Green of Greece

Emerging

2011-11-17T21:11:00.000-08:00

What labyrinthine caves of flesh and blood
lead to the power of that female smile,
a bow that only callow youth can wield
on bloody battle fields of life and love.

The timid glance but growing confidence
of secret joys projected from within
fall suddenly like blossoms in the spring
raining down upon unsuspecting hearts.

Keen arrows pierce the ageing predator
and sting alive forgotten memories
of love stumbling helpless among the thorns
following then fleeing the longed for prey.

The mask of beauty briefly donned and then
replaced by irresistible desires,
the mouth pulled down with each sore panting breath
and urgent cries of love’s insistent song

Riding on the breeze the new butterfly
flashes ephemeral beauty on the world
knowing nothing of its brief span of life
it seeks out the perfumed path of its fate.

And so the woman child smiles at the world
not knowing the force of her fateful glance
so careless of the fires she may ignite
in sun parched hearts it falls across by chance.

The Style

2011-11-13T22:01:00.000-08:00

A strictness in your soul that was your style
would not allow curvaceous joys to show,
although the jasmine thighs of Josephine
unlocked your dancing feet and a made you smile.

Slowly, with grim intent, your world had formed
in solitude, the storms of war shut out,
where nature’s wayward forms were brought in line
with cubic lore and space that was deformed.

In Paris, abstraction was all the rage,
the cafés blazing with artistic thought,
and rhythmic beats of Jazz upon the stage
where Louis blew and sang through strong, white teeth.

In La Rue du Départ, beneath the moon
wind precisely the tension on the spring,
place a shiny disk on the gramophone,
lie down and listen to your angels sing.

The horizon bore down upon the sea
seen through vertical lines of worn out piers,
half remembered from childhood’s waking dream,
distilled with tears to a philosophy.

Where shall they lie upon the pristine plane,
the horizontals and the verticals,
the width of every black, defining line
a question fit to drive a man insane.

Poverty, frugality, lack of success,
a daily blight upon the iron will,
transformed by habit and that careful dress
the aesthete forced his life into Der Stijl.

The list of friends grew long with loneliness
so neatly written down in books of notes,
a careful piling up of signs and words
undistinguished by woman’s fond caress.

The atelier long brought to order,
a work of art and tight conformity,
abandoned as Huns massed on the border
packed up, a refugee upon the sea.

Heavenly sight of towers seen through the mist,
safe haven for those who love the height
of vibrant streets arranged upon a grid
with neon lights and dancing through the night.

Refreshed by friendship and a studio
the black lines gave way to flowing yellow
bands of red and blue, like a radio
blaring visions of songs he loved and knew.

Now, at journey’s end, the culmination
of his art passed on the torch of freedom
to a younger nation of hopes and dreams
a keen vision more complex than it seems.

The Feast of Souls

2011-10-29T18:25:00.000-07:00

The waning sun brings on the month of blood
when shadows of the past collect in pools
of memory, where lost loved ones cluster
clamouring for their share of living warmth,
clustered at the door jamb or window pane.

Running home, the children flee the grey cloak
of year’s eventide, when the black sow comes,
snuffling and squealing from each bush or tree,
learning the meaning of that mortal fear
that lies pushed out of sight by young and old.

Once, fishermen knelt in the flooding tide
and made offerings of ale to Poseidon,
master of the storm whose season had come,
praying for a fruitful catch in the year
just begun, and protection from the sea.

But fire and merriment outdid their fears
as chiefs and local kings gathered to drink
and feast the fateful evening to its end,
and herald the coming of the new year,
when bonfires would blaze briefly on the hills.

Candles, those symbols of the soul, flared bright
as processions of the faithful passed by
the windows of the fearful safe inside,
but soon devils came knocking on the door
demanding payment of cakes or sweetmeats.

The fear of death now generally allayed,
we sit content before our blazing screens,
quite unafraid of the year's dark season,
happy remembering ancestral fears
as entertainment and the joy of youth,
yet knowing that the month of blood will come.

The Rocket’s Red Glare

2011-07-02T20:42:00.000-07:00

Dr Norbert Martensen looked up at the faded copy of the periodic table pinned to the corkboard in his study. It had once adorned his bedroom wall when, as a struggling young chemist, he worked his way through college in the early sixties. The world had seemed simpler then, perhaps because the Cold War had stiffened the sinews of the nation into it’s preferred attitude of striving against a powerful adversary and toiling assiduously to create a better world.

He had been in the vanguard of the post war scientific and technological revolution, despising the sideshow of sex, drugs and rock and roll. His indulgence hadn’t extended beyond some furtive gropings with his wife to be, albeit to the civilised beat of the Modern Jazz Quartet. He had been a clean cut, reliable young man, dressed in polo necked sweater, crepe soled shoes and the kind of dark rimmed glasses worn by Nixon’s German advisor. A Nobel Prize had not been beyond all hope then.
Measured by the conservative yardsticks of business and government, Norbert’s life had been a success. Materially he was quite well off, even in early retirement, though his health was none too good. Alone now, childless, his wife dead three years in the fall, he went over in his mind what he had to do.

Uneasy with unemployment, following his forced redundancy from the secret laboratories of the Department of Defence, he had sought work with the State Government. Despite his impressive credentials, he could only get a part-time job as a chemical safety inspector. He didn’t care about the low pay and was happy enough to get out of the house for a few hours each week, ensuring that his fellow citizens were not being poisoned or blown up by the industrial hazards that threaten the inhabitants of any big city.

The redundancy had interrupted his research, which was abandoned as unfruitful after he left, his two assistants being redeployed to more relevant work elsewhere. Over the years, his interests had gradually moved from inorganic chemistry to the chemistry of the brain.
The secrets of controlling human beings (whether criminals, foreign armies or the unemployed) lay there.

During the Vietnam War, he had worked at Monsanto, but was soon assigned permanently to the DoD. He had become deeply involved with herbicidal and ant-personnel agents, particularly Agent Orange. His interest in biochemistry arose from his work trying to prove that dioxin was not harmful to humans. This question assumed increasing importance when claims were made that it was responsible for deformities in the children of US war veterans as well as countless children in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Everyone knew by now that the effects were catastrophic, but official lies had to be maintained to minimise the cost to the taxpayer and preserve the image of a humane Government.
Norbert knew, from his own research with veterans and field trips to Cambodia and Vietnam, the deadly rains of Agent Orange had permanently damaged the genes of the victims. Succeeding generations without end would suffer horrible deformities with no hope of medical aid or compensation. A third of Vietnam and huge areas of Cambodia had been sprayed and dumps of Agent Orange were still seeping into village water supplies, carrying on the deadly war long after the Americans invaders had been hurled ignominiously into the South China Sea.

He could not simply absolve himself from all this, even though he had been completely innocent of any deadly intent at the time. He had just been one man in a vast network of organisations, dedicated to protecting American interests and keeping the Communist menace at bay. It was impossible to wage wars without victims and wars were often unavoidable if enemies were intent on doing America harm.

His career had provided a prosperous life and a good pension but he was willing to testify
on behalf of US Veterans or the Vietnamese victims if it would redress the awful harm that had been done. The chemical companies had made some small restitution but the Government was largely immune from prosecution. He suspected it was his willingness to testify against the authorities that had hastened his redundancy.

Something more effective than admission of guilt and compensation was required. Something that would not only inflict retribution on the agencies concerned but would prevent a future recurrence of such tragedies. His own penance would take the form of altruistic revenge, even at the risk of imprisonment for life.

After his wife’s death, he had converted the back of the house into a makeshift laboratory. There were experiments he dare not conduct at the Department’s labs. He had worked on human subjects there, lifers from military and civilian jails. The effects of chemical and biological agents on combatants required such sacrifices of otherwise useless lives. He had become fascinated with the simpler behaviour of chimpanzees, which had also been used for military experiments.

He could not afford to acquire such rare animals for his own lab but had to be content with their brains, after they had died in the Government Lab. He had been fortunate enough to get hold of the brains of a couple of bonobo, a rare protected species only recently discovered. He had become fascinated why the behaviour of the bonobo differed so markedly from its human cousins and that of Pan Satyrus, the common chimpanzee.

The bonobo were cooperative and highly socialised but Pan Satyrus was highly aggressive, the males often murdering the offspring of their rivals. This behaviour might be a learned cultural pattern but was more likely to be the result of different brain chemistry. After years of work and considerable expense, Norbert found there was a difference in the chemical balance of the brains and, surprisingly, had been able to demonstrate his theory.

He had managed to synthesise a pink bromine-like liquid, which vapourised around fifteen degrees Celsius. When exposed to the gas his rats had behaved like the bonobo, but to an extreme degree. They copulated in a frenzy without regard to gender until they became too exhausted to continue. After a short rest, they resumed until death ensued. The remarkable thing was, that a single exposure seemed to cause a permanent change to the rats’ brains a fact confirmed by post mortem examination.
Like any good investigator, Norbert sought an antidote to the poison he had created. This turned out to be a similar, greenish yellow liquid, produced by swapping a phosphorus atom for nitrogen. It switched off the effects of the love drug all right, but induced a deadly aggression instead. The cage was soon strewn with dead and dying bodies as internecine war between the rats broke out. The behaviour of the bonobo and the common chimpanzee had been explained.

The plan had occurred to him by accident. He had been assigned to check the safety of the municipal firework display on New Year’s Eve. It had been a simple matter for him to read up on the regulations and apply the safety rules in the field. The display had gone off without a hitch and he had been confirmed as a reliable member of the Safety Directorate.

Most of his time on the job was taken up with routine testing of effluent and chasing up illegal dumping of chemical wastes. June turned into July and he was assigned the task of policing the massive firework display that was to be installed along Constitutional Avenue and other venues in the Capital. It was the President’s second term and no expense had been spared to mark the occasion with a spectacular display.

