Times …

There are times,

Fleeting times,

When he can catch his breath,

When his heart isn’t batter-hammering

Inside his chest,

Inside his brain,

That he can believe the lies:

That he is gaining on the familiar figure

Disappearing through the doors,

Ahead, frustratingly just beyond recognition;

That he can decide whenever he wants

To stop running;

The way You See Them

 

Hot feet, impatient to eat the miles,

Get past – over, through, round – the

Heart attack jams on this

Stretch of cold-as-business road.

Runes, signs, lines

Whispering at me

“Blue open skies

Are nothing but lies,

Friends will make you weaker …”

But the technology that,

Yesterday, was going to be

All I’d ever need:

To get ahead,

Stay the pace

Is strangling my soul,

Selling my secrets.

Things are always

The way you see them;

Until they change …

Or you do.

Next to the Fact …

Again I’ve been dreamin’; the one

That always has me feelin’ like screamin’:

Wakin’ up in a place I know but don’t remember, last

Night’s warmth, passion an’ promise already coolin’ fast.

When the friends that I wanted were out

And the ones that I met were not.

Drifted to the palace game, realising I

Knew neither the names nor the rules. Later

At the accident club the edges were dull, the

Twice-warm’d wine and cheap skin-sin far too pale,

To Light Again

Found in the cold-turn soil:

Just a sod-clamped half of nothing

Corroded scrap-of-metal,

Forged, used, cast away –

Misplaced perhaps – lost  these

Five hundred years and more …

Then brought sudden to light again.

 

“Don’t foul your ears

With the bad they say,

Don’t pass on the vitriol;

For down the lines of

History-gone-to-bed someone

Will plumb the several realities.

Be better if you don’t swallow the

Lies they offer, so glibly, today.”

Tell Me You Knew Him …

 

Where went he then,

This big-hearted troubadour knight?

Where went he in the times he was away?

Away from us, our tribe, our ken?

Which astral, other-world spaces did he ride,

This minstrel warrior

Who wrote the starlight words,

Stories of elf and rainbow worlds;

Harvard; Leading the Blind

“See the statue here …?”

The step-on guide drones;

Way she mouths it,

It’s not a question

“One statue, three lies here,”

She isn’t speaking

So much as reading a script.

No Tomorrow-Chains.

So much sun-on-butterfly-wing colour here;

Princess on the table.

“No strings,” she begs, “let there be

No tomorrow-chains.

I’m asking for nothing more

Than one night’s freedom skies;

Perhaps a whole lot more

Than you dare promise …

But, before you shake your head,

Hear this: I am willing

To accept your lies

But you have to be convincing.”

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