Free Air
If I knew why birds fly with me.
Open up the palace
it is light so early
sun on the fence posts
the chandeliers of flowers
Light up the sky
impound the acrid rockets
burn the fetid nets
these are my orders
free the untamed flocks
Swoop and fly with me
beautiful birds of paradise.
Air
Gathering gust giving
Fresh frisson flow
Announces Antilles aroma
Saturated loaded close
Clammy warm wet
Dripping fanned tropic
Season falls bronze
Chill bone ache
Yellow-bronze gold
Sap descend flop
Curl dissect drop
Pile scatter vanish
Swept clean earth
Freeze crystal white
Descending snow carpet
Gale rug beat
Landscape quake deafen
Beaufort scale flatten
Crackle soft melt
Flute song green
Globe bud budding
Bluebell hatch zephyr
Return renew renewal
Breathe easy again
Freedom space speech
Dimension movement expression
The air we breathe.
Words
When do words form
spill trickle flow
into a definite flood?
Scented image moon flower
grow seed germinate
balletic symphonic botany.
Sign refine define
word by word by word
forever a fugitive meaning
round and round the walls
of Jericho.
The Farm
Great Uncle Tom it’s true your farmyard and haggard are silent,
the haystack has gone.
Cows now longer meander the lane, there are no churns on the stage.
No. Hens no longer scratch, geese no longer loudly patrol.
The Donkey has gone, the horse stall is empty.
There is no need to chop mangle for pigs.
The kitchen garden no longer yields
firm potatoes, carrots and onions,
juicy apples and blackberries.
No. The lean-to dairy is full of junk, no longer does Katy make butter.
The well has been capped, the peat fire is out. The contractors are in.
Bramble
Bramble in autumn pronged and tart
over your barbed arching march
through spring to summer.
Spiked with pale pink delicate flowers
fruited now gold, red, black. Tangle forest
sinuous screen of green and blotch.
Ripple and shake reveal your tenants
Blackbird, butterfly and finch
feeding fattening seeding.
Drone Storm
Rolling cloud grey and grim
darkens all below. Rumbling menace
flying nearer, looming larger.
Growing columns surging fleet
flying demons droning fate.
All your power pent and choked
writhing dismal inward clenched.
Humid essence what’s your call?
Crashing culture thunder death
bloody scream nuclear flash?
Is this the end we’re done?
Unblushing
Clear morning autumn hint rising heat
all is calm growth mature
an idyll sweet.
Then sight so dark a dusk red rose
thorned around arching high
looking down.
You shout out so-an iris shock-
the mind dilates.
What is this that steals the scene?
Scented deep an inner peace?
Aura from another time another place
seen again here today, but silent still.
Enigmatic, mysterial, vital.
Learning to Climb
Why does everything happen to me?
The King lives in a castle I live in a hutch.
Why is life like climbing a tree?
My boss thinks I work for free
I need to escape his clutch
Why does everything happen to me?
All politicians make me pee
promising promising so so much.
Why is life like climbing a tree?
I worship my girl on bended knee
she’s run off with a bloke who’s butch.
Why does everything happen to me?
The rents overdue I need to flee
landlord wields his crutch.
Why is life like climbing a tree?
Why is it all the third degree?
Let me be cool like the Dutch.
Why does everything happen to me?
Why is life like climbing a tree?
Idlers Eye
Jumble rattle Grand Bazaar
purple nails strawberry vapes cut price booze screech of tram
razor sharp barber Clumber Street jostle trainers tee-shirts
plenty of tats.
Jumble rattle Grand Bazaar
blue buses lilac buses pink buses orange buses
vacant queues grumbling queues angry queues
plenty of chat.
Jumble rattle Grand Bazaar
wobble weave scoot skate
faces arms bags eyes crazy
murmuration of a million feet.
Jumble rattle Grand Bazaar
eat in eat out Indian French Moroccan Chinese
smells signs litter and light
plenty of seats day or night.
Jumble rattle Grand Bazaar
architects play book of regional hue
chimney gable window door
Georgian Victorian mid-century modern
post-war rectangular shop front spectacular.