After the first display, he had taken an interest in the construction of fireworks and the chemicals used to produce the variety of effects, particularly the shells and their many kinds of payloads. There were palms, which curved downwards like the tree, rings of stars, roundels of maroons, chrysanthemums and many more. It was a lot of fun making prototypes and testing them along the quieter reaches of the Potomac. He got caught once, but his official inspector’s pass got him out of trouble.

Two big shells sat on the bench in the garage, ready to load into the blue panel van. He had bought professional fireworks, replacing the payloads with glass vials containing the pink and yellow liquids. He’d made some careful calculations to insure the vials would fracture at the right height. The prevailing wind would be blowing from the basin, with any luck and would carry the gas to its target.

When darkness fell, he suffered a mixture of excitement and terror. He was a man of science, not a man of action. He procrastinated over a cup of coffee before going down to the garage and loading the shells into the back of the van. He drove to his chosen site, south of the Ellipse, and parked the van. When he got out, he saw the operators were already busy checking their racks and testing the wires that communicated with fire control. They waved their acknowledgment that he was on the job and let him get on with his cursory inspection. It was a simple matter to unwire the big cylinders he had identified on the display plan provided by the Directorate and substitute his own modified shells. After he had finished inspecting the rest of the network of racks and fixed displays

He found the supervisor and issued a safety certificate. The rest was in the hands of the gods so he went home to watch the display on TV. He settled down with a beer and activated the remote. Most channels were showing parades from all round the nation. After a few more beers the enormity of his action Dawned on him, he felt depressed and on tenterhooks. He wondered, perhaps hoped, that it would fail and that the shells would explode harmlessly. Even if it did work, the presidential party might not come outside to watch the display. He wasn’t too worried about this. The cameras were waiting on the White House lawn and the lure of publicity was more than political blood could stand.

He sat through endless parades, beamed to his lounge from all over the nation; marching bands, miles of flags, twirling batons and the shapely thighs from Americas finest young womanhood. At last, the studio cut to Washington and dwelt lovingly on the national icons of the capital. The commentator filled in while the telephoto lenses tried to pick up the slightest movement behind the elegant windows of the White House.

The firework display began and the French doors opened to reveal a couple of sharply dressed goons. When they thought the coast was clear, they stood aside for the presidential party to emerge. The President came out first, followed by his wife and family. The dog was not with them presumably it was being kept away from the noise of the fireworks. The Secretary of State followed, then the Secretary of Defence, The Chiefs of Staff, The Security adviser and many more. The expensive dresses of the women folk made a fine display against the dark suits of the men. They chatted gracefully to each other, sipped champagne and looked dutifully into the sky. After a few massive bursts of light, their reserve soon turned into childish delight.

For what seemed like hours, the sky was torn asunder by an accelerating holocaust of sound and light, a truly grand finale to the glorious Fourth and tribute to the pyrotechnician’s art.
The display drew to its climax with the big maroons going off with a terrifying noise, causing some of the guests to duck involuntarily for cover. The penultimate shell was Quiet by comparison and was a bit of a damp squib, but the cloud of pink gas descended on the company as planned. Nothing much happened and some of the party turned to leave, coughing discretely as the gas tickled their throats. Some official seemed to be apologising to the President but he broke off suddenly to remove his trousers.

Before the G-Men could find anything to shoot at, they lost interest in killing and made straight for the nearest animal in skirts. Some guests seemed unaffected at first but it wasn’t long before the lawn was crawling with half naked bodies, grappling with each other in the quest for instant relief. Some fell back momentarily satisfied but were impelled to hurl themselves back into the fray. The cameramen abandoned their posts to join in but the studio soon cut the feed and struggled to explain what their viewers had just witnessed. No-one watching TV saw the final shell explode. There were only a few pathetic survivors still alive when the security forces arrived to clean up the mess, who either flung their arms round their rescuers or tried to murder them with tooth and nail.

The Mystery Unexplained

2011-06-21T19:23:00.000-07:00

The one who never sleeps can never wake
but must forever wait for the dreamer
to pull down a bright cloud of consciousness
into the deep void of insensate dread,
and dream of the conductor of lost souls,
that dark psychopomp, Ibis headed god
or swift messenger, flying from the heights
into the abyss of eternal sleep.

Unborn he rules alone, between all that
lies above him and all that lies below,
but she, pregnant with possibility,
squats ubiquitous, ready to conceive
from every seed that falls from weeping moon
or virile sun into her moist darkness.
No monster is too foul to call her own
or goddess too fair to rival her power.

Two conjoined, but forever separate,
begat a third, unrivalled in beauty
and fecundity, from their roiling seas,
to make substantial all the forms of life,
but only in the darkness of their dream,
for the garden of the goddess is lost,
spinning in the void, bounded and finite
among the fiery hells of burning stars.

Desiring to be her consort the first
becomes the fourth, ruler of her domain,
Emperor and lawgiver, unrivalled
among her creatures that think themselves real,
but remain expelled from the true darkness
of unbeing, caught in the delusion
of the cubic throne and bound to obey
the arbitrary rules rules of time and space.

Written in the Sands

2011-05-05T20:21:00.000-07:00

In imitating God’s long winded hand
the sinuous Quranic script takes wind
on sand as paradigm for truth and wit:
but life’s impermanence embedded there
leaves hoped for heavens nowhere to be found.

Those born into the faith must long in vain
for lost oases with cool waving palms,
displaced by rearing towers of steel and glass
thrown up by potentates grown fat with oil,
and foreign slaves who toil within their thrall.

One son born into this oppressive clan
was dutiful in studies and devout
but, while fortunate in wealth and power,
dissented in his heart and drifted far
from his family’s involvement with the west.

His world of minarets and ritual
now left for barren wastes of rock and sand,
low murmuring of women by water
in cool courtyards of decorated tile
abandoned for coarse cloth and jogging mules.

The bad breath and crooked smiles of his men,
dark eyes gleaming by the fire with God’s wrath,
revealing burning coals of hate within,
fed by left slanted verses, memorised
in boyhood and digested with each bow.

Now, the mountains rise, forbidding of life,
demonstrating the smallness of man’s dreams
and his pitiful span of life and hope,
brief shelter from Satan’s all seeing eyes
until the bane of aery fires rains down.

The only path between two living hells:
the gleaming luxury of worldly wealth,
or some soulless toil within Satan’s mills
was to restore the twin temples of God
in the land of his nurture and his birth.

But first, tear down the twin towers of Satan,
they said, with rising fervour round their fires,
use your wealth and influence with men
to capture and guide his soaring eagles
and dash them burning into his proud den.

And so God’s will came to pass, as it must,
mysterious in consequence, by stealth
the fires of Hell rose up from out the dust
and ravaged all the lands of faithful men
in Mammon’s name and lust for power and wealth.

Wraith like and hollow eyed the Prophet’s man
wandered in barren lands, beset by pain
and doubt, loved by some reviled by many,
knowing the ever testing hand of God
would lead him at last to His paradise.

Meanwhile, a sojourn in some doleful place,
would have to do while further plans were made
to rouse the world from sinful slumbering
and false enjoyment of a failing world,
mired in material faith and godless strife.

Such vain thoughts of glory were soon cut short,
by treachery and bureaucratic thought,
when Satan’s dogs did their master’s bidding,
intruding on his brief domestic bliss
administered the fruits of Judas’ kiss.

Now the right hand of God writes on the waves
another windy tale of hate and death,
and far beneath the pale faced Prophet lies,
perhaps dreaming of a better life, lived
again, but next time not so much in vain.

The Wings of Truth

2011-02-18T19:32:00.000-08:00

The child’s eye lights upon a dragonfly,
following the play of light and shadow
along the wayward, darting path of life’s
ephemeral and urgent search for joy.

Tiny prey swarm among the swaying reeds,
dancing above the gently flowing stream,
but the one who sees without yet knowing
lies naked on the pure white river sand.

Only a myopic microcosm
has opened here, a perfect realm balanced
upon the gleaming wings of summer’s world,
crowned by yellow Iris and celandine.

Below, the dancing stickleback flashes
fire and gleams, hoping to lure his drab mate
into a fishy nest of love and dreams,
beneath two tall shadows in human form.

The day wears away into memory
a lost tapestry wrought with the Devil’s
Needle, flashing bright on the wings of truth,
a single joy among the world’s false fruits.

Ghost Train

2011-02-16T15:19:00.000-08:00

The night is dark and I am small
but tall enough to stand
next to my father’s case,
battered leather, brown,
in the crowded corridor.

My mother is sitting down,
in fur trimmed hat,
on matriarchal luggage,
grey imitation crocodile,
its belly pregnant with camisoles,
sponge bags and old towels.

My childish world that day
a swaying cacophony
of piled up kit bags
and bracing legs,
wearing khaki or navy blue
and the Few
displaying stripes or wings,
Brylcreme boys in lighter hue.

Outside the window,
cinders spark and flash
with that funny smell
of burning coke and ash
that invokes the sound and fury of
Behemoth striding through the night,
on a working holiday from Hell.

In compartment and corridor
the dolorous air is full of smoke:
the stench of Woodbines,
Players and Craven-A combines
with the rank perspiration
of other ranks,
seeping from serge uniforms
and woollen socks,
brown or grey,
darned in desperation
by yearning wives,
inured to loss and separation,
ground down by force of habit
and frustration,
turning factory wheels
and keeping home fires bright.

The night is warm:
the window’s leather tongue
lolls out long, swaying,
buttoned down for ventilation,
a breath of air refreshing
the Victorian dream,
preserved for each new generation
of travellers in the age of steam.

Nose pressed to the window,
I see the repeating shadows
of the latticed bridges, black
telegraph poles and trees;
red and green eyes burning,
signals raised and lowered by
invisible hands and ties pulling levers
in windowed boxes along the track.

