We drowned here today...

Sluiced along curious Holloways papered in shell.

We knew few colours by name,
Yet saw how they merged, circled, embraced,
to sweet-talk the senses to parley.

Last night the first Redwings sipped the late air
with the high-muffled chatter of Fieldfares passing.

Morning came garnished in far borrowed glories.

The place where we wonder to drown.

Toss these brackened antlers
to a Babylon of early crows
where slim repels of cirrus
lace the marches of Orion.
I wore you as an amulet
hard pressed upon my pestle arm
as charms of montane lunar drift
rebelled about your peacock gaze.

There is balsam on the Eastern run
in piquant writs of clementine ,
where jubilees of Persian mote
reveille in the waiting still.
As hieroglyphs of scrying palm
lay wraith about the cindered pane
you harried in ancestral bell..

The name of some forgotten God.

What is it she whispers?
Outside..
The brittle bleach decor rustles shy applause
Inside….
half encumbered slumber wins
The aching World to part made play
Arcadian chapels hover in folds
That form in the fields of gathering grey

and still she whispers.

Damp calico dales murmur and shift
in the twist of a tremor.
A cold palm press upon temples that pulse
for the touch of another that passes
high over the way…

What is it, she whispers?

Witch-fingers lift at the filigree latches,
saltwater patches salivate free…..
..lasciviously.
beneath the list of chalking blinds
rim- shot eyes scour windswept causeways

Always searching,

Always waiting,
For some unknown.

And still she whispers...

Evening cleats The Bay,

As cavalcades of passive argon, sulphur on
the ogham slicks,
to treacle ways toward the seeding
cooling of the hours,...

The sleights of crimson, fringe
the bruising cower of the West, to
brightly die behind the leathered hill.

From a wrist of tallowed amethyst,
a Tiercel purls a last ellipse, and in
his sinking helix ships, the Sommes
of curdled estuaries, to brood
the closing Mill....

Peered through the ideal imagery
of petty dream-spun avenues.
Brushed the quiet tides that rose
in fluid blends of milky down.
The clamour of the Westbound flocks
that scarred the last in pulsing chevrons
told of lands beyond the lay
of harlequin recline.

The lilac swathes that bled to blue
then proffered airs a saintly glow
cooled in easy idiom, the rapid
pyroclastic flow of dry diurnal doubt.

Aromatic night descended,
petals closed on avenues
to the path, the stars attended
cold eternal retinue.
Far ushers of the dew gilt foot
in concert with the silver seethe,
the mist in supple opulence,
an ***** to breathe.

The melting toll of empty hours,- chaste

Among the dry-stone steeples,-stirs

The cobbled rune of foetal wonder.

Forgotten waifs, in teasing, see

The scheming torpor of our ways

Then mingle in the vaults of our regret,



Through half closed eyes the

Unremembered rise on drafts

Of innocence, to spell their names

In Spirit in these scuttled, pin drop Realms.

The utters of an arcane tongue  that

Whittled horses from the hill,  now merge

Into the chiseled henge of lanterned Citadels.

A brackish lance of squandered resin,
Hurdles from the beacon shale, soldiered
To a least of blinding dwindles.

In epitaphs of silhouette
The spindle miradors retire
Earthbound castles martyred to
The coming of the rain

"How you loved me once",
he whispered, to those who
gathered around his bed...

"You gave me strength
through your convictions
upon my mystery you fed
and I in turn, would comfort those,
who -while in suffering- chose to
turn to me....

Conceived through need
of explanation, my kind
in many guises mastered
******* Lords of all creation
"Eternal Minds"-or so you thought

From grotto walls to burning growth
the ineffable, osmosing oaths
the cultured banners of excuse
the mansioned rulers
void of proof......

...........for "Us" you fought

As ages altered my kin expired
want mutated, as you flowered
knowledge spread as awe retreated
unseated were the ways of Old..

Now stricken by the minds
that made me,my immortality
has left me...
...and with few to fan the embers of
my reason- I grow cold.

So I ask of you to turn and leave
It was never I that penned your creeds
It is you who brought idolitary
to justify your every deed

Now all is empty on those
pages- nothing breathes
upon the air, as the lines
upon my fading face are
features of your disrepair


But as I pass, I leave you this:
That is, you know not more but less.
for all the gifts that you were given
so treasured under hope of Heaven-
mean nothing...

Drenched in oil, rising seas,
pollution, avarice, war, disease

Your present...

Not a vision.

I need to be inside.

To bend your bones around me,
To fill your throat with rabid flesh
to claw your shiny hide..

I hurt to break your prim veneer,
Your fingers pulled in knots of hair
Your lupine drool upon my hand
Your spike of stammered sigh..

I need to be inside

How low lies the line, the thin
Separation of Earth and Sky, far, far,
Beyond the bending ambles, the
Solitary gables, where descending pylons,
Unroll their cables, deep into the womb
Of distant cities.

Bellicose clouds in league with
The sea wind, wrest samphire fragments
From a sentinel peace, while folding
The hamlet in pitying glamours
Of harridan water on slate.

