Haze Loop

Mist ascends in morning's haze

as dreamers dare to dowse their daze,

but vapour's hold

can only fold

underneath the burning rays.

Underneath the burning bright

the goldfinch tells of her delight,

her feathered flow

is soft and slow

singing in the midst of flight.

Singing in the mid of day

the goldfinches have flown away

so too has gone

the sun who shone;

mist ascends in renewed haze.

A September's Sunday by the Sea

Light catches all that comes out to greet it;

glints glittering in pebbled hills

glints glittering in the ocean's wafered waves,

glints glittering in Sunday's satisfied eyes.

Sounds orchestrate for those who hear its silent cacophony;

a crash of footsteps, uneven yet definitive,

a crash of waves, constant and icy,

a call for company, cold and unconvincing.

The breeze joins in, droning docile;

moving the flickering corner of this page,

moving overhead, a plane's engine sings and a father's finger

moving, pointing duly to the sky for his squinting son to see.

A cloud of delicate birds mould into forms,

migrating south, grasping the warmth with their wings

and faintly heard behind is the constant hum of traffic,

Sunday drivers strolling coastal roads to coastal towns.

All is quiet and peaceful

if I let the surroundings relax my mind.

All is noisy and vibrant

if I let the surroundings focus my mind.

All is beautiful.

Contrasted Cliffs

In layers of scratches and incisions

your form evolves along the bumps and bends,

shaped by passing time and man's decisions

where sturdy lives may meet their crumbling ends.

But amongst the chalk, granite and the sand

there is something of beauty to be found,

for throughout the differences of the land

it's all anchored by the same common ground.

So let age not define your sense of self

nor be it the colour you have been formed,

you are not your possessions or your wealth

but sculpted by the beliefs you have formed.

Do not discriminate texture or tone

but see beauty in all kinds of stone.

#Sunsets

Sunset in a mirror
rusting into memory
of a day gone by.

Aflame

Creases line their lears

across lamp-lit halls.

Amongst my flickering fears

its stony face falls.

It's crevices crossed

and my caution cast.

They bare their moulded teeth, mossed,

at my own, aghast.

Slipping to their soles

in pools filled with oil,

I find my heart full of holes,

pockets filed with soil.

Getting to my knees

it dowses my graze.

Gasoline caught in the breeze

burning out my daze.

Lost in the Lunar Lit Licks

Salt water seeps and spreads

through sepia sheets,

an owner caught unaware

by the changing tides

of the lunar sea

in a midnight stroll;

all light left those words

and meaning shattered

by shingles shunted

towards the shore.

The pale reflection leers

her flickering facade

as though luring the owner

into her sinewed grasp;

lecanscopy and the hypnotic

displacement of pebbles

working in synergy;

still he can't retrieve

those words he wrote

with an assured pen;

the night is ephemeral

but its damage holds eternal.

Night Tides

Opalescent aura; the phantom that falls

between my blinds and slips beneath

my duvet onto the folds of my sheets -

my glance and hers meet

at the still and silent sea,

a refracted halcyon, milky hue.

I turn over to you, tight eyed, smiling

at the sentiments that stirred me

from my sleep and how

that silver soul sensed

the soft tides in the waves of my heart.

The Widow

Susurrus summons of the solemned sea

welcomingly waves, beckoning me.

I know not her wish

or where I will wash,

but only in her clutch will I feel free.

She's said to be the mother who gave life

but I see the weeping of a widowed wife.

She groans in her grief

to her submerged reef,

her only relief a jagged rock's knife.

I notice that she would not mourn for me

in her desperation for company.

Yet I let her grip;

I let the tide rip,

and she swallows me whole so hungrily.

Wren

A wren springs

from his seeded seat

on to the branchlet,

which wobbles

 from his slight weight.

A wren flutters

his tiny panicked wings,

plummeting to the floor

in stuttering glide

before flying away.

It strikes me how even

the most fragile birds

make errors of judgement.

It strikes me how only humans

let pride prevent us from moving on.

We are the ones who forgot how to fly away.

Wisp in Wonder

The wisp of smoke

dances towards the sky,

reaching from your dying cigarette

that litters your light fingertips

buring into the overcast troposphere,

resigned to the thickening fate

that the once dainty effluvium has.

I wonder if it is envious

of the smoke that is reserved

to be graced by the touch

of your full, fleshy lips

exhaled softly into the overcast troposphere,

dancing elegantly into the dense sky

savouring its farewell kiss.

I realise that whether by lips or fingertips

the smoke's time in your presence

is ephemeral and all smoke

must eventually join the clouds;

if I was that blissfully endowed smoke

my last action would be to hover

a halo around the crown of your hallowed head.

Tree Cover Lover's Delight

Have you ever listened to nature?
Not sat in silence, daydreaming.
Not walking through, admiring.
Not distracted by handheld technology.
I mean really listened attentively.
It strikes me how harmonic it is,
the rise and fall; the unison and the grace.
Carefully planned out and ordered yet wildly unpredictable.
People worry about getting lost.
About straying too far from the path and finding themselves
somewhere where they are unfamiliar.
They are already lost; so far gone along
the path of bright lights
that the yhave forgotten where they want to go.

Nature and I have a meeting room
where we can converse uninterrupted.
She is compassionate to my industrial
self-distruction
and smogginess of mechaincal mind
and so I am careful to do my part
to ensure she doesnt befall the same fate.

