Armistice Day poems

Now you talk about
A special relationship
Now you talk about
A trade deal

The little god
Talks to the big god
Across their offices
Wit transatlantic zeal

Don’t trade me off
Like I’m a statistic

Well I see the poor
On both sides of the pond
Are you gods
Can you wave your magic wands?

You do the pushing
And someone else pushes back

That’s what it amounts to
On a human level

And what does it lead to
Another level of hell

2

My heart
The dark Teutonic forest
When it’s dark
The wild shadows
Take over
In dreams

While the quiet little creatures
Huddle under fallen leaves
Waiting for the sun
To brush away the tree tops
And scoop them up
With a friendly smile

It must be in the cosmology these days
This darkness
That lasts like an arctic winter
And saying that it takes months
To remove the boulder
From the Troll’s tomb
This could be the perfect
Epoch for it

3

It is one of those days
That everyone seems cut off from each other

As if a great being
Was re-cutting the cloth
Wiping the chalkboard

A complaint arises
Its universal
Who will stop the rain

One lady
Who considers herself a gossip
Stops gossiping as if
She were locked in a cell
Another
A man
A very garrulous man
Finds himself lost
As if blindfolded

Graffiti appears
Upon every wall in the city
Who will stop the rain

It does no good to be friendly
It does no good to be the partygoer
You will feel like the mice
Chased by a hatchet

The universe itself
Is being wielded like a discus
By an angry hand
And we can all feel it

And we spend a moment or two
Staring at the sky and wondering
Who can stop the rain

4

The shadow of foreboding
Falls first
Then there’s complete darkness
As the leash is detached
And the two dogs start fighting

Even though the sun is shining
The commands are dark
There’s no thought of life
Love is put away with the excuse
They must protect their homes
And then they start
To destroy them

The light is not sunlight
It’s what was the human spirit
In times of calamity
It forgets to keep the light shining