". . .THE WONDROUS ARCHITECTURE OF THE WORLDE. . . ."

I laugh
the road over the Hog's Back
closed because....it melted

was the sun ever so
back in your day
eh Kit?

and what do I read
Mr. Marlowe?
why words, Kit, words

that word magician
Dr. Burgess he presumes
to bring you back

to life again
and so it seems
I see your blood Kit

streaming in the firmament
nay only a Deptford sunset
dragged screaming from memory

your blood upon the page Kit...
mere cherry juice it
stains the words

and so to Deptford I
do go
thanks to Madame Remembrance

I a poor
purveyor of poetry
clutching at words

and here
a great reckoning
not  in a little room

but on a lost street
staining the scene
a sickly yellow

and so enough
of Prologue...
Act 1 begins

a smiling ruffian
see his knife smiles too
the blade eager for blood

alas I
in so much pain I
have no fear of death

indeed would welcome
the flicked knife
if it would release me

from my life
a man prepared
to die if it be so

"Come live with me and be
my love..." I doth quote
in my best Passionate Shepard

"Wot?" he wots
scared of my insouciance
the ghost of Marlowe by my side

ahhh he the very villain
a scar from eye to smile
he aims to do the same to me

"Where rogue did
they get thee?" I mock
"VILLAINS 'R' US?"

Marlowe's ghost laughs
"Aye lad...ay lad
to him!"

"Only one of us..."
I warn my hellhound
"....will come out of this alive!"

I pause for effect
"And I'm afraid
it won't be( hee hee ) thee!"

I take a determined step
towards my would-be
now trembling killer

who all this wordage
being too much for him
he flees

ahhh the glint of words
defeats the glint of steel
he my Ortygius

"What sort of Feend,, or spirit of the earth,
Or Monster turned to manly shape
Or of what world or melted he be made...?"

I declaim to an audience
of cats and cans and
other streetly filth

I...I. . .unable to
find the next line
and so I etc., etc., etc.

and once more
I am of Guildford yet again
30 years or more away

and there melts a road
upon the Hog's Back
and I laugh to be alive

"Doth teach vs all to have aspiring mindes:
Our soules, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the worlde.."

**

Ha ha spent all this morning writing this after Jan came in and told me about the melting road! On the hottest longest day of the year for 40 years I was reading Anthony Burgess A Dead Man in Deptford and remember one of only my two visits there. Of course this is where Marlowe was killed/assassinated.

For seven years after a head injury I was in immense pain and would have been grateful to be taken out of it...so my poor villain had met a man who didn't mind dying....hence all the verbiage and wordage.

BECOMING THE MAN MY FATHER ALWAYS WAS
(for Brian )

Each night
I would follow you

through the rituals
of what you had to do

being Daddy.

I wanted to be Daddy too.

Mimicking your gait
becoming an exact

copy
of you

trailing along
in your footsteps

like a lone seagull
following in the wake

of some great ship
of state

watching the water
burn

'til it was all bubbles

then letting it
calm down

before filling my mother's
hot water bottle

carrying it to her side
like a lover's gift.

I was
your little shadow.

She'd always smile:
'Thank you Danny! '

'That's alright love."
was always the answer.

These the ritualistic words
in the hot water bottle ceremony.

Then he'd teach the clock
to ****

adjusting it with his hands
and wind up Time

so that it spit tick & tocks
all through the night

then go lock doors
turn keys
draw bolts.

'That's it, son! '

I used to imagine
being you

and now I am
my own man

winding up Time

bringing my missus
the gift of a hot water bottle

(the gift of me)

both equally
heart warming.

'Thank you Donall! '
she always smiles.

'That's all right love! '
I always answer.

Me the man
I am

because of you.