On the horizon Bessemers roar,
licking at the purple sky;
flaming desperation of a nation
facing sure defeat in war
or, maybe, the elation
of unexpected victory.

Somewhere overhead,
the Plough turns the celestial sod
about the ill-lit maypole,
a vacant carousel
without its rider god.

In glimmering cities light fingers
reach out in vain,
feeling for the throbbing aeroplane,
bearing incendiaries to rain
down fire on the Co-Op
courtesy of Heinkel
or Messers Smith and Co,
whistling into mean streets below,
and allotments (to maim
the odd marrow or geranium)
where stirrup pumps and red buckets
stand ready to dump cold water
on German ire and magnesium.

Underfoot the floor bucks and clacks
to the unwritten song of the railway tracks.
Sleeping heads loll and jerk,
Pontoon players brag and smirk,
knee to knee over yesterday’s daily rag,
dusted with droppings from a drooping fag.

Doors slide open and slam,
bodies squeeze and cram
in urgent procession
to the lavatory pan
or distant dining car.

A woman stoops and spits
into her handkerchief and,
with a toil worn hand,
wipes away the smutty smears,
puffed out from iron lungs by straining gears
and blown through the window where I stand.

On towards the North
the iron charivari rides,
shattering the silence of the night,
through England’s craggy spine
and lonely valleys striding forth
along the trans-Pennine line,
into the grey glimmer of first light.

From battered Crewe to Manchester,
Wigan, Huddersfield and Bradford,
the LMS express drags its motley load
into the industrial fields of grimy Leeds
where barrage balloons hang out,
hawsers dangling overhead,
angling nightly for a German scout.

Slowing before the destination,
we wait while the lights are red.
Ghostly figures loiter in the siding
beneath the curving iron shed
or lurk within the murky station,
shunting coal tenders up ahead.

Within the train, sleepers wake,
yawning, stretching, standing,
dragging luggage from the rack,
the weary throng prepares to disembark.

Couplings jerk and clang
and with a last triumphant shriek
and bang the monster comes to rest,
disgorging smoke and oily reek.

Windows crash down:
weary arms reach out,
dangling hands grope
for brass handles;
doors fly open and idly swing,
releasing the damned
from their mobile purgatory
into the Yorkshire morning.

Sixty years after, in my brain,
the travelling ghosts alight again
from their journey into night.
But none remain to haunt me now,

lost riders on that ghostly train.

In the Darkness Reconciled

2010-11-07T23:40:00.000-08:00

Born of water, the first element known
to the child is air, in that choking gasp:
earth soon becomes an irresistible
attraction, to mankind as crawling worm.

Fire appears later, as candle or coal,
Quite distinct from the domineering Sun,
it beckons with its warm and flickering light,
but repels the touch with a stab of pain.

The sudden flaring of the pink match-head
informs the child that hidden magic lies
in serried ranks within a brittle box,
out of reach, hidden from tiny fingers.

In October, mysterious work begins:
adults and older children in the know
begin to pile up wood into a cone,
on a dark spot now overgrown with weeds.

A guy is made, from old clothes stuffed with straw,
ready to be hoisted onto the pile,
but kept safe out sight until the time
of sacrifice and celebrating flame.

The why of mock death is never explained,
except as remembrance of dire treason,
but not as the fear of creeping darkness
that must be dispelled by the bonfire’s flames.

The loveliest mystery is left till last,
when the child discovers a pretty box,
all decorated with peculiar signs
whose meaning is a different kind of light.

Within lie the enchanted forms of fire,
each safe inside a coloured tube or cone,
ready to be released from their prison,
ignited by a salted twist of blue.

Weeks of agonised anticipation
pass by, until the day and that dark hour
comes round when the madness of fire shall rule,
and shining eyes behold the Golden Rain,

the burst of the Volcano and Snow Storm,
the glittering sparklers and the rocket’s glare,
all too soon expended until the last
Demon or whimper of the final Squib.

Somewhere else, a Catherine Wheel goes awry
and fails to spin, and a Roman Candle
lets loose voluptuous loads of fiery balls,
among the bonfire’s sparks of falling rain.

The women add their sacred rituals too,
chestnuts and potatoes thrown in the ash
provide a late night supper for their young
and bring the revellers closer to the hearth.

So Hera and Hephaestus reconciled,
participate unseen within the smoke,
inflaming the minds of the very young
to seek beyond the confines of dull earth.

Summer's End

2010-10-30T18:06:00.002-07:00

The time of sunlight is now past
and shadows lengthen every day:
you knew the bounty could not last
and darkness would demand its pay.

Gather the fallen apples from the ground,
squeeze out the sunlight trapped within their flesh,
hang some from the rafters and dance around
and try to bite the few that still are fresh.

Sit at midnight before a glass
and hope the one that spills first blood
will come and roll you in the grass,
before the snow lies on the wood.

When the veil between the worlds has lifted
cut good joints from a newly slaughtered beast:
see spirits rise where the smoke has drifted
from bon-fires burning the bones of the feast.

In the greyness of the morning
pick from the ash your cooling stones,
read the future that is dawning
for young virgins or aged crones.

When the children come knocking at your door
treat them with kindness and bestow your gift:
teach them the meaning of November’s lore
before their springtime blossoms fall and drift.

The Sadness of the House

2010-10-17T18:27:00.000-07:00

The contents accumulate,

an aggregation of desires,

chosen with economic care

and young hopes of future ease,

only to be discarded

sacrificed on fashion’s altar.

TV tubes morph into flat screens,

their ganglia of wires are pruned

and the once loved leather lounges

are deemed unfashionable,

despised, they no longer please,

their kindly embraces now spurned.

Evidence is erased by paint

of youthful progeny and marks.

No toys litter the dust-free floor,

no boyfriends clamour at the door,

just the third dog waiting for

a visit by the family throng.

Juicers, used once, electric fans,

artificial flowers, pans,

huddle in the attic gloom,

their ruminations scarce disturbed

by thermal insulation

or new air-conditioning ducts.

Below, the beds no longer creak

with joint or lone furtive desire,

but still bear the weight of sleep

waiting their turn for renewal

of duvets or mattresses

or that last journey to the dump.

When the front door slams one last time,

the empty rooms can exhale

the final breath of occupation,

and listen to the world outside

for the next engine on the drive

to relieve the sadness of the house.

Another Light

2010-09-21T17:57:00.000-07:00

A single light flares in the night
and the blood singing in the ear
signifies that life persists,
in defiance of that fear
at the corner of the eye.

Why? is the question to avoid
when idle hands take up the pen
and dare to challenge empty time
to yet another duel
on the uncertainty of life.

While breath remains a sighing clock
the count down to the end goes on,
even in sleep, though unobserved,
the contrapuntal rhythms move
towards a deathly coda.

So, make an end, snuff out the light
And dream away another life.

From Whence He Came

2010-09-19T19:56:00.000-07:00

The desert in its parsimonious way
divides the dismal rocks by sandy seas:
the miserly sirocco drinks the dew
and locks each drop away from thirsty lips.

Bearded faces, like old myrrh wood resist,
patiently, abrasions of sand and time,
measured by crescent moon and pendant star,
wheeling above the plodding caravan.

Howling in caves, wind and man find their joy,
carving infinite forms in sand and clay.
Sun and moon no longer shall be worshipped,
replaced by spirit’s vast and empty cave.

The Prophet raves of salvation’s gardens,
filled with tinkling water and women’s sighs,
where men may pick fruit and caress houris
without fear of retribution or death.

This grand mirage, beyond the shimmering
horizon, promises the weary soul
eternal life in pleasurable bliss,
or burning Hell for disobedience.

So mused the trader in his lonely den,
bemused by voices roaring in his head,
scrying a bloody future for mankind
within the stony crystals of his mind.

Submission to the greatness of The One
was the only way to freedom and life
for wayward men, women, children and slaves,
all bound by devotion to His new god.

To convince the faithful, there must be Hell
and dreadful torments to persuade them all
to dwell in righteousness until that time
when angels would cast down the evil ones,

and place his followers in the gardens.
So dreamed the lonely scorpion, in his cave
or lying prone beneath the vault of stars,
until maddened to sting the world awake.

Limitless, the desert sands lay waiting
to receive the bloody spate of prophets.
Eyes widened by the poison from within,
the deluded djinn stared into the sun.
Blinded, he thought he was the chosen one,
but returned to darkness from whence he came.

In the Jar Remaining

2010-08-14T06:40:00.001-07:00

She opened her eyes and saw
the shining ones, hovering
above her expectantly,
each wrapped in glory, waiting
for the first of her kind to rise,
naked from the sodden Earth,
arms reaching out, breathing in
that first breath of birth.

Officiously the fiery smith made haste,
hands weaving mystic gestures in the air,
he added voice to tongue as well as taste,
bestowing strength and beauty with such care
as only his great art, beyond compare,
could bring her forth, live from the sticky clay,
astonishing his betters, by the way.

Once he had perfected her form and face,
two goddesses, the bright eyed and the fair,
adorned his new creation with such grace
that all who beheld her were in despair
as to what finer gifts they could prepare.
While the Graces crowned her hair with flowers
those left out devised more subtle powers.

She felt blood coursing in her veins
smelt sweet garlands in her hair,
bore the weight of golden chains,
knew the touch of finest cloth
upon her translucent skin;
gentler than the midnight moth,
a lurking evil not yet seen
in that perfect world.

On a golden crown the smith wrought creatures
from the sea, the land and the windy air,
like living things they adorned her features,
each sang with different voices, unaware
that their cold weight was more than she could bear.
To this art the messenger added guile
which formed upon her lips a winsome smile.

When all the gifts had been bestowed on her,
the high thunder said: “let her now be led
to the brother of he who must suffer
such eternal pain, never to be dead,
and in recompense for his theft she’ll wed
this worthy Titan, and take with her a gift,
this jar as dowry and my secret grift.”

