Tag: life and death

Painted over humanity
With broad breezy brushstrokes
Evaporating
With the life of its victims

It lives
Nestled in our lungs
Like a musty fox
Curled up in a den

As it eats away its house
It dies in there
With it landlords grey
and lifeless body

There are so many breaths
In a crowd
For it to make
New pathways with

There are so many lungs
To hide in
Until it rises in a coma
From a bed

With deaths identity
On our faces
All our memories
Eaten away

Isolated, and tomb ready
We see our hearts night
On its journey
Beyond the curtain

We reach out to grab
All the things
That are still
Available to us

All the things that we loved
Memories peeling layers
Ending here
Enduring there

All the feeling rigged up
between us – unravelling
We feel the sails falling
Blowing away in the wind

On the day of Jehovah
We will be judged
One will say to another
It was him

One will relate
How life was taken away
And some will be grateful
That life returned

Some will be born together
Some will need to find their love

Coronavirus – unwelcome guest
In the temple of our bodies
Like a cloud of gnats

Like starlings that fly in flocks
From the beast in our lungs
Grateful to avoid ignoble deaths
In the animal market, on filthy plates

Like the stars that float in space
Swirling like leaves on an endless ocean
Whose light has memories like our owwwwn
Falling through space uncorrupted

This new form of life that takes life
Zipped up around us, in its pocket
We grope out into breaths of air
To leave its dry shadow where
it tried to embrace us

Coronavirus – who set you free?
Like a flock of flies from a dung heap
Where are the legs that make you leap?
Where is the mouth that eats and eats and eats?

Are you behind me inside a man?
Are you in front of me in unsettled smoke?
If the traffic of my breath is stopped
How can I cross the road?

The security guard looks tired
As into the supermarket I go
I eat like you, I breathe like you
But alas – I cannot see you

All the world’s a stage
Bloodstained and smashed
The trap door opens
To reveal a nuclear silo

All the world’s a stage
And we are the walking dead
The bandaged blind
That limp to the supply train home

All the wold’s a stage
Where children run about
And fathers have no work
And mothers die in childbirth

Romance could exist upon the stage
In good times and in bad
But tears are real and happiness is hard won
And religion plays hopscotch with the nations

All the worlds a stage
That changes hands for every scene
In peace and in war we labour
A human formulae in an explosive recipe

Two Ice sculptures

Two ice sculptures
Fall in love
Melting
With love
Melting
Melting
Melting

She never argues

She never argues
With a spanner
Or gets upset

It lies on the ground
Beside her
On slip of the tongue
And it will all be over

The train

The train
Leaves the station
Of mirrors

Far into the universe
It looks back
For its reflection

Fools and their cameras

Looking at love
Thru a colour filter
I take a photo

The photo shows
The disassembly
Of all hat I needed

Christmas star

The star system
Sirius
Has come to earth
It walks awkwardly
Down the high street

It points its silver pointed hand
And walks on silver pointed feet
And talks from a silver pointed head

Your reflection
In the silver pointed head
Gives it a face
Yours

Soon it absorbs
All the Christmas shoppers
That fall down dead
Like wet laundry

The river of time

The river of time
Lows everywhere now

Twisting light and darkness
Together
Braising them
Like hair spread out on the ground

It flows along the street
In every direction
By the legs of window shoppers
By the stationary homeless
Asleep in shop corners
Around the lovers
Looking in the jewellery shops

Only the man in dark glasses
Sees these rivers
Flowing thickly, eternally
Everywhere

This was the morning

This was the morning
I climbed into the attic
I was a boy made of dust
With an aching in his heart

Mother was a flower in the garden
Father was an angry mole
I climbed up into the attic
Hoping to find some way into the future

But I was wrong
There never was any way out of the attic

I remember typewriter

I remember
When I had a typewriter
I typed up my poems
With great immediacy
I would pore over them
For years and years
Until they evolved
Into sand upon my skin
Then along came
The transformers
And poetry was never the same

The words I write down

The wards I wrote down
Yesterday
Have been attacked
By a Microsoft flatbed scanner driver
I picked them up out of computer memory
Like drowned flies out of a bucket of water

Jonah

I spent some time
With the holy spirit
I offered it my heart

But the universe seemed so vast
And the universe was so dark
It took my fear of falling
And made an eternal metal badge

And pinned it to my pride
I was confused that I could not cry
How does a man run from a dream?
Where is there a place to hide?

