~

The Past is dead.
And we mourn for it
With the rejoice
That it can never return.

~

~

Dear liberty,

A starling separated and flowed down a stream made of liberty,
Tumbling across tables, sweat and chairs,
So suddenly as if I wasn't there.
April magnets of talking on twine brought the dearest bird near,
For only for it to sigh, ten feet high and float so,
And now sadly she has nearly gone.
Ten years lost of hope, treading water,
Swimming breathlessly until tumbled out,
Limbs unfound, abound alone weightlessly now.
She faces east while our minds go.

Skipping, sleeping of feeling,
Auden and talking, rhythm and bleating.
Pass station time, work time, find time...

As times flew it becomes crystal clear
In the shower dew of eyes glued
And opened anew what the day makes
Of my now cageless soul of it all:
A tower heaving black soot, blackbird
Drifts along the edge of it all,
And defiantly charges forward like horses
Pulling entire verses of universes of strength into vacuums,
Stepping a freedom void forward, forward,
And its everything blackened glistening hope I
Wish for, all hanging by a thread now...

Authorities' sons smoke more furiously,
Alienated by more some;
Past doesn't flow in my wake my light, up on me, bull fight,
Loose canons go looking for ground to hold onto so.

Space is out, bunkered on top of dead grass, straw like,
Feeding from melancholic sword fights,
With ghosts and all people ever knowing.
Looking for reflections in infinity's mass;
Having time, compassion and no weight to consider fate's own destiny;
Chasing something solid...

Now web caught, ripples through people,
Around people fighting talk.
Thousands knew and there were people
Leading people, leading liberty;
Discussions grew and you knew.

Lights grew. October grew and grew.
Orbits, cans and hands and plans grew.
Leaves on trees turned to brown
So they could watch us as we burned so,
Softly, quietly barely spoken,
Coats pleasured, soaken
In wonder's deliverance and bewilderment's peace.

Park fountain head spun, bar run
In hands and poking fun at pylons.
Melting catching projection air kiss your natured face
From curling air of beauty's awe.
Plummeting and spinning plum eyes
Glance deep, and heart's tremendous shudders
A million words loose from god's pages.
Your moonlit back harpoons me,
Hands carve your thigh as smooth as film roll smoke.
Bitten, hot pins tingle skin light carefully
And so tightly clawed, writhed,
Breath stormy and wild that sings to the angel's
Gathered to watch to fear to tread;
Knotted hair tracing tender heart flows of your shape
By fires eyes, seeming eternal,
That concrete truth of a liberty's bliss.

Leaving a light on to encourage the dark on...
Less one anchor on...
Learning freedom isn't freedom if it isn't so...

Blackbird.

~

Can I tenderly press your soft rosebutter lips delicately hard against mine with yours?

Sshh...

Bonfire!

~

~

Oh Lewes, the highest branch on this wounded soldier's tree,

How you enlighten me bristling with dense tabernacle ash;

A royal awakening upon landing the first breath

From the hills,

Filling the lungs,

Filtering into blood;

The sauce of wild curiosity's metabolisms

Heaving plush against all adversity,

That smouldering scent...

A mirage red throbbing cottons this black scenery.

Flames cunningly lick Sussex tumbledown town

Paving curbs and children's bedazzled faces.

Torch lit narrow streets flow liquor and inner sounds

Orange ripe, pick the path, take upon

Dense and denser and dense throngs

Of souls weaved as one revelry,

Like artistry, hot toes;

Knowing a chased glance of hope itself

Was a wicked possibility from among the flames.

Oh Lewes, your people, the games they make

In wonderment's glorious eye;

Not queuing but leaping over fences

Did this witness climb.

South over glistened

And kiss me Klimt bombs beyond thunder called,

Each glimmer or footstep near.

Crossed bog and marsh from through tunnel,

Tucked entwined in thick bramble clusters

Did he see the majesty explosions and burns late shine,

Each rocket pangs and lights the sky's murkiest

Sea abyss green grey florescent lavender white,

Each yelling honest praise vulnerable upon me.

Shielded by all at once at a heave

Did he push on knowing, when once stepped

Clarity feels bonfire's amber drawing him in,

Seized by a collar strength coolness threw forth by him;

Now in mind's focused wondering hash smoked straits and shipping lanes;

Two burning boats crossing paths on foggy, still seas.

Oh Lewes, golden bright, splashing apple bobbing bright,

Wrapped in autumn's decaying effigies,

Renewing life beneath your gardener's stairs,

Cob foot fleeting about,

Upon the sounds and the trails did his wings beat about.

Fire eyes moustache, blinded by thick sweet sulphur soup smoke

And canon aplombs blow deaf's piercing delightful warlike kissed ear

A million times ringing

Upon the drops, a drizzle, a dozen, another million pellets

Beat down upon all and him,

And sought shelter beneath the philosopher's tree at Cliffe's knee.

