On The Shoulders Of Giants

Between the Eliot and the Cocker

The writing is bound to come a cropper

With the plot line firmly stored in the locker

The time is now right to write something proper

To draft something new about you

Say what you want if that is what you want

Be deceitful if deceit is your concrete choice

Say what you hope for if that is what you hope for

Be sincere if sincerity is his master’s voice

To craft something new about you

Between old Thomas Stearns and young Jarvis

The words are certain to be a real showstopper

It is the modernist way to call out the avarice

To pick out the pills for the party popper

Who laughed at something new about you

Say time is time if time is what you want

Be endearing if to endear is your Rolls Royce

Say place is place if place is how you cope

Be revealing if to reveal is your James Joyce

So daft, a portrait of something new about you

 

Silent Echoes

Always I wait

I wait for the first line

Some days I make note of the date

But mostly I don’t, and, do you know, that’s fine

I have a vacuous shelter

Which I cannot enter, or hardly speak of

Therein lies the joy of the helter-skelter

Which once passed itself off as love

For all I know the emptiness is compounded

By the singular thought

That no thought is returned or rebounded

All I hear is naught

Naught of the nothingness of light

Naught of the depth of misunderstanding

All that is left is the fear of fight or flight

As if on that runway once more landing

This din is the end of the latest new beginning

Feint leads for fickle feelings

The dies are cast, the hair is thinning

The doubts stand out, up on through the ceilings

 

Starting Over

Already the leaf as fallen

Even as the pain pays its own reminder

One body, which makes its way

Working out where to place the music

It is obvious that I should crawl about the floor

Find the remote, plug in the CD, turn it on

But I don’t, no I don’t do that

The poetry must always come first

Instead to listen to the silence

Or the ambience of the muffled world outside

Where the leaf has already fallen

Where the pink sky has turned to grey

It is less obvious what I would listen to

Which playlist, what century

Yes I am unsure, and being unsure

The poetry always comes first

I sit in this new writer’s space 

Fashioning myself as such a vehicle

My eyes sway from leaf to leaf

Working out how to begin again

 

Meditation Shrine

Between the vast landscape

And the tiny flower

And further memorabilia

A flame flickers

That is

Between

The vast Hebridean landscape

With land, loch and mountain

As photographed in years gone by

And the tiny flower, captured

By camera

On the roadside beside the bog

There is a glass vase

With a votive candle

Also, between the large pebbles

There is a thin slice

Of fossilised ammonite

Which was

A gift for services rendered

In the furtherance of publication

Of that lady’s poetry collection

 

This, Or That

In this town, whose streets

I neither own nor roam

Unlike that village

Which really was my place

In this time, whose age

I both fear and crave

Unlike my youth

Lived out for all to chase

In this light, whose darkness

Checks all progress made

Unlike the dawn

More certain in its gaze

In this line, whose edge

In truth approaches plain

Unlike the poet

Who wanders in malaise

In this end, a stuttering fall

Which maybe came too too soon

Unlike the comet

Whose sparkles our spirits raise