Thirst

“After God, Shakespeare has created most”
(Alexandre Dumas)

You illicit dealer of words,
Conjuror of hallucinogens;
You who inspire the minds of inspirers.

I am your purple-lipped devourer:
No longer the dreamer
For now I am thirsty.

Perhaps

Pungent wood infuses the night-scent –
Fresh from the downpour.
Sinews of water, wrestling metal,
Condemned on the slippery bars.
Perhaps I love you more than you love me.
And the drops well up and fall.
The sky is weeping.
My words are the sponge.

Sunday Night Among The Shards

The faithful Moon kneels down to pray.
A splintering mile of juts and shards,
Of stealthy spears and slithery glass
In ambush lies – sinister as greed.

And as, serene, she drops her head
The poisoned peaks of bladed scrapers
Thrust their readied javelins hence
And pierce her martyred pupil blind.

Bleeding throbs of the faithful Moon
Upon the metal canopy douse;
Feeding down the glassy sheen
Her blood white, her white tears.

The Lighthouse

A tragedy:
He stared from his tower of light,
Tasting salt.
When I look at the world
I see only the numbers, equations,
Formulae holding it together.
A marker-pen:
He painted them – no –

Daubed them on the glass
As the waves broke like
Vulnerable wings, beyond,
Unseen to him.
Pitiful symbols
Of a modern anti-creed.

"Youth is..."

Like sketching out
life in pencil:
A fear of ink
indelible.

St Paul's

Alone in this drowsy epicentre
In the after-silence of the bells -
The stone column an extension of my spine,
The dome the weight of my thought.

Deep in this rock is the resonance of Time,
Scope, Knowledge, the Weight of the sky and
Gravity and Dark and History’s quest: the
Searches of Souls and Intrusions of Gospels.

I listen to the wise instinct of the resonances.

The City of the Monotonous Mass

Like a fanged glass shard
Salivating in sleepy rain,
Another week drips the dregs
Of its hours like watery metal,

Throbbing a wistful glint
Before melding anew.
(The briefest respite of a praying
Ant, catching a breath in the soil).

A missed heartbeat’s silence
As The City's furnace blinks into the
Sleep of the battle wounded, drifts
Into the glide of a ghost bird.

The dreamless sleep of the
Monotonous mass, whose nights are
Warm in the replenishing charge
Of sweating machinery.

They are the crumbs of goldfish feed,
Eyes mired in x-ray-black,
Brains loaded like knotted wires,
Pulsing with digits of warm static:

Slaves to the glass shard
And the gaping abyss that will
Chew and milk them for
Their ripeness at dawn.