She looked at the fateful jar:
fear and dread swelled in her heart
as she clutched it to her breast
and wandered through the wilderness
seeking the one named Afterthought,
but was rejected with mistrust
after travelling so far
to do what she must.

She cried, and beguiled Epimetheus
forgot his brother’s warning to take care
to spurn all gifts from high Olympian Zeus,
and soon was overcome by beauty’s snare.
Enjoying the woman, he did not care
for those who spin, measure or cut fate’s yarn,
or heed the pain of him chained to the skarn.

Left alone, she spied the jar
and felt curiosity:
what fine joys might it contain?
The lid was stiff, and furiously
she pulled hard to get it free.
When all terrors had fled the house,
with the lid safely shut again.
What else, she wondered, might remain?

Requiem

2010-07-28T17:21:00.001-07:00

Death passes daily, touching whom it may
but today I felt its shadow, coldly
falling on one too young to pass away.
What injustice, then, that the old boldly
dare to live on, breathing life's morning air,
so heedless of the lonely cares of youth,
hoarding ill gotten treasure, unaware
of your struggle with as yet unknown truth.

You, bravely, did not cast off innocence
but carried its bright banner as a sign,
to those ground down by life's intransigence,
that beauty casts out all that is malign.
Too late to tell you of your worth or say
in comfort that your life was not in vain,
Untimely, your escape into death, Lethe
but let these poor words signify my pain.

Love Parade

2010-07-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

Pan blew the pipes but Mammon called the tune,
In Duisburg, not Hamlin the love rats danced,
all eager for the press of flesh, entranced
by hopes of sweet joy in the afternoon,
driven on by the techno beat, they soon
faced concrete and steel as the flood advanced

Children of a hopeful generation,
yearning for a country where they could feel
the beating of freedom's drum, elation
not guilt borne by a defeated nation,
grandparents ground beneath the Nazi heel,
quick slaughter in the night by air force steel.

Parents, behind walls in separation,
long languished in guilty isolation,
even before they had torn down the wall
and Duisberg heard the Turk's Muezzin call,
the urge for peace and love was a siren
calling youth to cast off their country's pall.

Of earth, nourished by iron and bloody bind
where hot metal and war had formed the kind
of trading cities all along the Rhine,
rebuilt by sweat, slaked by Pilsner or wine,
from office space and steel mill, surged those blind
rustic passions that will not be confined.

Crammed like lemmings they found their way into
the concrete entrance and were forced to go,
between the walls of that fatal tunnel
crushed and ground together in a funnel
like discarded litter in a runnel,
until some climbed out but fell back below
and lay crushed beneath fear's stampeding flow.

Now guilt of a lesser kind has decreed
Charivari will no longer proceed
along the dull graffiti covered walls,
for fear joy unconfined again will breed
the dithyrambic madness that soon calls
for youth's sacrifice in Valhalla's halls.

Entropy Knows Best

2010-07-14T21:33:00.001-07:00

Fragments, shards and raindrops
shatter, splinter, fall,
a scattering destruction,
an ever present pall
covering the sad remains
of life's weakly constructed hall.

Mountains, rocks and pebbles
become sand between the toes,
and after that who knows, who knows
where the world will go,
as the wind blows and blows
away the fruits of accidental love.

The greedy eye informs the brain
of this infinite illusion,
and makes all things whole again,
which adds to the confusion
between the living and the dead,
between fulsome heart and empty head.

Build up, assemble and repair
all that was ever made
but the destroyer will not despair,
entropy, remaining unafraid,
will take it all apart again
until the last atom is mislaid.

Love and Time

2010-06-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

Love and time may not be commensurate:
the first, blazing fiercely, may die away
as plodding time rakes ashes from the grate,
leaving but few embers to warm the grey
remains of passion's quick declarations
of undying love, never yet made good,
but only transformed to emanations
of the soul's longing to be understood.
Where now the flames ascending into air,
soon cooled by volumes of the worlds cold breeze?
Love cannot be conditional on fair
faces, words, acts or that lustful disease
that makes us dance to natures merry tune
beneath summer's sun or cool winter's moon.

Night Visitors

2010-05-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

The starlit sky is dark with hungry hordes,
gliding as silent as the looming clouds.
How well you see the midnight gold gleaming
on my tree, a feast for furry bellies,
drooping clusters of fine orange berries.

How many crops have you destroyed tonight?
Peaches, bananas, figs and soft mangoes,
torn and shredded beneath the gibbous moon,
soon to be abandoned for some new food
or fancy of your predatory brood.

By day you hang out in chattering hordes,
inverted, viewing the world upside down,
or sleeping after fertilising trees
or sowing swathes of half digested seeds
regardless of whether they're crops or weeds.

Naturally, you've acquired a bad name,
accidentally scratching some poor humans,
infecting them with Lyssavirus or
a horse with the deadly Hendra strain or
worse, killing a vet after months of pain.

Despite these faults you are charming creatures,
perhaps even distant cousins of ours,
living a life of freedom and plenty,
we should not begrudge payment for your toil
by sharing a few products of our soil.

You're welcome to berries from my branches,
but please don't touch my Paw-Paws when they're ripe.
Meanwhile I must clean the driveway again,
and cut down all the berries from the tree,
since my drive has become your lavatory.

Old Merlin

2010-04-28T21:21:00.000-07:00

I

I sit restless as the wind, unsatisfied,
Winter's days garnered in an old grey hide,
Puckered and tucked up in a wrinkled rind,
The oldest and the wisest of my kind.
Floating and listing after every thought,
Not weaving or dancing as I ought, caught
In love's webs, spun from Arachne's mind.

Pain of birth, joy of love, fear of dying.
Rain of water, flame of fire, clod of earth.
But of the free air I was born, flying
On dragon's quintessant wings without sound,
Adviser of kings, no subject of Earth's round
Of sufferings, I had a virgin birth,
In past days when of gods there was no dearth.

I wander among the trees, no sapling
Now, as when I first learned their alphabet.
Beth, Luis Nion; Birch, Rowan, Ash; yet
Now I know them all, like fingers on my hand,
The meaning of dog, roebuck and lapwing
Escapes me, like leaves blown in the wind,
Or souls drawn to heaven, having never sinned.

The last of winter's frost lies on the tree,
White fingers pointing to the wind and snow,
As quietly I sit within life's lee,
Warming myself with thoughts of coming spring,
Wrapped in black cares and robe, a winter crow,
Dark winged with only a harsh song to sing.
I wait for her to come again to me.

I thought that I had learned of all her ways:
Of winking eye, of rounded thigh, of lips
Parted, arms raised, dancing with swaying hips,
Of nimble girls running with little skips,
Of full-blown maids, wide eyed with loosened stays.
To each enticement I had become inured
But in her ancient web still lie ensnared.

These new priests with belted knout, dressed in grey,
Told me their new god had a better way
To deal with the baneful bliss of woman's kiss.
But, it seems to me, he was another Atys,
Who, had kept his balls intact (unlike me),
Crowned with thorns and whipped on the pillory,
And killed after the ides of Hilary.

My first love was a kind of Cybele
And I too hung upon a sacrificial tree,
Swinging, with my head hanging upside down.
The lady of life and death came to me.
The harvest of true love she reaped away,
And with the man in red I went to stay,
Until in the Druid's lore I was full-grown.

When I think of later days my heart grows cold,
Of songs and laughter floating on the breeze,
Of times past remembering for one so old.
Those times have become as fabulous as Troy,
When I was middle aged and Arthur but a boy;
Days of love, riding through the apple trees,
Sighing after ladies, hearts full of ease:
Too many stories never to be told.

So, I wait here for her to come to me,
Wrapt in icy wood by her sorcery.
I see in the dull mirror of my mind
Her fair but fickle face and subtle charms,
Unbind the spell and take me in her arms,
A lover at last loved by his lady,
When she glides through the trees to set me free.

What poor fool has hopeless dreams of this kind?
Filling up the empty cave of his mind
With fleeting phantoms of long lost love,
Waiting expectantly for some sweet dove
To come at last and soothe away his cares.
That fool is me, the oldest fool of all,
I sit and wait release from lover's thrall.

Little gods of love there have always been,
Cosseted and loved by their mother queen.
Venus' naughty boy was known to trample
On lovers' bleeding hearts, for example.
Jealous of his psyche, this goddess ample,
Locked her up in dim halls of jewelled gold,
Hoping that her boy's love would soon grow cold.

She should have known that he could never flee
From his own darts of burning ecstasy.
No more could she give up her lover shared
With dark Proserpine, in that yearly round,
When she took Adonis with her underground.
Nor can I expect to escape the bonds
Of loves dark spell and burning lover's wounds.

When gold mates with lead and silver with tin,
Iron and copper in love bind and leave twin
Mercury behind lay within the twain.
God or man who understands this quatrain?
Saturn falls below bright Sol rides above,
Chaste Diana is hunted by great Jove.
Mars with Venus lies; Hermes dies of love.

II

Lost in the weeds and briars of my mind,
I stumble hither and thither, half blind,
Searching round for another of my kind.
Why do I waste my time with this and that?
Looking in the still mirror of this pool,
I see, staring at me, another fool,
White beard tangled beneath a wizard's hat.

Now, at the end of all my wandering,
Counting the sacred trees on my fingers,
I know when winter comes, why spring lingers.
Waiting for her return, flowers bringing,
Painting the face of the beloved earth,
Stirring the air with shouts of youthful mirth,
Filling the land with the boon of birth.

Once, by the sea, I rode to Cornwall's wife,
In the body of another nobleman,
And filled her up with seeds of golden rain.
I remember now her wild face and clan,
She was Arthur's mother, the fair Ygraine.
And I his magical father now remain,
Tangled up in this web of kingly strife.

