia Ridge

Then down to a chancery garden
Down beside the sea-spray
Astride the zest of life
Where we could fake our own disappearance

For a summer afternoon
With Cezanne, or Picasso
Or Monet
On his bridge at Giverny

Would we shake our own forbearance
For a hazy swoon
With our own bare canvas, our other
John Bunyan

A smile with a skip
A hand slid softly through the golden hair
There right beside the fountain
With splashed stone flags of intimate surprise

Laid side by side in perfect fit
Touched at all points of the compass
Touched all ways on the curved surface
Of this spherical sphere

A maypole, a stream of coloured string
A garland, a smile, a chance embrace
In love with innocence
Ever with which to carry with you

No greater gift to share
From here and from childhood
From here and from everywhere
From here and always, all the way to eternity

From here and always
From here and all ways
All ways to two people's
Two people's Millennia Ridge

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What Less Use At All

I remember the last time I had
Four Satsumas'
As so do those around me at the time

Friend, I tell you
An overdose of vitamin C
Is somewhat to be avoided

But what less use at all
Than garlic, without the odour
That then only leaves the Sanatogen

And as that’s for old folk
I clearly don't qualify
So it’s to the Brandy and Babycham I turn

There you have it
That’s what it is
Tell me; would you care for a hand at whist?

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Somewhere Called Home

My words are treading carefully
For fear of saying love
My mind is skating warily
For fear of some word from above

Or some more coincidental confirmation
For already I know it
As the leaf strokes my face
I know it to be true

Yet I dare not say so
Should the truth disappear
So easily as it did at first
Appear

The careful tread
Then not to be misread
As any sign of caution
Other than the fair time to give for love to nurture

As one would give to any primrose
Or petunia
Or vacation
To a concert or a tropical isle

Or better still, we set ourselves
To longer conversations
Hand held conversations
Somewhere called home

Still there
For our words to be chosen carefully
Through our laughter
Our smiles, our tears, our faint repose

For all of that to be
Quite natural
Uplifting
It is that which we propose

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Washing

The shirts are dry and the underwear is so too
Soon it will be the time for the line of the hot iron
To discover and to deepen the colour of your blue
That blue which speaks to you as in the Speakeasy
Those Jazz nights at the Upper George in Halifax
Or down the stainless steel road at Stocksbridge's Silver Fox
A blue then with fusion links just as the Pelikan ink stains
The letters sent one by one to a close though distant lover
Or the words penned for one yet meant entirely for another

The jeans are dry and the wool socks are so too
Soon it will be the time for the layer and the care of folding
To organise and tidy making up the altogether neater you
The you that changes because for you change comes easy
As for that celebration dinner at the Idle Rocks in St Mawes
Or for high society on Ladies Day at Glorious Goodwood
The you that struts his stuff yet also poses as the flaneur
Clothes so finely cut by a tailor or by an experienced brute
Worn with a suit and a jacket over silk stockings and brogues

The morning was warm and dry the afternoon is so too
But you know that soon will be the time for the drawing in
For us to phase out this memory of summer and thus
To give me and the washing folk out there a clearer view

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