Poem: Epitaph

The wind is howling through the old oak trees.
Who would have thought?
Sweet smiling eyes, sweet eyes smile.
Whisper your secrets in a cat’s ear
But I can see you. The hunter is here.
Lift up your frock, at least above your knee
And the wind is howling through the trees.

I can see you hovering in the corner of my eye
First left, left to right and sink lower again.
It was a back tooth wish this time,
Quarter for quarter and swallow a dime.
The first clock is chiming but the last keeps the time.
And the wind is howling, and the trees cry.

Poem: Winter

Winter is coming again, crisp clean cold and Christmas lights.
The plants have died, the trees naked and stark against autumnal skies,
This is my season. Briefly I pretended to be a Summer flower, for you
But of all the fairytale characters I most wanted to be the Snow Queen,
The White Witch. I was never a Disney princess.

When the sun was shining I played at make believe, pretend warmth.
I do not feel it, they tore it out of me with good intentions,
I am safe. For awhile you made me wish that I was better, able,
Somewhere deep down I think it would have be something to love you,
But it’s a relief that it is over. I am glad that it is Winter.

Poem: A dream

Here is a hope for you, here is a dream,
I have wrapped it in silver paper
and hidden it, unfulfilled and secure.
You can keep it, put it with the rest of your curios.

I like to look at it sometimes, this glittering thing,
but we must not touch it
it will shatter too easily, already it is cracked at the edges.
Protect it from me, hide it from the world.

I am trusting you with it, it is precious,
without it I would wither away,
I will not risk it with foolish determination.
Mind it and admire it, do not let me lose it.

Do not look at it too closely, it will blind you
with its burning need
but glimpsed from afar it is beautiful, promising.
Treat it gently, keep it safe, do not tread on it.

Poem: The World

There is something bleak in the winter sun, we expect it now.
A long time has passed since we took the magic out of the rainbow-
Picked it into it’s component parts and marvelled for once at reality.

Twenty five letters to play with and we have Shakespeare or Jordan,
Words crafted carefully or thrown to the new wasted world,
So much uncovered, yet clinging in desperation to insipid fantasy.
Twisting our tortured forms, hoping to create human chrysalis
Whilst ignoring our wings and stagnating in ignorance.

Stronger, healthier and safer then we have ever been, we panic.
Imagining paedophiles in every playground and the earth burning beneath us
We twitter uselessly around nonentities, prattling instead of listening.

Today’s newspapers no longer tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper
To pay homage to the Gods of health, safety and stupidity while
We cradle the blood soaked innocents we forced to be our heroes
And imprison the broken in a kinder chemical Bedlam.

A long time has passed since we took the magic out of the rainbow,
We have forgotten the majesty of simple solutions in fractured light-
A whole world pointedly looking away, frightened children covering their eyes.


(This has been posted before, but much edited...)

Poem: Damage

They got to me in the end.
I thought I had escaped them
with my books and poems, with my thinking.

They got to me in the hidden inside place
where I live as myself, snide whispering voices
I had forgotten, still influencing.

They got to me with made up stories,
make believe that lurked and grew in secret
only to appear in a hateful moment.

They got to me, they tore through
sense and goodness, until I found myself
parroting bad black lies, instinctively.

They got to me, just when I thought I was free
From dusty, dirty old books, from this
ugly stupidity. They got to me.

Poem: Heroine

She is all used up, worn to nothing by the harshness of life,
go ahead and talk to her about dreams
with your idealistic cosseted view of the world,
then watch her step outside to barter her hopes
in exchange for so much poisonous escape.

She believes herself loved, he waits for her
in the next room, listening closely for her distress
so that he can intervene when she needs saving,
they trade on household chores, he washes the dishes,
buys the drugs, she spreads her legs and mops the floors.

She smiles emptily into the distance, spaced and absent
but for rare moments of shattering reality
when she talks about the remembrance of hands on her skin,
each moment of desperate surrender breaking her apart,
etched with terrible clarity on her body and heart.

We make her a cautionary tale, another statistic
to use for advocacy and funding,
when she was a child she dreamt of what she would be,
now she is wrecked, vanishing into the footnotes,
filed away with the rest of the detritus.

Brash, brazen and angry, she views the world with a cynical pragmatism
that makes mockery of our wishing wells,
all of our desultory interventions meaningless
in the face of bone weary despair, a broken life,
an unfortunate contemporary human sacrifice.

Poem: Virtual Anger

It is easier to be angry about nothing at all,
Spewing ferocious hatred, irascible in our insistence
That we are right, like it matters in
The greater scheme of everything.

It is a certain song, a lyric or
Some television programme, swearing
On the radio, how dare they,
We give in to righteous anger.

Put it in a letter, on a blog,
Tweet it, how much hate can you
Fit into one hundred and forty characters?
@everyone, the world had turned to dirt.

Impetuous, we do not think about anything,
Retweet this, borrow an opinion
Without thought, hesitation or consideration,
Ideas are cheapened, moot social currency.

Virtual opinions for a virtual world,
Reactionary causes that matter if they are trending,
Easily we can all pretend to care
When it requires us to take no action.

Poem: Mediums

Despicable carrions, gorging on grief,
picking over old bones with gleeful deceit,
vile abusers of the bereft and bereaved
exploiting their victims need to believe.

Heady with power they descend and they feast
and call it a comfort, this rape of the deceased.
Their despairing prey so intolerably misled
by these liars who claim to speak with the dead.

Poem: Result.

The men are hanging around the backstreets, like they did when they were boys
uninterrupted now by school or wide waisted shouting mothers
beckoning them home for dinner and bed.

There is no need now for secretive smoking, and the cheeky calls to passerby’s
have taken on a leering and sinisterly threatening air
darkened by hopelessness and disappointment.

These men are the faces behind the numbers, the real world result
of the consuming greed that used them up
and spat them out to be forgotten.

With nothing to do they drink and fight, armed with their own pointlessness.
At midnight the Guards come and move them along
to be somebody else’s problem.