There, too, I met swarthy Morgane, my fate.
A little girl she was then, full of hate,
When I came to take away her brother
And replace her father with another.
In a year or two, this father was dead,
Against the Dane in battle Uther led
His men, and dying from the field had fled.

When Arthur was near full grown, with no beard,
I saw her again, this woman; she came
To me for instruction in all things weird.
Morgane the raven; wide mouthed, squint eyed and lame.
I took her in and taught her well my craft,
Of bird, bush and tree, and the secret name,
But when she'd learned it all she left and laughed.

With pallid Christian priests she did consort,
And plotted with the knights of Arthur's court
To adopt this dead Saviour as their own.
Forsaking her allegiance to old gods,
She accepted the rules of their synods
And persuaded Arthur to wear Christ's crown,
To love the Saxon and not put him down.

She knew I loved her but opposed her plan.
With spell and deadly counter spell we fought,
This black lady of death, sweet Morrigan,
Who became the Magdalen of Camelot.
She, with Arthur's foul enemies did plot,
To remove king and queen from Albion's throne.
So that her bastard son could rule alone.

Lancelot to Guinevere she did bring,
Estranging this knight from his lawful king,
Sowing discord among all and everything
Bound up in the lore of the table round.
Agrevane betrayed the Queen's courtly love,
With faithless knights he hunted her to ground
And closed the trap to catch Lance with his dove.

I had seen this foretold in wayward stars,
When the moon eclipsed Jupiter and Mars
In Orion's wake: the scorpion brings war
And famine to the land where Venus' Law
No longer holds sway over kingly might,
Where Mars rules beneath Moon's deluding light,
and brother with brother contend and fight.

Half mad and sick from the loss of his queen,
Arthur lay down, until a vision seen
Of his new god's glory, shaped like a bowl,
Appeared, shining before his weary eyes.
He called upon all his brave knights and squires
To go on a quest and find out who stole
This reliquary, bright with holy fires.

Once there was another bright sacred bowl,
A womb of poison brimmed with all things fowl,
That stained the fingers of a youthful bard
When to his lips the poison he transferred.
It sent him mad with the moons delusion,
He ran amok inspired by the confusion
Between what is seen and what is heard.

When love dies, in its place rise awful sighs,
Rending the heart and filling it with lies.
The sadness in Arthur's breast filled his bowl,
Which overflowed into his sickly soul,
Flooding it with this Saviour's bloody rain,
Poisoning the old world with Christian bane,
Replacing queenly love with nails and pain.

And so they all rode out to look, in vain,
For love's source and the cause of Arthur's pain.
When coin beats club and cup replaces sword,
Old gods become deaf to the wise man's word.
No longer does the bard persuade the king
But priests bend his ear about everything,
And force the world to kiss the Pontiffs ring.

III

I stand alone, arms stretched between two worlds.
Crystal spheres, singing their eternal song,
Impose on the sublunary whorls
Refrains of good and evil, right and wrong.
With supernatural might I set the scene,
In between what is and what might have been,
And stick my head right through the starry screen.

What I saw was a place of emptiness,
Holding in its embrace the firmament
On which we stand and bear unhappiness
Or joy, depending on our bent.
No god or saviour I found out there,
Beyond the Scorpion and the Bear,
Only utter darkness without compare.

And in this dark womb of Earth I lie, caught
Like a fly in amber, or a ship in port,
No longer free to sail on life's adventure,
Or to believe there is a joyful shore,
A land where youth, love and beauty endure;
Unhampered by the ravages of time
Or the moans of priests in God's pantomime.

When young, the world shows us the face of youth,
When old its face is lined with snaggle tooth
And each day becomes a weary winter
Drying out the bones until they splinter.
Here, in the dark labyrinth of the Earth,
Where roots hang down and body worms inter,
I wait alone for my release from birth.

I lie uncared for by the goddess wild,
My cleverness with cleverness beguiled.
Arthur too lies Wrapt up in dreams of yore,
Buried on some imaginary shore
Or drifting forever to apple Isles,
Tended by triple queens whose wily smiles
Trouble the hearts of poets evermore.

The quiet water drips and builds with lime
Cold cathedrals of iridescent time.
Stalactite and stalagmite bear the load,
Where dwell hanging bats and squatting toad,
Worshiping the dark demons of eternity,
Before light tripping gods with bells did climb
From the ogdoad of Hell's paternity.

Saturn begot her by Harpe's timely slash,
Sister of furies, giants and nymphs of ash,
With shells and bells she came, down with the rain
Of Uranus' blood, born foaming from his pain.
And where she trod and in the air flowers
Rose and fell, roses and primroses; showers
Of love and joy filled heaven and Earth again.

What need have I now for such a fantasy?
Seeking rest in the arms of ecstasy
Or in the tangled webs of poesy;
Woven by desire to trap the lover
In nets of gold, where we soon discover
That love and freedom cannot be sundered:
Love soon leaving when its fruit is plundered.

The sword has done its work; Arthur is dead
Or lies in limbo, struck down by Mordred.
Father with incestuous son entwined
In an embrace of hate, eternal bind,
Signed in blood and the movement of the stars
They turn yearly with Sol and Luna's cars
Until born again to fight in future wars.

On Snowdon's peaks and in valleys of the Dee
I wandered terrified, a broken man,
Fleeing death, from the Battle of Camlan.
Taking refuge in these woods and caves
I live with wolves and crows, thinking of she
Who will come to me, like Venus from the waves,
To wake again my passion, if she can.

She came to Arthur's court from Orkney's Isles
And beguiled us all with simpering smiles.
The daughter of a petty king was she,
Too young to outsmart a demi-god like me.
With secret sighs she promised her favours
To none but me, an old fool who savours
Soon enough the rapture of a woman's wiles.

Once, from oak and apple, mistletoe I fetched,
Out of Diana's woods, to wield my power,
But now in Saturn's wintry grip I cower,
Like a broken tree, with arms outstretched:
Its trunk Hollowed out by Thor's thunder cracks,
So long protected by the Roman Pax,
Now felled from sacred groves by Saxon's axe.

Now I must go where none can follow,
Bound up in this hollow log I will stay,
Staring at the sky, waiting for Nimue
To fly to me, like summer's first swallow
Or wisdom's queen, piecing her king's body
Together from bits buried in that hollow
Tree, told about in Egypt's prosody.

A Poem by Tony Thomas

Walking Behind

2010-04-22T20:03:00.000-07:00

Thoughts without words seem harmless in themselves.
The magic mushrooms open tiny caps,
grey parasols in the morning mist, they
have no thoughts or words to express their joy
at rising early from the soil beneath
the shady trees, sending forth their first spores.

Words without thoughts may not be so harmless.
The blundering butterfly may find a net,
assiduously spun by dawn's spider,
a glistening rainbow in the morning sun,
a pretty architectural miracle
to dog walking man, after angry words.

Words without actions may become a lie.
The fleecy clouds that never lead to rain
provide welcome shade from the glaring sun;
a promise to refresh a dried up land
that may not be kept by thoughtless nature,
whose actions do not require reflection.

Actions before words are the general rule.
A stooping bird plucks the spider from its web:
the dog barks and lunges at the bird and
the man, distracted from his reverie,
when dragged along, starts shouting at his dog,
as actions beget words in ready tongues.

Thoughts without actions may seem otiose,
but only to those of muscular bent,
intent on becoming a primal cause,
throwing sticks for dogs, they are not content
with just seeing, knowing and keeping still,
like calm waters undisturbed by the wind.

Actions without thoughts are distinctly right,
for creatures clinging to their limbic roots,
as contemplation without action won't
fill the belly or reproduce their kind.
Mind, that ghostly adjunct to the body,
a disobedient wife, won't walk behind.

Moon Shade

2010-04-20T12:33:00.000-07:00

The streetlights glimmer on the cobblestones,
an old horse drags its load with weary bones.
No moonlight shows beneath the looming cloud,
the sudden crash of chords is very loud.

The heavy figure seated in the gloom
glowers into the shadows of the room,
hunched forward, raising strong hands from his knees
he runs cold fingers over minor keys.

An angry heart heaves and sobs in his chest,
felt hammers rise and fall; he'd done his best.
Remembering the softness of her face,
the notes move softly at a steady pace.

Rubato and arpeggio combine
as gentle ripples on the waters shine:
guttering candles gleam upon an eye
filled with grief's passion but too proud to cry.

The Moon's bullion weighs heavy on his heart,
not yet transmuted into gold by art.
First, the adagio must dull the pain,
as blunt fingers caress the sad refrain.

Harsh anger waits, as it repeats again,
building ready to unleash waves of pain,
but the melody weaves its soothing spell
and his moon shadowed spirit serves him well.

Horrowitz plays Adagio from Moonlight Sonata

Rainbow's Bend

2010-04-16T15:47:00.000-07:00

When buds retreat into the branch in spring
and autumn leaves rise to the trees and sing,
the rainbow bends its gaudy ear to see
the ends of rivers rising from the sea.

The midnight sky blazes with stars so black
but morning brings the sunny darkness back,
banishing colour to the shadow lands,
and shattering the eyes with spectral bands.

Glittering hours rise with the glassy sands,
four thumbs oppose one finger on each hand,
our anti-clocks rewind their flaccid springs
and factories unmake our precious things.

The tongue drinks in the babbling from our ears
and quickly learns that all our hopes are fears.
The heavy heart pumps blood into our veins,
and sends old nightmares back into our brains.

The law of levity now rules the Earth
and every creature clamours for its birth,
fleeing golden beginnings to their end,
beyond the flatness of the rainbow's bend.

Babel Root

2010-04-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

Kapoor show sir, is what I say,
your orbit spider wends its way
to Heaven but like Icarus,
burns up and droops acephalous.

Boris loves it, poor man-boob slob,
and sings its praises, that's his job,
and so the phallic cage will rise,
delighting ladies with its size.

