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Sunday 10 May 2015

A6

The road leads out to the dales
To look down on a patchwork of fields
Divided up by dry stone walls

The road twists out into open country
From the market town halfway
Between the workplace and the seaside sea

The road climbs the limestone hill
How not to remember her name
How not to be moved by her fabulous smile

The road rambles down the valley
Carved out by glaciers
Quarried by ancient & modern men

The road took me away
Took me away always
From those that I loved and the others

The road goes on
On the road as with Kerouac
On the road as a way of writing


Saturday 9 May 2015

Storm Psychology

Woken
By the tearing wind
And the driving rain

As if unspoken
The middle-of-night truths
Race around to stain

Frame this once youth
Whose three score years
No more remain

His image left
On the tails of winds
Amidst the thrusts of rain

He’ll restrain
From being uncouth
If that's all the same

Yet the stories
Of his tainted fruits
Still surely lead the shame

If only to explain
Of himself
Who indeed was to blame

Lying here unrestrained
In the tearing wind
And the driving rain


Friday 8 May 2015

Day And Light

The forecasted storms did not materialise
Instead a morning of wild and phenomenal skies 
Turner himself could not have painted such colours
Diaghilev himself could not have elucidated such movements

Reds, as true as the blood drawn
By defiant Spanish bullfighters
Blues, as sure as Yves Klein himself
Would have ground from ground

Silvers and whites, as clear and bright
As the most majestic of imagined miraculous visitations
Pinks and greys, both flamboyant and calm
An immense sense of tranquility and stillness
Amongst the highest of transformative energies

A sky formed from infinite layers
As if a thousand deep stage curtains
Each one rolled slightly back
To bring the one in front in view
This then repeated, ad infinitum

Until there at the point of disappearance
A light, a light with all the joys of life in its luminosity
A weightless shining, an emissive source of brilliance
At the very point of brilliance

In the afternoon, on the journey home
Heading south east, looking due west
A length of cloud beyond the grasp of straight on vision
As if a carpet of crumpled white felt was hanging from the stars
An impression of damp felt, with a shower of iridescent droplets
Falling from the universe, towards the mist covered ground

For those on the terra-firma
Immediately beneath the shimmer fine lines of water
They may say "it is no more than a shower”
But to me, these few miles away

It is as if it was the beginning of a spectacular stage show
Perhaps a curtain raiser to Jean Michel Jarre
With all his wondrous projections


Thursday 7 May 2015

Pull Off

Stainless steel table top
Spots of rain turned into mottled motifs
As one might find on oil slicks or lava lamps

Prickled points of container plants
Dead in their autumn shade
As one might find in Nash's paintings of lost hope

A time, a place
For the last time
For the last chase of words

Somewhere, on the way to somewhere else
A service station
For all of those folks who need a service


Wednesday 6 May 2015

In A Book

Eight days ago
Butterflies in profusion
A warm calm
The end of an Indian Summer

Today the gulls battle the wind
As maniacs in flight
Who knows their destination
Who understands there sense of reason

Yesterday was fire and snow
Love, infatuation 
& snippets
Of vagrant poets words

Before that there was long ago
Humans still told spoken stories
A cold struggle
As if the beginning of civilisation