And all was fast damp puddle dark now

But a few of thee gathered around,

When a torch came, lighthouse like,

And more gathered light in a fire,

Row after row coming forth, spreading ablaze

Shock painted faces, costumes telling stories

And entire Lewes was raised fifth's rage again.

And now he all brimson

From his gut to his bosom marched on,

Glee'd by heat to dry...

Oh Lewes, how your spirit dances

On your hot cobbles at this hour

To make this warrior transcend.

Is it in the wake of a kinetic surge

So far a distance from him to thee,

From brow bed flames?

Is it your stirring questions

Encouraging him in,

Or a hidden blush to race straight at me?

Or your wild fires eyes and their epic prophecies

That sparked the dawn for when all oxygen

First flung itself defiantly towards its fait accompli;

The magnificence of holding the entire earth together;

The wax taste in the seal of a kiss

When two poets collide, burning hot for life,

For soul's bounty is blessed in folklore for all eternities.

~

~

Everything here is still warm after sunset.

I pray that I meet you in my dreams every night.

~

~

Men are only ever seized.
We are fruit ripening and rotting
On branches to be harvested,
Only us who can truly be picked.
Offering ourselves season after season,
Efforts for foreign strengths
Where our sweet sweat of purpose sings
Forms, dissolves, imagines,
In her spring's vanilla blossoming call.

~

~

Strike

As it grows warmer my back dries and stiffens for work,

To provide.

Inspiration at this height evaporates globules of effort from my spine

Into the formation of a cloud charged with the strength of mine

And others, carried by the wind like breath

Seeking to fulfil the pull towards our lungs

To breathe to survive,

Combined scientific effort prepared to collide

And precipitate into those mountains

Whose heights measure our progress

We lay roots within and build upon,

To drench the torches that threaten to set ablaze the bark,

Our youth and future,

To wear away each cold rock of truth

Every drop lands upon,

To gently carve paths and tributaries into it,

To swim into great lakes and seas,

To replenish our brooding conscious oceans

With all these stories we have to tell

Of the journey we know others will undertake.

We all become teachers just by the hope others see in ourselves,

Recognised by the taste of the sweat of our labour

That drips from our words.

~

~

Imagining Fatherhood

Those parts of me I've given outside of myself,

Where cradled by unknown possibilities

Excites and licks the flames of the burning responsibility it reveals.

For the warmth of it must come from nature's desire in us,

To attain the fuel for its fire,

That finds its form in the very essence of nurturing the spirit of passion,

Out of the sparks from the collision that light up each overlapping soul,

Giving birth to intimate thoughts of love.

The sunset of her hips,

So warm and dragging into the coolness of night

As though a fire taunting the allure of the so close

To darkness it reaches out to, to hold

With each flickered shape of her step sends a tremor

Seeking its crescendo.

Carrying such a chalice to be filled and sipped from by only her

Wonderful glow of consent.

Her praise in our equivalent benevolent parts,

Stung by the harmony of each other's song,

The echo of touches and wanton desires.

Her hunger for the delicious sensuality of fruit in our highest branches,

So intimate becoming in the distance to its height,

Climbing upon us like shadows

Summoned to move to chase the edge of the warmth she seeks,

Dipping us to dissolve in her oceans,

Of her womb, all encompassing her being in those moments,

A grail worshipped greater than any god

For all its secrets and omnipotent light,

That promise us such things that it can never keep,

Yet knowing our fruit will leave eternal vitality behind
Even after its decay.

Our hearts fill with history as seeds fill the ground.

Choices layered until their foundations feel the weight
Of all those laid on top,

Engraving them into nature,

As though a new moon's affects upon
The waters of my consciousness become permanent,

As a separated part to hold onto in continuous orbit, undo-able,

Surrounded by the glorious impossibility of escape,
The coming together of elements,

The weaved blood of patterns, blessings and honours,
Bestowed a child, to wade in the arms of her heavenly tenderness,
Binded to every space in between

And to drown in the sacrifice of contentment of such an embrace.

Studying this purer innocence and bewilderment of youth,

As ours now protects their own,

As they grow ever more conscious in our strokes,

Guided to recognise our own lessons learned,

And cared for, held in the most delicate way,

Beyond relations that demand anything in return,

When even the darkest task is smiled on.

As though carrying a cup we fill with everything precious about us

Until we ourselves are almost empty,

On a sea careful not to spill a drop,

And letting wind's tough punches to leave a delicate trace of warning,

To hold them out to the storm,

To hold out something encouraging before their eyes

That we find in ourselves,

That we show brief glimpses of,

That we send them out to answer to never tell us of what they will find,

And we become to them like distant stars that shine on us
With the light they offered long ago.