We know spirals are delightful,
but your twists and turns are frightful,
a parody of Coubertin's
rings, those conjoined Olympic quins.

I can see Charles, in the Palace,
come out swinging with his phallus
to condemn in stuttering words
your tangled heap of metal turds.

You should go catch a falling star
and build a Babel less bizarre,
more like a swaying bamboo shoot
and not that ugly Mandrake root.

Money is the name of the game
but Brits like to apportion blame,
so pray that they'll all be jolly,
dancing round your ruddy folly.

First Taste of Heaven and Hell

2010-04-11T04:56:00.000-07:00

The chairs and tables were as I remembered,
some fifteen years after that first visit.
A light coloured wood, with smooth, curved backs and
the glass topped tables with a greenish tinge.
Near the window stood the shining column
of the coffee machine, on the counter,
the one that had made the terrible sound.
I must have screamed when the steam jet shot out.
from the pain that only a child could feel.
The fear had begun with the great steam trains:
I didn't want to be an engine driver,
leaning out of the cab, showing white teeth,
polishing levers with an oily rag.
I had screamed in pain on the platform too
and then again in the ice-cream parlour,
but recovered when Granny calmed me down.
The metal cup was strange and very cold.
all covered with tiny drops of water,
each one clearly visible to my eyes.
In the cup was a chocolate hemisphere,
topped off with a segmented wafer.
Clumsily, with a long spoon, I tasted
my first ice cream, and it was very good.
Afterwards, we stood looking at the cups,
displayed in the shop window opposite.
Some were silver and some were gold and some
were inscribed with copperplate writing.
"That big one there is for the Flower Show,"
Granny told me, before we walked back home.

Winter Roses

2010-04-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

The old man had been left alone now. The still warm autumn sunlight slanted through the open casement windows onto the polished boards of the studio floor, not quite reaching the foot of the table on which the vase of flowers stood. From behind his head, the cool northern sky lit up the white cycling cap that he wore and highlighted the threads of the brocade cloth beneath the blue vase.

The frail figure was sitting, or rather had been placed at an angle, so that he could see the dark corner of the room as a contrasting background to the pink and red blooms that Jean's wife had carefully placed in the vase the day before. He thought it would have been better if they had been arranged less carefully, since beauty often followed accident rather than design.

He could see outside into the garden, through the triple panes of the doors, and a bit of intense cerulean blue above the tangle of bushes and gently swaying mass of fruit trees. Beyond were the twisted forms of the olive trees that had endured for centuries. If he had not bought the land they would most likely have been cut down, to make way for some hideous tourist development, an act of vandalism he could not bear to think about.

The fresh smell of distilled turpentine and linseed oil hung in the air, scents which his now cavernous nostrils could barely detect anymore: perhaps through the atrophy of the senses that comes with age or the familiarity that blinds the mind to an omnipresent sensation. He dipped his brush into the oil and flicked in the spiral curve of a petal, mixing it with the undried madder on the canvas.

The tableau reminded him of the Tricoleur: the blue vase, the white cloth and the blood red of the roses. He was not overly patriotic: the ravages of the recent war had nearly killed his son and had hastened the death of his wife, but he was imbued with the true spirit of France. In his heyday, Paris had been the centre of civilisation and might be again, now the Bosch had finally been defeated. He did not care for politics much either, but knew the importance of symbols. The blue of liberté and the red of fraternité were incompatible without the separating white of egalité. What better represented freedom than the blue of the open sky, and what more telling sign of brotherhood that the red of blood? As to white, was it not the summation of all the colours of light bound together in harmony? Had he not devoted his life to balancing the raw colours of the palette into the opalescent perfection of female flesh?

He thought of his early nudes: too much bitumen leaking into the flesh tones, too much umber in the shadows. Red was the colour of fire and warmth pulsing within the human body, a necessary antidote to the cool, neo-classical perfection of Ingres and David, which he had so admired in his middle years. He had reintroduced the discipline of line, and dried and cooled his palette in the search for perfect form and colour, but had remained unsatisfied. For years now, he had breathed life back into his monuments to the female form. In old age, he wanted to feel again the presence of woman, the weight, the softness and the smell of the female animal: all those delights that were man's birthright had to be translated into the impersonal medium of canvas and paint.

In the heady days of his youth, the four of them had dissolved the world into a living rainbow, learning to see it in a new way, lifting the veil of varnished gloom forever. Colour had burst free from its restraining lines and edges, perhaps for the first time since man had smeared his caves with ochre and charcoal. There could be no turning back now; the stygian gloom of the academy had been overthrown by life and joy, and he had played a major part in this human drama. But where had it all led? He wasn't sure but could not give up the search for something more. Could he, even now, come up to the great masters of the past?

Crippled all these years, he was now helpless as a baby without its nurse. But he was thankful that God had spared his eyes. Degas and Monet had lost their windows to the world and were left with only dim shadows or the feel of clay beneath the hands. "Bad pain", he muttered, lowering the palette with a ruined hand. He would have liked some brandy; the occasional liqueur eased his pain and was a small pleasure besides. "Pleasure is important", he said to himself. "What is life without pleasure? The pleasures of painting, of friendship and of women." He had been unable to enjoy the greatest gift of the gods for some years now.

"What have the old to do with this?" he thought aloud. He remembered the half-length self-portrait with its sidelong glance and almost hidden hands, revealing the delicate longings of his soul. "I loved myself then, or rather what I hoped to become," he chuckled, reflecting on the hidden narcissism of those days, betrayed in this image of a still young man. He could wear the red rosette of honour now, if he wished, but cared little for the kind of social judgment it represented. Only time would measure the true worth of his labours.

"Truth, there had to be truth," he muttered to himself, struggling to raise the palette again. The battle for truth was never ending: the truth of line, the truth of form and, above all, truth of colour. Each act of painting, in itself a lie, was a deception and a fraud upon the viewer. "Glorious crime," he said aloud. Even the gods had to lie to reveal the world to men. He was no philosopher - what painter could afford to be, without doubting the worth of his profession- but he understood that without the sensual there was no world at all. Life was a picture painted with all the senses, and to appreciate it fully one needed to be an artist. The painter worked with the raw materials of the soul, seeking to reveal the glory beneath mundane experience. Without art the world was full of ugliness and pain. The artist was there to display the feast of life, rather than the famine. He had been poor, he had been unhappy, but he had always been an optimist, sustained by the belief that his special gifts could throw the cloak of beauty over the injured masses of humanity, to capture the eternal beauty of life and joy in the faces of ordinary men and women. As every fatalist knew, he had to make the best of it, whatever life might bring.

The precise, linear style that he had mastered long ago was no longer possible. He couldn't grasp a charcoal stick in his arthritic hands, let alone a finer instrument, and had to trace out the main arcs of the flowers with the brush, pushed between the fingers of his crippled fist. Ever adaptable, his brain had learned to transfer the delicate control from the fingers to wrist and arm, but the flickering flashing style of his youth could not be recovered. Now, it had become a stabbing, jabbing action, like some old fencer defending his honour to the last.

In his earlier works, he had painted landscapes, still lifes and sometimes animals, but his preference now was for single subjects: the nude, a group of figures, a bowl of fruit or just a vase of flowers. He wanted to extract the essence of the subject and impregnate the canvas with the intensity of the feelings it aroused. Satan lacking true creativity, merely tempted man to explore God's creation. He was all in favour of that, but photography, that invention of the devil, could only produce a colourless, dead imitation, devoid of human feeling. The labours of the pointillists, with their scientific dots of colour mixing in the viewer's eye, were wasted in trying to produce a rival to colour printing or photography. There were no singing lines or colours in photographs, and even if there were there could never be any soul. A painting was an expression of human emotion and feelings, in response to nature, something a photograph, or its imitation, could never accomplish.

His painting was about relationships: between earth and sky, between inanimate objects, between people, and between himself and the world. Nothing was entirely separate; everything was in some way related to its surroundings. Everything reflected what was around it: light flowed over surfaces, broke up into a million hues, filled up shadows with indigo and purple, and poured its bounty into the eye, where it ran down to the heart and awoke love, passion and desire. The problem for the painter was to arrange the pigments on the canvas so that the light falling on the painting would be scattered in the same way it would have been from real flowers, fruit or women. This was a kind of magic that went beyond mere cleverness because, like the actor, the painter had to add his own message of love and beauty to the light, as it went on its way to the observer's eye. The serious viewer had the responsibility of learning the visual language used by each artist, so that he could fully enjoy the gift of sight being freely offered. Like Arachne, the painter must weave his colours with consummate skill, even to the amazement of the gods, whose jealous rage might reduce him to a shadow of his former self.

A patient spider, he wove on, despite the pain. Each subject had its special problems. The purpose of flowers, like a woman's smile, was to attract a lover, to enjoy the nectar within. The petals had not the fullness of the fruit that would surely follow, as summer followed spring, but displayed a more brilliant if less substantial tone. The very purity of its colour repressed the wealth of reflections found in an aubergine or in a woman's cheek. Woman was both flower and fruit in one, so most satisfying to the painter's eye. What more glorious subject than a full-blown woman, suckling a child at her breast. This was the subject he had chosen for his wife's monument, a last defiant blow in the face of indomitable death.

The servants had returned now, tending to his every need. The palette had been removed and the thumb guard taken off. Wheeled into the villa, and uprooted from his chair, his useless legs hung down, the limbs as gnarled and knotted as the ancient olive trees in his garden. He was accustomed to the indignity of relieving himself in front of others, and being cleaned up like a baby by his 'doctoress'. In the kitchen, soup and pate was being laid out.

Afterwards, in the studio, willing hands would clean brushes and squeeze out fresh colours, according to the master's standing instructions. He did not like being called master; that would be tempting fate, but preferred his surname, unadorned. Although he lived in the surroundings of a bourgeois gentleman he was not one of that kind.