Jumble rattle Grand Bazaar
precious stones tailored dummies
come on honey we’re in the money
segments markets competition
boom bust then in remission.
Stumble and battle in our Grand Bazaar
of many on this isle so many on this earth,
keep up planet our Bazaar is Vast.
Impulsiva
Early morning Naples, peeling apartment.
Stretching cat like on battered sofa
rising in same black jumper re-live
dregs of betrayal by him late last night…
Bright open window city life beats.
Sipping coffee your eyes ember smokey black.
Suddenly you shoot down the dark echo echoing stairs
racing your chariot to fire the last last word.
Just OneMore
Bottle stands shapely firm intact
shades of potent dusk.
label proclaims credentials
set in industrial heraldic.
Embrace. Crimped green top
released clatters to the floor
pervasive aroma bitter sweet hop.
Aficionados promise dependants curse.
Cool glass receives effervescent flow
bubbled white on sparkling amber.
Moment of truth point of no return.
Taste, forget yourself, know me.
Kierkegaard
Deep soil
Deep ancestry
Lucid Lutheran soul
Emotional pendulum
peaks anxiety troughs depression
Philosophy fountains from you
Socrates of the north.
Your outstanding arc of wit undressed
Kant, Hegel, church,
tea with the King, he nods, he nods.
Flaneur who strolled in search of himself
found modernity as
you swept a way for the re-thinking of thought.
Island Chapel
Cool pale still
shadow light
salt shore
tussock grass
around you flows
translucent blue above.
Picket fence protects your crosses
devout moral lives lived in hope
or lost in domesticity
shipwrecked maybe
or what northern sky?
Cool pale silent.
Fly Free
Of Mothers Day cards the other day I found a pack
in the place you kept those special things,
sent by sis and me, all signed carefully.
Each bright picture plays a distant memory
of springtime Sunday morns
before the fledged, flew free.
You kept preserved and loved.
Now ten years gone, I hear you call,
I always will.
Dusk Arrival
Crystal frost fall
field mist
cold breath in old lanes
solitary bird call
black flick of bat flight.
Crimson west fading
to polar blues,
follow tinsel silver stars
by sythe of new moon.
Murmur Advent
lambent firelight immortal books.
Whisper,
Emmanuel may
come to thee.
A Record
Dream a dry gloom from the city-
grass dust frying pan pavements.
Hide in hot rooms, backlit blinds.
Retrieved from lesser desiccated summers, the fan
spins a hanging hover-fly whirr to the blowtorch afternoon.
Baked to submission evening refuses to cool.
Sticky bar tops trap deluded bar flies
summertime city echoes sun worship
in the holidays we willed and prayed for.
A record for Zoroaster
bitter orange temple fire flares
the faithful wilt and melt
fresh from the flames lizard blinks where blackbird sang.
Land of the Sunflower
Warm bright summer morning
I feel the sun on my face
Barista in camouflage khaki
I’m going to write a letter
Innocent eyes smooth hands
I need to speak of love
They’ve lost their transport
To say what I feel
Guns gore at the day
I need to say...goodbye
Emollient lines are written
I cannot say it all
The world spins about them
My life is churning inside me
Indifference is complicit
Today I am learning...to die
his last letter
to the first love
is written and
The world turns without them as
against the blue sky the yellow sunflowers stand.
Hour Glass
Sand blown from hands
quartz scuffed circles
diamonds washed away.
Bright hot sight
gull-winged song
calling dance of
summers sheer spell.
Eddying sprite conjures
where fossil feet stood
and thought you.
Salt smelt memory
embalmed images,
spoken tides ripple
like waves,
life waves
written,
in sand.
Evening*
The clock ticks back
round in circles
the world was angry
so was I,
who’d lived an idyll
coaxing Georgian verse.
The Flanders felony coils its memory.
Eviscerating plosive twilight blood
steel dawn troglodyte stupor
yellow gas charnel fire.
I was ‘Mad Jack’ friend of pacifists
I a killer strengthened poet
the orbit set.
Review, revise, revisit.
It has me still, alone.
* About the poet Siegfried Sassoon
Ripon*
Borage Lane attic.