You can wash your face

You can wash your face
In my bucket of tears
You can wash your hands
Until they are clear
And when there’s a fire
Inside your soul
The bucket of tears
Will make it whole

You can wash your body
In my bucket of tears
Then dry yourself
Of all your fears
And when there’s a light
That shines in your hair
This bucket of tears
Will have no care

Here comes the cat

Here comes the cat
With its triton tongue
Standing in the kitchen
Emptying its lung

Slavering with hunger
Impatient with disease
Angry with the universe
It scratches its fleas

Let me out of this siding

Let me out of this siding
Let me be on my way
Find the man who pulled the switch
That sent me into the clay

Let me out of the siding
Clear the track ahead
Maybe there is still time
for life to stop the dead

Clock metal

Clock metal
Time is
Clock metal

Seasons grow
And die away
The Gregorian calendar
Has had its day

The light comes on
The light goes off
That’s all my friends
And that’s enough

My friends
Are the people of heaven
Come up they say
And put it all behind you

My friends
Are the people of earth
Stay here they say
And we will give you
A good burial

Either way
I will be separated
Like a label
From a jar of marmite

Love falls silent
Like an autumn leaf
The two oak trees
Drain the skies
Bruised with light

Purples and ochre’s
Drown the earth
Writhing in agony
The cobwebbed spirit
In the thin broken wine glass
Tasting the autumn wind

Love, inside out
Nothing to say
The dew of the morning
Whitening the grass
The fallen, fading acorns
Form the substance of words

That cries out, that cry out
Against the doors of death
Where autumn leaves sweep through
Dragging the pain in the heart
Into the dark hall of night

A loser’s love vanishes now
An unspoken word perishes
A word fought for endlessly
The glowing embers of winter fires
The ashes of the night
Sleeping by the window
The splatter of rain unheard
The howl of the wind
Cold against the indifferent skin

Wake up, wake up, its morning
Go down into the cold rooms
Draw the curtains
Still, the stars shine out there
Where the old shed decays
Unable to endure any more

A Company of starlings appear
Manoeuvring across the lawn
Pecking at the little things, the worms
Take them – take them all
As a few yolk-yellow flowers
Lie broken on the borders

1999

As stars glide through time
Leaving golden children in the stardust
As suns sing choruses of love
In their blue skies of eternity

Life will weave across its steeping stones
A silver-cobwebbed mist
Where a girl dances in a trance
Improving upon the nightingales song

Midway between the stepping-stones of freedom
And a stepping stone of love
A warship passes on its way to the front
It casts a cold dark shadow over her sweet scented skin

And a trail of blood flows from its stern
Under the water emerge the faces of all those to die
In the war torn way across the world
Hers is the only song they’ll hear

Afterward there is the living anger of the skies
That dies down around her figure kneeling in the spring meadows
And then a peacock-coloured sunrise heralds a new day
Across the hardened frost laden empty lands

They take you
up to the green gate
Then through the gate
And they leave you there
In the great fenced estate

Where a densely packed crowd
Mill about
Then where all the animals
Sit and stare
As the tightly packed crowd
Climb the stairs

And no one yet
Knows you are there
Amongst the millions
Of dreaming fragments
Amongst the millions
Of detached fragments
Amongst the people
Who are waiting
To go to heaven
To go to the bus station
To go to their destination

Crowds of fragmented souls
Crammed inside
Behind the fences in your head
Looking with your eyes
All of them
Looking with your eyes

And how they move
Like a landslide mass
How they move
Like a swirling wind
Like the white tide
In the moonlight
They fall like sticks
Upon the beach and standing up
They start to move inland
Looking for God
Looking for heaven

And no one there
See the gates
Or your parents
Waving goodbye

Then you never see them again
Perhaps they are here
In dream Eden

You wake up in a dark ward
You wake up in an alien place
Your bed is a hospital bed
And your face is your own lonely face

And does heaven
Even exist for them
and will they have to start again
in a another time and place

Into eternity out of the egg
The broken egg
That leviathan left
Amongst the bitten bones
And the feathers of fallen angels
Amongst the rocks
And the gravestones of battleships
Will they start again
Or do they argue
Do they fight
Amongst themselves
Do they point the finger?
Like in the revolution
Have they let grievances linger
Do they forgive
In the judgment of mankind
Will they divide
Into warring factions

And you are glad
You are awake
And you are glad
Of your own lonely face