After the meal, he was wheeled onto the terrace. He had taken a few puffs of the cigarette, which irritated his bronchial chest. The moist wind from the sea had never agreed with him. Very weary now, and afraid he might have one of his turns he signalled to the nurse that he had finished working for the day. Even in the warmth of the south, the roses in the garden would soon succumb to winter. Perhaps these would be the last he would paint.

The woman and the little girl stood in the newsagents, the bright artificial light reflecting colours from the shiny magazine covers onto their youthful faces. "I like this one," said the little girl, holding up a birthday card with a painting of pink and red roses in a blue vase. "These look more real," the mother said, indicating row upon row of roses, photographed to perfection.

Last Stand

2010-04-06T16:31:00.000-07:00

What is the mystery of Dave Mustaine?
But the fans just scowl when asked to explain.
Maybe it was the long, strawberry hair
or the screwed up face with its intense stare.

The drugs were heavy but the metal was free
when Dave was cast from the family tree.
Get even with Cat Stevens was what he planned
and after a long intro. formed a band.

Metallica played in the clubs round LA
Dave, Lars and James were the cult of their day,
One night of Trauma, Cliff went over the top,
but even in Frisco their fame didn't stop.

A contract with Megaforce turned them around,
so off to New York in a van they were bound.
When they got there Dave was drunk as a skunk,
was told by the boys, "pack your bags, you're sunk".

Back in LA, Megadeath was born, with
two Daves and a King old contracts were torn,
and some Rash drumming made them a killing
but, like fresh blood, new members kept spilling.

Screwed up with drugs, Dave continued to play
but messed up Alice's cover one day.
Cleaning his act he became a bell-weather
with movies and acting his shit came together.

But heroin's needle and fast playing technique
had taken its toll, and left him too weak.
The damage was done and had broken the band:
his fans wonder if he'll make a last stand.

Un-mused

2010-04-05T21:42:00.000-07:00

My muse has gone on holiday:
come to think of it
she has been away
now for quite a bit.

Perhaps she's just a fantasy,
made up to excuse
my poor poesy,
a ruse for delay.

Why do I need to be inspired
by a muse at all?
When I hit the wall
or become too tired.

The need for beauty is quite clear,
but a pretty face,
or goddess of grace,
need not charm my ear.

Surely it is just laziness:
or modest talent
that fails to impress,
when you are absent.

But even allowing for that,
the verses seem flat,
uninteresting,
words refuse to sing.

Dear muse, return without delay.
I'll do anything,
if you'll sing again.
Please come out to play.

Long Holiday

2010-04-04T21:15:00.000-07:00

There's always a queue for the last bus home:
many old folks have a ticket to ride
on the one that stops by the boundary herm,
quite a few youngsters are travelling besides.

Not long now before we get on the bus:
we've never been on such a trip before,
though some start crying and make a great fuss,
for what's best described as a mystery tour.

It's been a long journey since we first arrived,
when we were all greeted with cries of joy:
our folks were worried if we had survived,
often asking, "is it a girl or a boy?".

Wails of fear go up when the travellers see
the charabanc come toiling over the hill,
although some turn their backs, they cannot flee,
while others stand frozen, perfectly still.

Charon pulls up and winds on the handle,
changing the letters displayed on the front,
the dog at his side lights a new candle
and displays sharp teeth like a cynodont.

When all are inside, the bus pulls away.
some try to hide but know it's all over
the sign on the bus says 'Hell is this way',
so we know the dog's name's not Red Rover.

The lightning conductor says, "Tickets please":
we give up our tickets in exchange for two pence.
Hermes thinks this is a Hell of a wheeze
and refers to our souls in the past tense.

With gnashing of teeth and cries of dismay,
cold coins falling from our unseeing eyes,
we get our first glimpse of Sulphur Creek Bay:
our new holiday home, what a surprise.

Thicket

2010-04-03T03:40:00.000-07:00

I

Upon the rolling heath the prickly gorse
asserts its right to hold its ground by force:
ten thousand lances challenge earth and sky
among the tines its yellow pennants fly.

Beneath its boughs the purple heather grows
and spreads unhindered to the briar rose.
The wiry broom has no sharp armoury
but once adorned the helm of chivalry.

No heavy cavalry or armoured knights
clash in these valleys or the woodland heights,
and where the scrub gives way to hawthorne patch,
no entry there on pain of prick or scratch.

Here the crab-apple and the blackthorn thrives,
their flowers feeding wild apian hives,
whose voices murmur on the summer breeze
against the woodwind chorus of the trees.

What seems an entrance to the tangled wood
is fearsome thicket that has long withstood
rash incursions of animal or man,
but dauntless we must enter if we can.

II

In dreams the thicket rises once again
barring entry to sleeping realms of pain,
where rupturing the thorny mystery
would reveal nature's hidden theurgy.

Why are there thorns if not to cause us pain,
dire warnings never to return again,
but in our hearts, desire and instinct knows
there flourishes within a perfect rose.

Impenetrable is the inner way:
on waking its clear vision falls away,
the scent persisting in the light of day,
to haunt our being when we flee away.

The children in the wood are terrified
by every tree and thicket that may hide
the scabrous wing or yellowed toothy smile,
of phantom woodsman or the crocodile.

With forests levelled to the ground and all
the land used up for agricultural
production and the sprawling cityscape:
from this dark fate there can be no escape.

The wire once used to hem the cattle in
has been refined to cut and slice the skin
of that tender animal called mankind
who takes delight in torturing the mind.

III

Army of spiders dressed in sparkling grey,
in the ubiquitous dew at break of day,
the touch of steel upon a downy cheek,
a slake of water from a brackish creek.

Fear lies like a mist, frozen to the ground,
as each warrior feels the imagined wound
that will strike him down in this last battle,
falling on the heath like slaughtered cattle.

Then the flight through the thorn wood and the fall
caught in the thicket, where he cannot crawl,
the nightmare returns as the barbs cut deep
but in this fatal hour he dare not weep.

The roots of fear sink deep into the mind,
lacking nourishment from the ravaged rind,
they seek answers to the roseate riddle
sifting leaden truths through death's dark griddle.

At the limits of each sense doors open
onto a unity of pain, omen
of the dark entanglements of the blood
and the infernal thicket in the wood.

Poisson d'Avril

2010-04-01T03:40:00.000-07:00

April is the wettest month, cruelly

raining fish on the backs of gobby fools

or loosing doves too early from the Ark.

The cookoo may be heard but most likely

it will be violation of your bird

or the nightingale, "jug, jug, jug", you heard.

In Rome, hilarious laughter can be heard.

as the unkindest cut is cruelly

applied to Spring's first sacrificial bird,

or laughing at some ship of wayward fools

embarking on voyages unlikely

to find the scattered wreckage of the Ark.

Mooning or staring at the rainbow's arc,

when you should be tending your father's herd,

could brand you as a noodle unlikely

to inherit the flock or be cruelly

cast out to spend your days among those fools

at the pub, waiting for the next free bird.

In France, poissin d'Avril may get the bird,

but she may not be pure as Jean d'Arc,

gold digging femmes are always after fools

who often lose their family jewels I've heard.

Keep your wits about you or be cruelly

caught out by Poisson's probability.

In Scotland cover your arse, or likely

it will be kicked hard like some Taily bird.

They'll hang a 'kick me' sign and you'll cruelly

get the boot from Celtic to Rangers' Park.

As April Gowk your pained cries will be heard,

warnings to other unsuspecting fools.

Australian's monthly pinch and punch their fools.

Spain's calender remains the same, likely

it won't change, it seems they haven't yet heard

the Gregorian chant: too slow the crow bird

flies to catch the dove returning to the Ark,

but inquisitions still hurt cruelly.

April fools are treated cruelly like

the Ark's Dodos, unlikely to arrive,

but birds as croquet bats, are rarely heard.

What the Wind Said

2010-03-29T20:34:00.000-07:00

The west wind blustered down the ill made road
and whistled through the clumps of pallid grass,
where snow patches had clung on into March.
The boy wiped the windswept hair from his eyes,
hoping the fallen model plane had survived.
In the shop it had seemed a perfect choice,
now broken on the road he felt less sure.

Home from school he had been sent out to play,
his father, returned last night from the North,
was still in bed and could not help at all.
He lay in striped pyjamas with a tray,
still working on a bill of quantities.
The old brown Morris, garaged from the snow,
did not know that its days were numbered too.

The draughts of Mars blew under the front door
and up the stairs to where the surveyor lay,
coughing over the yellow baking bowl,
breathing Friar's balsam beneath a towel.
The sugar in his blood was not a sign
of strength through sweetness but the acetone
on his breath bore the smell of early death.

The doctor was expected soon, meanwhile
she had tried all the well-known remedies:
cooked chicken soup to feed him with a spoon
and packed his sponge bag for the hospital.
She planned to send the boy next door in case
her husband's chest got worse and the doctor
confirmed that he had caught pneumonia.

It was funny how he remembered him:
chicken broth running down a stubbled chin,
the clutter of unwashed dishes in the sink,
the chevron pattern on the plywood tray,
the unmade bed as he was whisked away.
He could hardly recall what his mother said,
something about being good and going to bed.

The man next door, a family friend, was kind
but the older children seemed too subdued.
He was given comics to read and food
while the day passed slowly into evening.
Taking him to the parlour, the man said,
"Be brave, you're the man of the house now", but
in his head, the wind said, "your father's dead".

Hinterland

2010-03-27T21:31:00.000-07:00

In the land of the jaune dent-de-lion
the wandering child is king of time, wading
waist high through wild and fading grasses where
star crowned poppies fly their scarlet ensigns,
firing tiny shots from pill box windows
into a no man's land of tangled strife.