Isolated closed in
intensive look.
Stare at the desk
into my nightmares
treat with terror.
Guns thump through rain
men cower
mud trenches devour.
Children play in the garden
Celandines bloom in the lane.
*About the poet Wilfred Owen
August Morning
Green rolling hills wave down to the sea
green purple trees sway in the sky
Clean scent from bracken and broom
rising golden time light
Blue waves shingle the shore
blue sky scudding white cloud
Over Heather Curlew cries
over Harebell Skylark sings
Stream flows peace over the clay
mist drifts morning over this day.
Insurgent 2
The jobs crap
and home life’s a domestic.
My team always lose
and the estate is for fools.
My pub, The Victory, is
dire and grim.
Dogs that bark in the night.
Be warned I wear my hostility
as a halo
my sneer
a rat trap.
I don’t get the respect
I deserve.
Shadows on the Runway*
Gun ship
Troop ship
Aid ship
Coffin ship
Shadows on the Runway.
History
Religion
Politics
Culture
Shadows on the Runway.
Regime Change
Regime Change
Nation Building
Nation Building
Shadows on the Runway.
Empires
of
the
Mind
Shadows on the Runway.
Bush
Blair
Barrack
Biden
Shadows on the Runway.
Twittering
Trump
Talking
Taliban
Shadows on the Runway.
Climbing bodies
Running bodies
Praying bodies
Pleading bodies
Shadows on the runway.
Falling bodies
Falling bodies
Falling bodies
Falling bodies
Shadows on the Runway.
Shadows on the Runway
Smashing on the Runway
Dying on the Runway
Bodies on the Runway.
*Evacuation of Kabul 2021
Luisa
Warm, quiet August evening, we walk among Victorian hillside villas.
Turret, gable and bay window haunt us with another time.
Walls and hedges, hidden secret gardens.
Arbour of trees along the empty lazy roads.
In the syrupy heat twilight sets off the sunset glow,
scents of summer drift, honeysuckle, phlox and rose.
White gaslit pools of light appear, illuminating leaf and moth.
High up we look down to low horizon. An unworldly light ascends.
A huge full moon with orange blush, silent rising.
We sit on the kerb to admire the magnetic prima dona.
I watch you watching, raven hair, hazel eyes, naked shoulders, olive skin.
You turn and smile, yes this is special.
We feel it here, this our moment now.
A lunar message. A stab of fear. Your love will wax and wane.
Is this our full moon? A perfect day the apogee?
Well, you did wane and I did grieve. Then common sense prevailed.
But oh, that evening and your smile.
Many, many moons ago.
Many moons ago.
Biographer
Beachcomber by the ocean of time,
waves and tides of history I sift.
In sweeping or granular past, the individual
I seek, the person of interest to me.
A quest through remains, historic memory,
our evidence scattered, diverse.
Journey their places and homes,
archive, library and vault.
Scraps of paper street corner gossip
accumulate sort file review.
Piecing together from document jungle
of writing and deed, their song.
Fact and sweet truth, balance,
error dispute opinion and lie.
Narrative from mist, hovering phantom,
swirling dance of flickering glimmer.
I try the impossible, present a version,
more outer than inner life.
Read the story vicariously live.
Now, did you sense the person’s being?
Coleridge
Is it nearly two centuries since we lived, oh father?
I Hartley your eldest son, smaller, died younger,
inheritor of dangerous genes, your reputation and name,
I think over your life again.
Poet preacher political orator full of promise bounding forward
Intellectual visionary seer romantic god,
rainbow sparkling in humanities new sky.
Credited genius you range far beyond poetry,
extrovert charmer and magnetic speaker
hurling yourself at experience and life.
Marriage, child, settle at Stowey, near Poole the wise patron.
Behind you, leaving Cambridge for a stint in the army and planning a utopian society.
Now surely stability, these lime bower days, will seal your success?
Here, father, is your “if” moment. “If only” people across two centuries still cry.
One day from honey-dew, you compose “Kubla”, it’s kept unfinished, unpublished;
we think we know why, something of what’s happening in your mind.
Then you meet Wordsworth, chalk and cheese.
