Futility No.2

To deny a drought, or climate end,
Ask how they kept their courses green,
Golfers, jockeys and those ascending
Unseen dukeries and queens
En route to monasteries,
Palaces and temples.
A river is not for mending.

I tried turning my mind upside down
And squeezing from this melancholic brain
Just like towels in a turbid
Samian stream
Or a memory of lemons
From a dry, unholy plain;
Yet the unfurnished words in my urn
Became vapour, became sky
And therefore irreverant.

Nonchalant gods
Dropped lapis lazuli
Into that cracked amphora
Not long after I died.

My quest remains
For something
That did not exist.

How futile.
How endless.

The Waking

You’ve been making yourself sick again.
Patronymic yellow, a man’s best friend;
I have this great distaste for the ages
And I shall bellow from my aberrant soul
A rail against all travails, your spume

And your foam, his wife and the world;
Her maiden voyage, champagne soaked,
Dried up rivers, bare oxbows;
For easy forsaking abundance is made –
Old time lore, there she blows.

You pushed that dire emetic back in
From where it did flow;
Absolved the sins in doing so,
Excesses of the long-since dead
On to our living transposed.

Sleep only ever satisfies the waking.

Strikes

Pripyat

Oberon

The Blues

Wreaking

I hope my deadening soul
Wreaks havoc on them all,
I wrote then to my shogun.

He replied, may I surmise
That life is for the living?
I disputed his wisdom,
And held my breath in my hands,
And spoke alone without reply
That I am unforgiving.

My forehead is a wintry beach;
Slower than a ghost proposed,
Boat-bells sombre in the fleet.

When battalions disembark nearby,
Enfranchised and embittered,
They won’t disturb the dreaming folk
While scarring Hope with scissors.

A single cuttlefish appeared in blue,
I stared into her inky liver,
Then just as sharply darted by,
Bloodied and barely delivered.

Valedictions

Valedictions for you,
We do not accede;
Valedictions for you,
Nor do we recede;

None superseded,
None to subscribe,
No more spun your wool
For pulling our eyes;

No souls contorting
For far-faulted causes,
No more conforming
Under horse-trammeled forces.

Valedictions for you,
No longer we thrive,
Only lessons unlearned
For liars survived.

Causeway

Am I the cause
Of all bad things

I couldn’t help
But wondering;

Am I the way
Beneath the sea

Busload crowds
Come walk on me;

Pilgrims reaching
Chapel’s shore,

See me drown
To bed once more.

Along A Weir-side Way

How slow the snake uncoiling
On weird cerebral lawns,
Grips those moles now grieving
And how the wagtail mourns;
Feet of gruesome coots are blue,
Uprooted and reborn.

His weir-side way gave us today –
Barbed our briar impressions;
His river’s course, unnatural,
Fallacies abounding wherever
Escapes briefly water or weather.
Too late the discourse and the dawn;
Too late misplaced starlings imitate
A feather’s fate forlorn.

A garden in his stomach then,
His bowels behold the bones:
Where self-conceited owls will plot
Their death, I walk the weir alone.