OH PHOTOGRAPHIC YOU!

you...yes...you
wearing the latest
cloud upon your head

living your life
in Kodachrome
leaving your B&W world

and see here
a tree in full bloom
growing out of your head

and see there you
with only half a head
in Polaroid Land

now you no longer
here or there
I love the photographic you

even all these
badly taken snaps
a treasure trove of you

all these awkward moments
tears that bring
laughter

now you gone for ever
but these holy relics
possess your smile

I shove them to
the back of a drawer
unable to look at them

but knowing I will
again and again when
pain bites through the soul

...AND I WAVE BACK

Outside the hatch
he turns slowly

and talks
but I can't make out
the words he says

they fall from his lips
dangle and float in space

outside the backyard fence
a hill grabs the moon

and then slowly
lets it go again

the moon floating just
out of reach

laughs; 'Go on...do that again! '

the hill smiles: 'Just you wait... just you wait! '
the moon beams
as a little bird

gingerly(as if at first unsure)
steps out into space

and then finds flight
take hold of it as if

it had only discovered it that minute
and absconds with it

the darkness
barks

and falls
into silence

and then another part
of the darkness

barks back

held in a gentleness
a leaf tiptoes down the breeze

as if descending
a spiral staircase.

Time holds its breath

outside the hatch
flat on his back

the earth a little blue ball he has let go of

the astronaut
slowly turns and waves

& I
wave back.

"MINÄ RAKASTAN
SINUA PALJON PALJON!"
( "I love you very much!" )

the sky
full of stars
as if suddenly

as if billions of stars
had been ordered
and crammed into place

he realised he
had become lost
in the silence

these were Finnish stars
and the silence too
was very very Finnish

he turned on his heel
and then turned
again and again

"Hello!" said the snow
only in Finnish
of course

"Hei itse!"
I answered it
as if we were friends

after an hour
the way home
finally found me

that night
curled up
in his life

he watched with his wife
Hiroshima Mon Amour
with Finnish subtitles

she translating
it into English
for his benefit

"...and then one day
my love you came
out of eternity..."

both of them
not realising they
had become pregnant

SCHRöDINGER'S SOCKS & THE REVENGE OF THE CAT

Schrödinger's cat
failed to see just what

all the fuss was
about?

It was all such
a reductive absurdum.

The cat couldn't understand
collapsing wave functions

decoherence
entanglement or whether

reality was really
quantum

to save its life.

It was aware of
one thing & one thing

only
. . .the diabolic device. . .

Cat in a metal box
with a Geiger counter

with a radioactive substance
blah blah de ****** blah

an atom decaying or something or
other &

releasing a hammer to smash
a phial of hydrocyanic acid.

Wot!

"I do not like thee Dr. Fell!"
thought the cat.

It was a very literary cat.

So all this palaver
about a cat( me? how! )

being both dead or alive or
neither dead or alive or

. . .wot!

So this is to be my great
to-be-or-not-to-be!

Welllll excuse me!
Say...doesn't the cat have his say?

So, I( clever cat that I am)
merely claw my way to the top &

disengage the device
by taking out the hammer.

So no cat was harmed
in the making of this

thought experiment.

It almost drove Schrödinger
out of his tiny little mind!

And he( hee hee )
never did discover

what ever
happened to his socks.

I forever stealing
one sock from a pair

from the open
washing machine.

Leaving him to ponder
just where socks go?

The other side of the Universe?
Oh come on Erwin...it's not

rocket science!

Now, to get back to
describing the behaviour of

a quantum entity.

"Mmmmm......mmmmmm?"

"Naw....I still don't get it!"

"Say ya couldn't see yer way
to giving me a scratch...could ya?"

"Up a bit....upabit....yeah...yeah
. . .there...just...there!"

A WOMAN IS CRYING

in the next room
a woman is
crying

a moon
perches upon
an hotel sign

unmoved
as a new millennium
dawns as bright as neon

the woman
still crying
her unknown despair

shifting silently
from one century
to another

human grief
unchanged
from age to age

a woman
is crying
crying

*

New York with one century becoming another and in this one moment on the threshold of a new age...a woman cries her own private grief...a sorrow that has no name but seems to be the grief of all ages now and to come. I never discovered the reason for such sorrow and the neon coloured it blue and yellow and then red.