Osmosis

 

Forest, a cathedral of columns

That struggle towards light,

 

An earth fugue, music struck

In tubes of transformation.

 

Taproots suck, thirsty proboscis

Seek routes through rock. Their tongues

 

wedge open fissures, sip dark liquids

from the stones cold lips.

 

 

Published by Black Bough Poetry in Deep Time: Volume 2

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Caernarvon’s dream?

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The rustle of retreating linen, bare feet on

stone, trowels slicing through mortar,

the plop as it drops as the tomb is sealed.

Anubis laughing, ushes in the soundless dark

                                      *

Beyond lamplight, gold glints its responses.

Rebirth might end this tunnel of centuries,

between Carter’s gasp and Tut’s masked silence-

we seek our passage from oblivion.

 

Outside the tomb: eternity’s debris.

Scree-slopes that cling to the valley’s cliffs-

here, time lingers, caged by rib and cranium.

Dust in the skull’s cup struggles to remember.

 

But only in the making of King Tut’s mask

is the true human soul preserved?

 

 

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This poem, published by Black Bough Poetry in Tutankhamun: Wonderful Things and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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Counting Christmas Trees

 

Wrapped  in city traffic, my mother drove

the Plymouth: an American saloon

in 1950’s green, down Oxford Street.

Wave after wave of festive lights above,

an incoming tide of human desires

mirrored in the rained-on river road.

Behind the steering wheel mum seemed so small,

though from those slender shoulders, those sinuous arms,

vast symphonies could fall.

 

In the back, we used our sleeves

to clean the fog from windows,

Conned by mum we counted Christmas trees,

we forgot to be carsick. We totalled ninety-nine.

The hundredth tree, topped by its battered angel

spiked deep-forest magic through our hall.

 

 

 

Published by Black Bough Poetry in the Christmas & Winter Anthology Volume 4

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Haiku

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Brown leaves beneath feet.

Spring’s birdsong - long departed -

soon I will see my breath..

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Published by Black Bough Poetry in: Christmas – Winter vol. 111

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The Poet Reflects on his Life for 12 Stanzas..

 

Night’s curtain draws open.

Light dresses the edges

of fog banks, candy flossed

coverlets float over waves,

obscuring origins

from a skull that lingers on the shore.

 

A slow swell lifts its limbs,

stretches, sparkles, carries

sun on its back. A new,

swift tide flows, a broad smile,

white and wide, foams towards

a skull’s indifference, on this lip of land.

 

Like wind swirled leaves, ripples

mark a squall, mounting breezes

roll fog banks back, clouds are

 faces of fancy, or dragons

in disguise. They cast shadows,

like the skull casts on its shore.

 

Surf’s repetition breaks on me,

retreats, revolves, returns.

Slabs green, crests white, darts up

and over in its drift towards

those bones which can’t lookout,

that eyeless skull, grown sad, ashore.

 

A dull sea doesn't smile,

it mirrors dullness.

The sentences it sends

mean nothing to this space.

My own intelligence -

an empty skull rolling on this shore.

 

Beneath this sea sink piles

of refracted light, transformed,

by depth, to darker tones.

Here, morphine weeps

through tangled sleeps, where dreams

weave webs within this salt jewelled skull.

 

The midday tide is high.

Children leap lines of groynes.

‘No, no, no,’ cry angular

‘gulls, hung from their sky hooks.

The sun turns metallic the

pools of water, deep in skull’s sockets.

 

A storm’s turntable. The sun

winds the sea’s grooved surface.

Builds pressure, builds vacuum.

Adds hipsters and horns-men,

whose sound is their master-

loud in the jaw of the skull that sings.

 

Storm opens wide its mouth

to swallow continents.

Breaks white its teeth at base

of cliffs, blasts without cease

as if to bury deep in sand

all skulls tumbling on this land.

 

Is this my Guernica?

A disembodied head

of Cretan bull that roars

beyond horizon lines,

echoing in that space,

that vaulted skull, reckless on the shore.

 

The wind begins to wheeze,

calms to a hollow chest,

asthmatic, or little more.

Low pressure is filled, a

high blue sky wins out.

The skull lies still, careless on the shore.

 

Soft castellations of sea

catch thoughts like silver fry.

They swim in the ebb of

the evening tide. The

kind dark beckons. Time’s long

fingers, linger, then the skull is cupped.

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Searching for fossils in winter.

 

I crack open this rock,

the flat of my chisel

twists, a key in a lock.

 

I search for what our

ancestors saw, but

had no words to name.

 

Inside is a nodule of stone-

times neat fist- I try to prise

its fingers open, to uncurl this

knuckle of frozen bone.

 

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Published by Black Bough Poetry in Christmas – Winter vol. 111

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Foxman

 

Fox-cub, curious amongst  roots, sniffs the air,

pauses, his foreleg poised, a child of caution.

 

Exile at eight, he sips meltwater from language,

takes his path towards the wood’s dark centre.

 

A psychedelic prankster, a foxy lady lover,

he consumes sorrow, plays with powdered joy.

 

Then, as a soldier, Foxman rides the M4 west,

tilts at hilltop windmills, with his lance of verse.

 

He finds trowels, bends his back to labour.

He digs, builds, creates meaning in his lair.

 

He loves, has cubs, is often found in pubs,

first his Father, then his Mother, die.

 

Pain burns in his joints; makes him want to retch.

He quits, now sits, writes, though never enough.

 

Fox-curious still, he leaves his lance on a hill,

and walks alone to the wood’s dark centre.

 

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