In Spartan gardens, Bu-gloss leans
Bruised petals hard, by rusted stanchions,
as bind-**** , knots the flaking perch
Of tumbled gantries, in a throttled
Slew of searching.

Melancholy anthems, quiver and hail
In the breeze-plucked tune of loose
Slung wire. Pleas of long gone mariners
Mutter and choir through salted gorse,..
..
Hurry inland to rattle at doors of
Norman churches, as if seeking
Some last sanctuary.

A singeing bleak...

Eye water, colors from thistle gripped nothings
Numb from a dissident space
Absence is minded by pale phased etchings
Embellishing braids of cinnamon briar, while
flushing the tumbles of Old Man’s Beard.

Mercury drops...

a Starling backed brush to the blackening fields
all riddled with meddling shoals
Turned ermine surrenders a rumour
Of solstice, remembers the Ploughmen
The tread of the horses that folded the beds
Of the cold, tired Earth,
While, over, the Plovers wheel.

The beryl high land smoulders….

Where skinny manes of cloven trailing, cuff
the rake of jumbled scree,
a porous crux of timbered carol
matins from the mossy shrine
to urchin on the bluff and draft
in nooks of birch and bilberry.

On that high dais, Corvid tribals
potter on the reeks of gale.
Fell boatman of the troubled storeys
quarter in some sleet cabal
to throw their onyx gauntlet down
a slating arc of fallow sky.

I waved you goodbye, as if
I would see you on Sunday..

Then my Father phoned
at four in the morning...

..and my Father never phones....

Too much thigh to go
unkissed
so wet-look fabric
has my tongue
in swollen lip bit
thirst..
A sunrise skirt
eased over arches,
modest drapes of stolen
passing showers...

Your pointed mouth
has come undone, to
curse the moon in
quiet hours, running
with the liquid thought
that through your thumping mind
becomes, the preaching
of the screaming sea...

Heels, held, high over head,
A bristled language empties
you of easy , urban drag....

There is a place
In  evergreen wiles
A permanent perfect                  
of boundless dimension,
I tarry untrying in idles of hours
Lost in the halls of this subtle domain


Walk with me there
To where willows thirst
On the banks by the bridge
Where cowslip with meadowsweet
Polka the pasture to pepper
The evening with notes of the rain



Gather me in-

-There,hold me in harvests
Of memory loved,- as when
  You turned your face

To the lights on the water

and smiled the glory of day into shame.

In the second hand soothing
of darkest address: frost crawls.
Having crept down the alleys
on  serpentine silvers
to pilfer the vaults of an Indian Summer,
in crystalline raiment
the malachite pavements
succumb to its covering sprawl.

On shellac returns of lamp delta falls
minutiae maraud in bitter sweet symmetry
shattering petals, encasing in glass
the Stella shot run of the vine.
A glacier tourniquet scuppers the mold
an accomplished assassin of natural device,
with icy indifference it hushes the *****:

The Moon, for the life in her eyes.

The wimpled scrolls recede....
The Authors of the braille sands
leave Northern marrow in their wording,
as sharp as Marram grasses bent
in keening subjugation....

Illuminated Sanskrit kelp,
infused with lust of fallen auras,
scrims the ****-green gartered breaks
now shaken from the glaucous mane,

while fleets of stippled cumuli,
( rain-chartered galleons of the West)
in line astern, prepare for war
beyond the deepened brim.

We,- the town-worn Pages- flutter,
drawn to trace the moiling hem,
to pour away into the water....

Salt-preened minions of the wind.

I have to unhand her, unhold her,
spell a widdershins wander
to unpick the stitches of time
sewn together.

I have to unlive her, unlove her,
-muster a fiction, a line of defence,
a charm of protection, a cobbled pretence
to convince that I'm better without her,

- but to court a dementia
that summons a shade
to centre upon the mistakes
that we made-
is, itself, a deceit.

For there were such pleasures
embossed on the soul
to remain in forevers
that cannot be changed.

The time of the shining of
Wind-summered grasses, has passed,
-To the lark-breast mottle-
The harvested skin of the
Senescent land

The candle-****** gutter of
Hurrying wing sees
The last of the coin
That was minted in thatches
Of deepwood
Of latticing bramble
Of crumbling eve.

The mourn of the Moorland
Has  feathered a will
With the clot of the Ash,
Where a heather of cinnabar
Freckles the splash of
a simmering tarn

As gravelling Easterlies
Peel the cling of
The verdigris fades,
Some twilight of sepia
Musters the pastel
of Wintering calm.

No sound disturbs
The cloud curled steeps of sea green pines
whose clinging oceanic thoughts
are freed, released from malted slopes.
Respired slow , the sallow spirals
herd to high, still, corrugations,
Their purse; a billion brooches
For their keep.


And, then a Raven
Barks its gloat across the drab pavilions
A dauntless hermit sculls away,
on myth buoyed strokes, to beat the bounds.
Carried from the pinioned ridge
away to secret monasteries.
Climbing from embroidered
oriental looms of Beech