It is a new light, a new warmth within,

Acknowledging the closeness to such wildness,

Looking for more solid pieces of guidance around,

To set the loosest cannon to some ground,

As though we are still children

Who will always cling to what we know is real, in doubt,

While all the while dreaming for them in disguise, in distractions,

As though aside a mirror imagining our bare selves,

Stripped back to see alive again those infantile threads

Of what we used believe to be the world.

Learned affection like this towards all who are young

Comes from knowing not to be the only soul enamoured to nurture and teach.

Knowing to face all the scars and bruises,

All our sweat and our pains,

That others can witness in our efforts,

So that no lesson learned should come undone or left behind.

Each season a new flock of birds leave for the seas to be guided,

And there is continual renaissance,

Looking for the footprints that led it here,

To which way we are walking.

For the unnoticed gift

Is to know that the young will see much further into the future
Than we will ever see.

~

~

Frustration, Restraining desires

When the solitary sense of home is so close,
It is because she is just out of reach that it is as agonisingly cold
As it is as warm as the smell of leather ridden miles to share a glance.

Clenching upon an explosion,
Shattering ice to fall beneath the surface of absolute cold waters,
Wanting to escape to the shore out of breath the smell of rotting apples.

The scent unbalances
And conjures the feeling of all internal organs at work,
Feeling each perform,
Each an effort towards that distance
Measured by coldness assembling through my limbs against them,
Gradually to a crescendo,
As though fervently rising up to face an indomitable foe, shivering,
Soaking deep into my shuddering still hot bones
Pounding into the thickening of blood
That boils with temper in my chest,
Spilling drops of its lucid stench of desire down its icy sides,
Precipitating steaming moisture,
Threatening to smother it,
To mould it into the form of a darkening shadow
Cast by the firelight bursting out,
Light shrinking my pupils to near the purest white glaciers so bright.
And the valley fills with heavily cold moist dense early morning mist
Where we are blinded
And permitted to only the most faintest of noises that there are to claim,
To hear the rarest and most solitary of birds.

As though something delicate is suddenly dropped -
The breath,
The turn,
The gasp.
Different parts of the body shiver independently,
And all the seething and grasping from drowning
In the dark fog of this night
Designs our hopes to maintain a calm grip
On the branch of some tree,
As though the thing that was delicate that fell that we witnessed
Was simply a leaf making its way towards inevitable fulfilment on the ground.

And when my eyes and senses are distracted
By this bewildering presence near,
The sweet steam of labouring
Compassionately for more than my parts
Disguises its overlapping tug on my collar,
Growing from it and refraining it from escape,
Leaving it tortuously haunting the very estuary of all my hopes once again.

From any night the sun could rise.
Knowing its slight shudders could begin an avalanche,
Brimming tempests brewing in the dance of a queen
Who wears nothing but her essence, as a flower of the night,
Leaning into the dark to touch every part of it dead from the cold of lifelessness.

~

~

On medicine the seeds of tiny feelings are nurtured out of all proportion and meaning.

~

~

Drown in their presence with no struggle
Other than the attempt to absorb as much of this foreign scent;
To grasp at its magnificence,
In how she crushes my soul as tightly as eternal life compressed into a seed
As equally as she expands it to fill it with the fullness of great possibilities.
Yet in that dual moment only this all encompassing shudder exists in consciousness
That is as powerful as knowing of her impossibility to tell us her deepest secret.

~

~

Such Brightness

Trickling across all the stones of my riverbed,

Carving into my intimate shape,

a Moisture whispering cloisters of heaven sent

Delivering endless warm wake

Then the wind turned when You blew at it

Were you scared of it?

While I was still staring,

Caught in its net of kisses hauled away for slaughter;

Sincerely picked, Broken stem of a flower loved

Is now But left sooner to die than if left,

No more filling a garden

Or our room,

Left to turn dark

And crackling dry and brittle

As your promises that mean so much become worth so little.

Now dipped permanently under a tide from your shores,

Weighed to the floor of unconsciousness by a heart turned stone.

Drowned in tears of all of tragedy's waters flooding our lives -

Cloudy seas,

That only grow darker the deeper fallen,

When once our surrendering shivering bodies embraced

To keep the dark alive,

Coldness and tremendous unspeakable war within

Now plummets me to all nothingness below.

~

~

Shadows will slip away through men's fingers when they move
Out of the light.

It is a cruel pressure seen in her eyes
As though he is sent guilt to kill his wounded horse.

Strangling the neck of a young swan until
Unsure if its beating heart has stopped.

A blinding, marauding storm of illness,

Lustful ignorance as white as the eyes of Goya's Satan.

Where consequent rain leaves the needle taste of metal in my mouth,

A gripped hand around my heart constantly throbbing it,

Holds it out over the edge of a cliff staring back at me,

And demands that enslaved I serve its punishment.