I met her this week but I turned up late.

Words in the Breeze

Decisions made

in the tree covered shade

where lovers ease

to words

that just the breeze

had heard.

An hour's slept;

the sun has leapt

through the cracks

to peer

where the ray still lacks

but near...

The Estranged Daughter

Less of a bridge over troubled water

but rotten crumbling boards and fraying ropes 

Mother Earth is estranged from her daughter

and the Father had abandoned all hopes.

So the child is left in the hands of thieves

blind to ill intentions of company kept,

for those with duty of care takes and leaves

the Father saw this and from afar wept

But he did not step in to intervene 

instead letting his child make her mistakes;

such was his effort to remain unseen

that he even missed visitation dates.

Daddy please return, and mend the bridge

I want to believe that you do still care

Daddy; a girl's on her knees making a wish

I need to believe that you could be there.

Sunset and Secrets

A splintered sunset in salmon skies

stuck in my paws which are rubbing my eyes.

Obfuscating bark parts to reveal

the dark of the woods til the next dawn will rise.

For now, owls perch on branches of teal,

sharing the secrets that night will conceal.

The morning fire kindles the smouldering shade

whilst phantom embers attempt to appeal.

And so in the day, more secrets are made

by that one star who refuses to fade,

yet the day also swears that he will not tell

as the trees protect light with their palisade.

And so time went in a coherent spell,

until the secrets spilt and the first tree fell.

Infected Light

Fragmented amber light

regurgitated by the lout loitered lamps

sprinkles down through the frame

of a plastic window

[off -white and cold;

yet retaining no cooling comfort]

and brittle leafs, tired and defecated

by the smoggy air.

The light spills up to the sky

and rebounds through the shook-up Earth

- as if a glitter globe -

covering any mystique that celestial sphere could draw

so that even stars and the moon

are just emergency exit lights

of a broken bed-sit.

Halogen Engines

The sun lay comatose on the sky's veranda, a hollow halogen for those tethered to its pull.

Soft spring songs swim through breeze like schools of fish drawn to the odor of fresh mulch.

The distant mower cuts a carpet of multifarious grass atop a pampered dirt, 

asking the Earth of its faculty, cacophonous and coughing gasoline. 

A seething and still gravel road carves through the surface of the crust, 

imparting a passageway to an island

swallowed on each side by efficient and mass distributed cathedrals of carpentry,

drafted by architects and subsumed by engineers. 

The buzzing industry of the mower has given way,

the only energy remaining is fluted by the symphony of blue jays and house finch.

Hush

The creek ran lucid, lacerating the hollow of its flesh so that its bones exposed limestone. 

Tree roots reached to the stream, emerald moss gripped, and the water ran whispering.

Then the cry of the red kite.

The clearing stopped.

And all was quiet.

As Yet Unnamed

A summer day, whose heat belied

its overshadowed sky, enveloped in a

variegated green rolling from one

landscape to the next,

and in a madified mound framed

the moment where I divined 

that you and I - we -

are a pair.

So dead and dry those lifeless blades

of grass, when compared to that of your

exposed shoulder,

that the torn grass could scarce

forbid our youthful hearts to know

that our neanic bond

outshadowed

natures dearth.

Which severed stump?

Which wooly verge could ever demean the joys of Venus' domain.

That day I could taste the droplets

of your name on my lips, as I

exhaled; its wide-mouthed prefix

swam towards my joining lips

pushing together in unison

before lengthy sigh

had my tongue crashing

against the roof of my mouth,

stretching out the last sound,

impossibly as it was not to smile in ecstasy.

"Begin again!", I heard

your heart skip a beat. When whispered

your three syllables recall

bleak days when no-one had sounded them at all.

The hearts of men, of women,

of beasts and birds

cannot survive bereft of loving words.

[Nice Day]

A bed of grass amid

springtimes tender flowers

kissed by pleasing showers.

Jewelled in dew they hid.

The soil had held their shape.

Blue canvas stitched a roof

The grass still blonde in youth

softly framed her nape.

Meandered

A word is worth a thousand pictures

if carved in a knot of magnolia bark

by covalent lovers 'midst the mist

of fog-less farts from man's machines;

and foxes wield mechanisms of defense

in unveiled wooly sports-coats worn

by and by the prophet in shattered carafes 

polished into a frozen lake of mercury;

and Ribble slides to and fro, catching gnats,

sprouting seedless sunflower tender-loins

torn away from sow-less lantern skies

obscuring the pupil black curtain far behind;

and when a blind man trips on fingered feet

dampened in salty dew and mucous fun,

he sees that silence makes those who weep

hear the sobs from echoes' rain-dropped keys

up onto the eminent brows 'n' ridge furrowed furred:

a promontory for truck-driving fleets of crippled use

to warehouses bustling with oily nails and meat;

and vowels tesselate to Persian patterns

seamlessly collected by some suspecting eyes

surprised mid surpluses of decanted meaning

that floats on by like fiery birthday blimps

manned by a trillion cells named Giuseppe;

but what factory made the first factory?

and whose name formed itself first?

by the letter-less alphabet comprised of grunts?

These questions sit ashamed in the corner

wearing still a pointed cap quoting "dunce;"

and so the shell with the infected pistachio nut

cracks open inexplicably and decides

to grow into a salamander's spot–a maze–

constructed by invisible web-coasts called mind.