Driftwood

One white house
Your memories unfold
Fisherman’s tales
Told and retold
A lonesome room
On a windswept shore
Children listen
Parents plead for more, for more
Your crevices and cracks
Your driftwood smoking stack
Rhythms and rhymes, into the night
Eyes burning as splinters smack
Living alone
Inside your solitary stone
Now painted white
A virgins flight, souls to fright
Was your life
So simple we surmise
Grilling fish
Sunset, sunrise, no surprise
A simple cloth
Not Cardin or Davidoff
Did you smile
Along the whole five mile
Walking the shoreline
Before the armies came
Was it ever the same
Was it, ever the same
Your stories unfold
Your history is told and sold
You lie there stark and cold
Within your mind’s finer robes of gold

 

Preamble

The bramble is in bloom
The yellow gorse

There's yards and yards of it
The rain speckled rambler
Walks, smiling all the way through
This pathway followed by monks of old
Today's story told
Around last centuries newest abbey
Amongst the twisted vines and lavender
In the bookshop, reading of retreats
Buying Aristotle's thoughts on happiness
The gentle people congregate
Smiling eyes, soft-spoken voices
Back on the moors
Back among magnificent vista's
A thousand years
A million miles
The beauty brings alive

The eyes and the ears
The traveller thanks his lucky stars
Nature has many more surprises
The river rises, in a flash spring spate
Meditation in stained glass surrounds
To a backdrop of glory and giving
Being your brother’s keeper
Contributing for continuing living
Sunshine and showers
Photographs of flowers
Reaching peace
Touching love
Being there
Just being
Immersed in adsorption
Feeling, by being alive

 

Ten; Around Then Anyway

A momentary lapse of…
A reason to believe in dreams
Cobbled stones

Rough-hewn meadow lanes
Summer skies

Children’s joy, butterflies
Bilberry bush, strawberry jam

Birds and bees
Picnics by the big house lake
A fleeting glimpse of…
A season to remember a stinging sense
The cane, caning to care
Wrapped in cotton wool
Playground pranks, slipper and spanks
Education’s cock and bull
A flashing passing of…
An aromatic memory of yesteryear
Tar-macadam steam
Workmen by the brazier
Smelting, melting, snorting, blowing
Machines amortise nature

Blackening the country mile

 

I did not take a black tie

I did not take a black tie
I came to see my mother
Ward 11 said Mary
I left a message, on the mobile

For my brother
I did not take a black tie
I came to see my mother
Ward 11 said Mary
I left a message, on the mobile

For my brother
I did not take a black tie
I came to see my mother
Ward 11 said Mary
I left a message, on the mobile

For my brother
Sugar Diabetes
Broke the best part of my grandfather's life
And my mother’s sister
For ten years she's lived in fear
Of chocolates and cake
And the desire to gorge
The desire to gorge
I did not take a black tie
I came to see my mother
Ward 11 said Mary
I left a message, on the mobile

For my brother

Sugar Diabetes
Broke the best part of my grandfather's life
And my mother’s sister
For ten years she's lived in fear
Of chocolates and cake
And the desire to gorge
The desire to gorge
And here I am at 47
At the end of half a week of visiting

And communicating, and feeling
Yes feeling for the goodness of people

How everyone contributes

And everyone cares
I did not take a black tie
I came to see my mother
Ward 11 said Mary
I left a message, on the mobile

For my brother
Sugar Diabetes
Broke the best part of my grandfather's life
And my mother’s sister
For ten years she's lived in fear
Of chocolates and cake
And the desire to gorge
The desire to gorge
And here I am at 47
At the end of half a week of visiting

Communicating and feeling
Yes feeling for the goodness of people

And how everyone contributes

And everyone cares
Now alone in the Sculpture Park
Beneath the sun and the crows
Thinking about life, about art

And sculpture

And doing things, with care
Tonight we bomb Yugoslavia
Trying our best to care

 

Now There Is No Horizon

The waves roll over and over
Rolling along the curve of the shoreline
Their stereophonic splashes washing over

Washing over
Silently the sodium lights glaze the ripples
Incidentally highlighting the ebb and flow
All the while the buoys and marker lights Bobble and flicker
All of this through the blown open

Broken bathroom door
This after Yentob on Freud on the radio
Only pretending to understand
Wanting to remember this time
Wanting to describe the space
Describe the feeling
Sodium at the seafront
At midnight
No other sounds
Sea moving, air flowing
And earlier, Hockney saying painting
Painting is the real thing
A photograph could not capture
And you know he is almost right
But behind me is the sink
And down below the window
A solitary moment, a stranger passing
Neither captured by the flashbulb

Nor the paintbrush
Both unable to synthesise all of the view
But with these words
Written down, beside the corroded

Cracked glass single glazed window
With a cream windowsill inside
And outside

Sky blue, mottled, exterior paint
I can see out into the blackness
To describe that; now there is no horizon
Only a two-dimensional black space
A completely starless night sky
How would the painter work
Without depth and perspective
How would the photographer touch
The thousand miles of nothingness
Between here and the next continent
Or remember the background sounds
Beach bound pebbles crashing
Like sacks of marbles
Or the roar
Of the last motorbike
As he serenades
And leaves
The shoreline
Promenade