Day taps away—
In the numbering rains.
All the fleet years, enveloped,
How many questions were founded,
What was granted by our solo vacations?
We have trussed, only films, yellowed and bent
****** into an makeshift, unready, empty album,
Dreams made right, journaled without strewn hands,
Lips rung dry from want of heat, touch and caress,
We kept our pride, penultimate, throughout
All the days, longing, dying, we slept
Together, in a broken bed of dreams
And thought, when will this play
Be glad?  When will that isle
Appear?  Will it ever show
Among the dark oceans
Rise— to ferry us away
Before the drunk sun
Sinks in the sea?

Love, in garden rose,
Her little hands twining tight,
Heart rapt in tendril.

In plain sight, the Peacocks ply their wearisome
Colours.  Awkwardly swaying, pompously preening,
They cry to be seen, their voices are gurgling  
And gawking.  The direction of wind is their vane.

Overhead, in the secret sky fleet wings are truth.
In the sun the searing Falcon is seeing all;
His talons turn and steal away, they are mad,  
Playful fingers— they will have their say.

Britain has few trees  .  .  .
Fools bespoke: Lord cut them down,
  .  .  .  Ecological disaster.

Pyro maniacs—
Weird climate change deniers,
  .  .  .  Too stupid to live.

The heron spreads his wings and preys.
His stony stand a beachhead sloughing
The salt sea, a sepulchered wading.

Leaven the broken bred, unshell
The teeming waters, a fisher of mermen
Unlordly low this lying father,
His wings are palms,

His rock a mount, his wings a bay,
And deafness, tears in the outer shores
And exaulted seas the forgiven waves,

Swells the briny blood and kelp.
Vains are streaming to the fisher king,
Lordy he lands the lying father
His wings are psalms.

A tiny flood that arcs the sky
Marks lord in miniature, a King
Fisher flies, His wings are
The waters calmed.

The otters bask and preen, mermen
Jostle in the laddered rays of the sun
They mark their surf, insouciant play,

Wavering the fisher of men, he sways,
Simply they circle in song singing hours,
Dancing as do the murmuring waves,
Their strokes are psalms.

Novice, heed my diction—
The learned, the schooled, the politic,
Are but fools with conviction.

Rain dapples in fens of the marshland brooks,
Among the rue hillocks of the sapling woods,

What little peace may fall to drop the shivering
Leaves, rood of the sun, a crop, kestrels quiver

In midair, to keep as they sway into the stations
Of all minions moused who faulter in formation

And bright is birth, when night clothes the day,
As all the mornings long, song of hope, in May.

His hands ring in the upper classes.
There, in the morning light, his will
Is forged, bent, as truth, on ruling  
This place, underhand, underfoot.

With shuttered ears divining his voice
The dim pupils see only what is said.
The top hand schools, topples all words
Ringing hands sing the song of fools.

How Headmaster trains on the heel,  
A dagger strikes, the paper cuts
Exalted, his close minded hands,  
See a Czar in the stony swagger,

And the student body, submissively lies
With his feet.  Outside the college
The headmaster is heard. Grossly,
He is their dream and only shepherd.

Was there a word,
Plain or shimmering,
Cast of gold and mercy,
In the bathing light of forgiveness,
Tempered with down and feather,
Wrought of worthiness and pride,
The mellow flame of tenderness
And shearing morning sun,
One tabulation of saving flesh,
The tapping root of the knowledge
Tree, the forge of stainless metal
And touch, stone direction,
One healing humour, cardinal
As blood, forceful as the salt
Journey bearing the pines
Of lodestar coordinates,
Spotting the Xanadu ex
Of the lost lovers?

In order the heart, keep running without knowledge
Of the living torch, of the soiling fires that wipe
Hopes memory, the boiled blood must breathe
In a sea of borders, of waves and rushing tides.

In order the heart, beats time, though it knocks,
Near breaks, as the wind that swoons is divining
Treasure, the jewel in the box of flesh must hold,
Must shore the rivers of the branching bleed.

In order the heart, is closed, and dry of touches
Towering keep, let the eye know mercy, let the seas
That travel with the bones never feel the marching
Desert, the hollow caves of the discarded lovers.

I feel the shrug of the passing winds,
That gather beyond my solemn place,
Where indifferent birds fly to and from,
With only lost dreams, real as her face.