Haiku #762

762.

Middle of chaos,
Will our dead be appeased by
Photographers’ fees?

Revive A Version Of Me

Revive a version of me
On quiet pages written,
Within a work I’ll never read,
Upon a different Britain.

For though the bandits won,
Those scoundrels and the bigots,
And all our lovers, woebegone,
Drowned on foreign frigates;

When all’s accounted, more or less,
Our xenophobes decanted,
Abusers too, then eat their mess,
And feed MPs replanted,

Then perhaps, the maps I find
Will chart more coloured places,
Less partisan, this paradigm,
With free and hopeful faces.

Seven

My palm lines are changing –
Life is rearranging,
Slowly, piece by piece.
Scintilla soul,
Tesserae hole,
My apocrypha, at least,
Is over
For now.

A cloud that day,
That cloudless day,
Revealed its fury,
Furies revel
In sixes and sevens.
Spectacles covered,
Pigeons survived,
Dustsheets all over,
Sevens and nines.

Dead escalators.
Tokens to green,
Covered in dust,
Dust and debris.
Sirens pervasive,
And pervasive
We collapsed
Or scratched
Or stretched
As an inflexed
Naked armpit.

Asphyxia,
Suits say die,
So they said,
And so we trust;
Yet truth can be
Evasive.
Grey faces,
Early grey hair
Like a Lowry abroad.
Hatzalah paramedics
Abound in my
Parallel dreams.
I wake
In a sweat
Into boundless rust,
Into blue sky
And a useless sword
To thwart a seam.

Everybody Matters

I am my own death.

Uplift blackening acrid smoke.

People fall down.

Blessed observers
Surviving
And thriving
On wi-fi
And serendipity.
Some did choke.
Some awoke,
But not all.

I gave birth
To twin apostrophes
Then suddenly spoke.

Bleak confetti,
Death wedding,
Lateral bleeding,
Distant heaven.

I dreamt last night
That every living entity
Has soul,
So why is there
In some buildings
And some people
That deeply observable hole.

Taxes, beliefs
And comfort
Paid for all this.
You can talk and share
All you want,
Blind and besotted,
But beyond a white cap
The next one is
Already plotted.

Numbers, Part 2

Plastic bag in a tree
And a sizeable saving
By a company
Still to this day
Profiteering.

Divide by seventy two
And you will finally find
The value of one human life
To the north of a borough
Is equivalent in weight
Of a wife’s whiskey sour
In the lies of the mouths
Of their blue sickened south,
South to the south of a tower.

I cannot yet rewind real life;
But when I can, I will
Know those perpetrators
And their sad accounts
One by one, although
There are those who continue
With more grief in their arms
Than I have ever known,
Who still continue with more dignity
Than any member could ever redeem
In number ten, or eleven, or three.

If you want to see,
Touch, and hold
Discrimination raw as
Rotten fruit in your hand,
And also observe
Sallow platitudes
From an MP and their man,
Their deepest is shallow,
Just head for the gallow
Dressed up in green,
Witness how words
Defer and demean.

Ode To Fame

One day, you will be old
And as wounded
As putrefied fruit
On life’s dining table.
Memories of your folds
And your unmet fears
All but faded,
They melted away like ghosts
On the road to
Your home in
Villanueva del Rosario

So you flew far and wide,
And you documented all
As the infernal place cemented;
People love colours
If purposes suit,
Lovers of movement
With a kit and a boot,
But all movements made
Give illusions their root.

You owned the diurnal,
You owned a dispersal;
They made arrests
On Grecian beaches
Yesterday, refugees
On deflating, sinking dinghies
Paid the price of your coat,
And you traded it all
For a soft drink and hope.

Serialised

Where do they go to?
Those endless rows
Who once sat, bless,
Pleased as punch
And bright as a bunch
Of tulips essential
To our well-dressed
Red-shoed universe.
They sang a hymn,
They learned a word,
Only ten or twenty years
Ahead to be interred
In brambles and roses
For the wrongs
Of a man, or men,
Or whoever we failed
In our future roles
To only once deter.

Aboriginal

Lunar mood fringe,
They placed several tiny pins
In my undernourished sides,
My diaphragm and then
My abdomen.
They did this for a promise,
For prophecy, and yet
When no blood flowed
Nor did I flinch nor wince
Nor died, they hauled
And winched me up
By my rusty flehmen lip,
To survey all extents
Of the damage they once did.

Far away from my vantage
I could discern a dust bowl;
Local Angle diminishes grief.
Despite the best intentions
Of actors and musicians,
Also known as charlatans
And often politicians,
We are worse off now
Than we were back then.
There is a bald eagle at war
With itself, it circles and calls
In brawling self-doubt;
In a dream irrepressibly
Parallel with that downy beast
Four bearded men rode side-saddling
Into a town where football grounds
Are venues for public displays
Of punishment and the schools
And universities and places
Of worship were left deserted
Long ago, long before my desertion.

When misappropriating men
Chase flags or desecrate chalices
Or bulldoze summits
To landscape the world a little flatter,
It is always women out of love
And children out of hope
Who are doled the most to suffer,
And at last I could see
From these barren heights
How Time’s helices reverted
To a more peaceful place
Wherein my less bleak thoughts,
Moreso than all of these,
Became at once atavistic and
Goldenly aboriginal.

Abyssinia

Sometimes these abysmal lows
Seek to address and occupy

My own ebbing soul’s
Reclusive loan and use

Of shadowy caverns,
Avoiding outer

Stony nomenclatures
Or any such anatomies of light,

Suspended and unrarefied
Far beneath the looms

Of gloomy, nervous time.
And if poured out now

From this diluted womb of myself,
And if all I am told should sleep,

And if all I observed and believed
Tattooed into the warp and weft

Is less akin to blood
In her unusual rivulets

Underneath riveted drifts
Within my skin and my bones,

Nor like molten gold
Or anything else so brightly bold,

But doubtlessly a
Thick congealing

Tarry albumen
Under my night-auk’s

Starless eye and ceiling
I am constantly reeling

In a reckoning disguise,
And arctic cold.

Sometimes I feel as though
Life is a test without answers.

Sometimes I feel my road
Is routed through converging disasters.

My body brittle as a twig
Drifting away from life’s fine flourishing,

Away from glittering citadels of my truth
Down a bruising river,

And when they find my floating form
Who will be my forgiver?

Pilgrim

In these Ages of Self
Sandstone houses of Selflessness
Are penury to this Age of Wealth;

We no more brewed an ego
On a pilgrimage to Portofino,
Nor hosted our ego’s health.

Yet we are shelterless now,
Palms open to the same rains
Which once drowned out

Our fathers in the filling fields.
Transubstantiation’s efforts
Require more than a little help.