To have murdered such promises of beauty from her

I suffer the torment of losing the very last of my own

Knowing that I shall not.

Gathering like waves we accumulate,

Going beyond where the shore eventually breaks,

As though ascending towards an expanding, chased shadow.

And then what if you were to suddenly catch it,

As you hope,

To fall into its trap and let it to become all of you,

To discover unexpected,

Seduced to pollinate its omnipotence in shock, in dance

Uncovered to you the most glorious sensations of the hottest sun,

Only for it to fall cold and black as the head of a flower cut.

Uncomfortably shifting to one side so slightly,

To find leaning on a cracked mirror

That reflects a tragedy that is not even real.

Hoping sobriety still reigns even the most soaken.

Harbouring sins to bite skin to bury these spells in strengthened bones,

With blood carrying this air of clarity.

For if I were really in your garden, in my senses

There would be flowers of all the seasons and nights all at once in the tide

And I would not know where the world began or ended.

~

~

Unstable channels of water,

Both flowing in spirals and tides,

Forcing my course against it when its will opposes mine,

Overwhelmed by the force of nature when its current assists,

As magnificent as just as though you look at me while my sight is turned.

Where is it you are carrying me to?

Where our central sense of balance lies is a fist against my sternum, stretched pale sparsely haired skin over those knuckles and lungs in love like bruises the purple colour deep within the brooding of an almighty storm, pressed together into a pleasure of pain that is bearable only knowing it is the only thing I can do to keep hold of the good in life.

Gripping,

Punching,

My chest, the innocent battlefield,

The bird, the innocent peace-giving spring

That continually teases, scared away,

Murdered by prescription

And suffocated in the winds that gathered fiercely into a deafening roar.

Do you still survive?

It is an enormous wave of passion, swelled up from the grief of your loss, your solitude, for leaving you there just because my eyes are turned, that I see pouring over me when I look at you. There is not always a taste of paternal love but it is mixed so closely with the murky green of tranquillity in the colour of leaves wet as the blue comfort of our embraces. There is not always the salty taste of lust but a strong smell of long worn bed linen, strewn across a pattern of flowers of almost every kind that rustles the scent to become penetrating, so far under my skin, that it stirs the angel from its statue form into heavenly warm moist bliss of divine kinds and places imagined and felt, succumbed honestly and lovingly into the truth of safety's hand hanging off the edge of everything we know.

One of you asks me to restrain it, both desire it in many forms from me. Yet all my prayers lead me to turn to leave you in peace, in sorrow, isolating the peninsular that is home to a hope that it is you who endeavours to find my fruit here.

This spring folds out of a seed planted with such natural honest desire

But weathered by unforgiving floods of induced selfishness

And the scorching draught of my consciousness

Leaving a twisting wreak of life

Neither of us wish to look at

Or talk of

Left lingering, your early sting,

Into an ache that I pray has roots so true.

That is its power, is its strength.

Its achingly real source.

~

~

All is inside this eternal time
Where it condenses on window panes
Only to evaporate in kind, now diminishing, heat.

Into those moments we breathed into expand,
Through veins into ages,
To moisten the calcium of offered heartbeats
Fading to be renewed,
Dousing the missing yet to pass,
So mute in the impossibility of farewelling you
While our breath continues to keep on clinging to the glass.

Opening her ajar
Breaks the banks of the thirsty rivers of my land.
Shy moon receding waters leave
Pools that fill scars deepened into now annexed hinterland,
Where mountain stones shelter the drying out corpse of fear,
Watched over by the scared curiosity of ten thousands starving crows.
And this spectacle roars alive to keep at bay
Thoughts heaven refuse to rose.

This peninsular casts off to sea
Where smelling salts nourish the air no more,
Scents of yellowed leaves and Orphelia brooks
Twists into the confusion of a sacred moor;

Roamed forgotten upon,
Where light is oh so delicately shone,
So subtle on lung's knife edge,
Hearts spoke of voices in the breeze,
In our sails, in between the fractures of your palm in ridden cloth,
Sewn mind's paths through knotted reeds,
Of dereliction sailed over cursed sons,
Towards either his god or your salty hands.
Towards strength once at the edge of it all
Knowing the futility yet still seizing all I can,
To ever become again on what holy land
Lays beyond the horizon of your furthest shore.

Great omnipotent monsters ahead
In all imaginations, to feast.
But if you see my shape in the features
Of woods, footsteps or silhouettes;
I was always Eiderdown felt,
The anchor from where your eyes can embrace the dark.
From on your etched skin a rhythm,
And a divine spell it became,
That only our bones can pound into its cure,
That leaves all this trembling solace thickening in my cooling blood
No soul will ever drown within again.

~

~

Fought,
To the Death,
For true Love
and Lost

~