Reverse search a pool of blood to its foetus of ideas,
calculate trajectories to a pin-head through the years.
While stippling marks proximity the silenced tongue won’t speak,
for its hell that takes our liberty when damp Earth entombs the meek.
In cavities of ancient skulls the dust of time drowns words
where cave walls once were libraries, now echoes fall unheard.
Where hit-list’s flamed in burn-pits and armies forged their prize,
re-written were our histories and their curses damned our eyes.
Then blinded willingly or not we sweep ahead in time
we carve sacred memorials in elevated rhyme,
and the horrors of reality will not be writ upon this page
as we flounder in our duality it is guilt that we assuage.
The mind that strums pure chords from trees
that sets them tumbling on a breeze,
or plucks the seasons fresh from frets
to paint sweet tunes of no regrets,
is seldom seen in winter fields
where sunlights giving warmth oft yields,
where barren turns the empty soil
where springtime chutes wither and spoil.
Yet in such bleak and darkened days
somewhere the Summer Skylark plays,
and in echoes from the seasons gone
we hear our futures hopeful song,
then in reprise our souls unfold
to make us young, to feel less old,
and though a year has once more turned
there is less forgot than to be learned.
Viewing the world through Inch thick glass,
the traffic chokes to a halt.
A veiled shadow holds a face to the window.
Its gaze encrusted with disappointment
eyes as pale as a moonlit desert,
We stare at each other from our different worlds
I silently mouth sorry
whilst thumbing my passports pages,
The Child Spirit sees me whole.
Frozen for the longest moment
in a humming steel cocoon,
I watch the wagons circle, vulturesque.
A hand-print is smeared on the window
I touch it before walking to the terminal,
less than the span of my palm or the fold of a Dollar bill.
Ascending through dust and cloud I curse the City,
Roads spinning out from the Circle below, the people are no longer real.
The Dubai lounge is first class cool just my Duty free and me.
The meeter and greeter
whose patter gets sweeter
whilst extending a sheltering arm,
to the nubile doe-eyed self incompleter
he’s like daddy minus the charm.
The halfwitted trojan horse clown
scribbles recklessly getting it down,
and though the words in his head
have already been said
he’s convinced he’s the new Ezra Pound.
The political ranters
finger their chanters
while reeling the dancers a tune,
the revellers will tap and skip to their crap
as if tides to a dictating moon.
The front line reporter the dutiful scribe
no opinion his own behind others he’ll hide,
he’ll travel the length and breadth of the land
making notes on events
he can’t understand.
The crab like page crawler
safe under his rock
awaiting the low hanging fruit,
skitters cross pages in clumsy veiled rages
his default much less than astute.
The cast out outsider
scrawls drunkenly silent
his passivity strangled, choked into violence,
he’s lost all his rhythm he’s radicalised
Joyfully driven to be so despised.
Down where the Land defers to the Sea
like the edge of an offered blade,
a channelled ocean flows harnessed yet free
through trenches millennia made.
At the pool of my blood I’m cut to the bone
fractured cliffs rise up to defend,
my heart echoes through chambers forever alone
with a pulse that no steel could end.
Your love is a sword that rusts in the tides
thrust too deep to ever withdraw,
like the Myth of a King who drew it but once
to find himself ever at war.