Enthusiastically, reasonably, you begin your sequence of leaving, returning, leaving.
Increasingly solitary he who craves belonging.
Image of the romantic hero, terrible, terrible camouflage, for your cuckoo child
OPIUM
Biography now aches with struggle and pain.
Giddy cycle of collapse and recovery.
Illness from opium addiction, nearly 100 episodes recorded.
Sara H the ideal, your “Asra”, hopelessly, helplessly distant.
Can she be the reason your are so far from the shore?
Is Asra’s beacon far on the shore keeping our mariner alive?
Inside your mind fears, anxiety, impulse explode.
Yet somewhere immeasurably in there, unreality is partially parted.
There are days and times of dawn, thinning cloud and visionary sun.
My careful friend Wordsworth, domestically comforted, proceeds.
Dams with faint praise, while perfectly marketing
beautifully arranged daff-o-dils.
Despite expectations, probable bets, you live to 61,
leaving a mountain of notebooks, a life of fragments dispersed.
Who knows, oh father, the daffodils may yet be eclipsed…
by your lunar lit stately galleon sailing along and above the lake
to Asra’s skyward castle, for rest and love to partake.
Lighthouse*
Blink, passing inquisitive light,
searching raking repeating line.
Beam of memory moments of being bite
piercing the past, rescued from dark by design.
Episodes of life ghosts to face
linked by time and light entwined.
Hear family voices haunted embrace,
exquisite sentences cast floated combined.
Through window along corridor return,
to fluttering moments searing unsaid
each loss every yearning discern,
stream of rhythm intangible thread.
You released that trapped in the past,
feeling of freedom lightening the mind.
Acclaim outlasted surpassed
memoir and fiction re-fined.
Your vision unconventional-irrepressible,
preserving place of safety in being.
Light, in tides inexpressible,
distinctly ambivalently seeing.
*about the writer Virginia Woolf
Liminal Dream
Who is the apparition that arises through a black arch?
Ruby red in colour lurid green aura,
stalking the night, seeking a drifting mind.
During the liminal time time intrudes, draws nearer rises higher clearer.
Clinging at the moment of ticking terror, vanishing fades away.
Where to? Where from? The face the robes strangely familiar?
No message written, no warning song, nor pointing to Elysium.
Why the visit? Was it in error? Am I a chosen one?
Are you the past, last hurrah, or vision of the future?
If you visit why not stay? All the drama
antique appearance gives expectation, you’ve something to say.
God, a ghost, or Delphic suggestion,
maybe memory, or something I’ve eaten?
Your chancing with aura and questionable charisma,
all image, no message, I should have known.
Aloft
I stayed aloft. Up here only me
like floating seabird over sparkling sea.
April morning sailing easy, feel this breeze, smell salt air.
It feels giddy this much sea, so much sky, a feeling rare.
Man’s small vessel down below, people smaller still.
Vast blue horizon curves away; geometry, or will?
Silver bow wave roaring, surfing,
gliding vessel sweeps it curling.
To lofty swaying arm at sea,
ascend from care to hold the key.
On this perch it feels like flight,
here is seen an ethereal light.
Maes: Girl at a Window*
You and we seeing
framed absorbed
in still waters.
You look into the pond
watch the gold and olive fish
as they swim surface and dive.
Thoughts circling glide
emotions splosh and splash
patterns discerned in ripples and waves.
Perception dives from the surface,
through crystal to black opal depths
-gleaming insight re-surfaced.
Dreamer or thinker, we see you reflective.
Dreamer or thinker, we seek your reflection.
*The Nicolaes Maes painting of the same name.
Spring Blossom
Yes it's Van Gogh, lighting ambition.
Shining plum blossom, in exhibition.
In a corner, by a side door.
Contemporaries hug the main floor.
From Arles, on the margin. Created
with hope, new palette, sun painted.
To the orchard came the magician,
casting a spell of revision.
Jumping texture your impasto,
painting bright your manifesto.
In the corner your attendant's a friend.
She's heard your song, glows your friend.
No boredom, or day too long.
You've lit up our girl in spring song.
Mark's Reviews 