Here, the common blue and meadow brown flit
from twining vetch to thistle spear, heedless
of the striding child unsheathing grassy
swords with tender tips, a tasty morsel
ground between teeth and spat from ruby lips,
trampling a random swathe from then til now.

Behind bay windows mothers fret and stare,
draw back net curtains and wonder when their
offspring will return with dusty shoes and
tousled hair, in time for jam sandwiches
and milky tea, and then race for the door,
and out into the summer evening air.

Alone or in ragged bands, the children
of the hinterland stalk between field and
woods, following the instincts of their eyes
and hands, seeing and grasping at each straw
of precious experience, before long
shadows call them home to dream laden sleep.

Demon Child

2010-03-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

Grant the mystery of his conception,

and stories of his childhood seem less strange,

whether man or angel was his father

is subsumed in his claim to be divine.

Was Attis conceived from an almond seed

falling into his mother's lap from Zeus

or Adonis sprung from a tree of Myrrh,

Caspar's gift to the newly born Jesus?

A small child walked through a field in Egypt,

idly gathered ears of corn in his hand,

cast them in the fire, ground and then ate them,

and each grain taken returned full measure.

Persephone's child might have done as much,

inventing daily bread as well as wine,

but preferred indolence to childish play

and was eaten up as a sacrifice.

At three, Mary's lamb played with other boys.

He put a dried fish in a bowl and said:

"Now move fish, swim for your life", and it did.

"Cast out your salt and dwell in this water".

The neighbours denounced him to the widow,

with whom his mother lodged, and she cast them out.

Was she cross about what happened because

the dried fish was for The Feast of Shamo?

Walking in the market place with Mary,

he burst into laughter when twelve sparrows

fell quarrelling into a teacher's lap.

"Bring him to me", the teacher told his boys.

The angry schoolmaster twisted his ear:

"And what are you laughing at, Hebrew boy?"

The child opened his hand to show the corn

and said, "I scattered it to make them fight".

The boy stood firm until the corn was gone,

saying, "they brave danger for what they prize,

and will not leave till they have it." For this,

the master had them cast from the city.

Back in Nazareth, in the pouring rain,

the five year old got water in a pool

and commanded it to become quite clear,

and out of the clay he made twelve sparrows.

It was Sabbath, and there were children there,

who told Joseph how his son had transgressed.

When questioned by his father, Jesus said

to his birds, "Fly away and do not die."

These lustful and active birds, sacred to

Aphrodite, bear dead souls to the sky,

or perch upon the cross and chirping say,

"He is not dead, and will rise up some day".

One of the boys, a Pharisee, boldly

emptied the pool out with an olive branch,

but Jesus dried him like a leafless tree

and he fell stricken, dead upon the ground.

The sign of mercy from the Father's wrath,

emptying his little flood, vexed the Son,

and, like Eden's tempting fig, he withered

the child who dared to tamper with his works.

The Pharisaic letter of the law

was dead, and drained the spirit from God's word

and like the tree that bears no fruitful weight

it did not deserve life's watery spring.

Some days later, while Joseph and his son

were walking in the market place a child

hit him on the arms: Jesus said, "Finish

your run," and the child fell dead in the road.

After the outcry, Joseph reproved him.

Jesus, said, "I know these are not your words",

and those who had complained were struck down blind.

When Joseph saw this, he seized him by the ear.

Jesus was vexed, and said, "It is enough

for you to see me without touching me.

If you knew me you would not anger me,

for I was made long before you were born."

Seeing wisdom in the child, one Zacheus

offered to teach him letters and good sense.

"No man can teach him, but God," Joseph said,

"he will only bring torment to your life".

Jesus overheard them talking and said,

"O master, everything I say is true,

and I am before all men, and am Lord.

Unto you nothing is given: for I am

before all worlds and know when you will die".

When the Jews heard his words, they were angry

but they were unable to answer him.

The boy turned and said, "I spoke a proverb

to you, but you are weak and know nothing."

Joseph took Jesus to the master's house

and the master taught him aleph to tau,

speaking gently to him, with flattery,

but the child would not repeat the letters.

Angry, the teacher hit him on the head.

"I know all the letters you would teach me,"

the pupil said, and repeated them all,

"But you do not know how to interpret them".

Some say the master was confounded and

recognised the wisdom of the boy but

others that Jesus became so angry

that he cursed the master, who then fell dead.

Many days later, another master came

and offered to teach the prodigy.

At the Doctor's house, Jesus opened a book,

but preached rather than read out the contents.

The master listened attentively, as

Jesus spoke of the law, and encouraged

those who had gathered there to marvel at

the holy doctrine of which the boy spoke.

Afraid, Joseph ran to the master's house,

but the teacher had much praise for the boy.

Jesus was joyful at the master's praise

and raised up the one he had slain before.

With such wonders, the demon child punished

those who despised his words and restored to

life those who had offended him, showing

that he was lord and master of the world.

Crusader

2010-03-18T20:13:00.000-07:00

Crusader, how will you absolve your sin?
By petty mastery of field and soil
or buckling on your carapace of tin,
and forsaking your muddy patch of toil?

So bemused by the glory of your Christ,
this Latin book that only priests can read
will drain your wealth and to Hell's shores entice
your ragged band where Christ won't intercede.

Warrior, why do you defend this cross?
Do you wish to hang beside your Saviour
and wear a crown of thorns to mourn the loss
of peace or gain some indulgent favour?

This red device emblazoned on you shirt,
inflames the hearts and minds of your company
but won't protect you from the desert dirt
or showers of arrows from the enemy.

Why did your millennial Messiah
fail to come on time, with his burning sword,
to slay the usurious pariah
who bought your accoutrements with his blood?

After plotting with Frankish Godfrey's men
in the Rhineland you plundered for supplies,
trotted off to Constantinople, then
fought with the Seljuk under Muslim skies.

In triumph you rode to Jerusalem,
knowing your Christian army would prevail
and there did God's gory work, his emblem
flying from the walls marked the bloody tale.

And now, in the second millennium,
you sleep under the stars and crescent moon,
breathing in depleted uranium,
the deadly dust sown by last year's platoon.

Your crusade is financed by usury
and serves the Masters of Jerusalem
pulling strings in the US Treasury,
jerking the Pentagon's fatigued golem.

Crusader, how will you absolve your sin?
The tortured rebel and the murdered child
cry out for vengeance from the pain within
and weep in torment for a world defiled.

So bemused by the glory of your flag,
this doctrine of hatred on which you feed
will drain your health and put you in a bag
or win a medal for some evil deed.

Warrior, don't you know this war is lost?
Do you wish to hang down your head in shame
when those cheering crowds welcome home your host
remembering what was done in their name?

This proud device emblazoned on you caps,
reminds the comrades in your company
of those past glories told behind tent flaps,
whose martial deeds were mixed with infamy.

Why did your statesmen send you off to war
but fail to tell you of their lying creed,
a sacrifice for their profit's altar
in Mammon's name of unrestricted greed?

Now rotting in a veteran's hospital
Working that new prosthesis on your arm,
you won't be trotting off with generals
to save your enemies or do them harm.

In triumph you rode out to Muslim lands
knowing your righteous army would prevail
but now your deeds are buried in the sands,
with dead crusader's cross and iron mail.

Mandrill

2010-03-12T18:40:00.000-08:00

Your burning eyes are so intelligent,

fixing me with your gaze between the bars:

I am afraid of your feral power,

though you are held prisoner in this zoo.

I am a man and you a gaudy ape,

a hairy clown decked out in coloured stripes,

boastful red and blue flags both front and rear,

signalling anger or desire to pair.

Where is your harem now, you prince of clowns,

or were you captured too young to have known

the jungle joys of those swollen balloons

that baboons find so irresistible?

Like Bodhi Dharma in his cave you sign

that curiosity is not welcome,

your one-pointed sagacity a fire

of malign wisdom that we cannot share.

A social creature you now sit alone,

distilling thoughts of hatred and revenge,

waiting for a keeper's one careless move,

before striking out with canine razors.

Your eyes say you believe you are a king,

exiled from a steaming luxuriance,

our common birthright, where easy living

and sexual delight are close at hand.

Now, you take refuge in philosophy,

like me you wait alone for something new

that will set you free to become, at last,

what you and I were intended to be.

But we both understand those inner fires,

that feed upon dumb hatred and desires

for power that only philosophers

or kings may muse on in their solitude.

I am free to go, with my little clan,

to shuffle papers in my ministry,

and genuflect to tribal bugaboos:

alone, you chew on nuts and hatch your plan.

The Ballad of Fardelbard

2010-03-07T01:57:00.000-08:00

The women loved him but he loved the sea,
its roaring swell and pallid creatures, down
where only words could reach beyond the eye,
into the fields and houses of the town.

To hear the sea in a shell he did not
need to listen nor reach a hand to ear,
but sift the shifting sounds of shining word
sands on wild beaches that he held so dear.

The child became a father to the bard:
robbed of his native tongue the brilliant son
by elocution rose to prominence,
blinding the father with his rising sun.

By limelight the grape became his poison,
and old Augustus' moll his wayward muse,
besotted by the wailing siren's call
his marriage or his sullen art would lose.

The ghosts of poverty pursued his lust,
delivering the fruits of family,
bloating the features of a pretty boy;
become father pig to Welsh menagerie.

But still the golden youth roamed free among
the orchards and the fields, where bellfried owls
like wise Athene's fowls bore him aloft,
rising triumphant by force of vowels.

Weaving a tapestry of glowing words,
a world transmogrified by Druid's spell
floated on airwaves to war weary homes
where each poem resounded like a bell.

Ambition and his legend as a sot
fed the romantic spirit of the bard,
excessive days of wine and roses led
to love's ruin and verses by the yard.

Now Silenus was his drunken tutor,
the sodden cavalcade became a farce,
and when spurned by pregnant Ariadne
the threadbare cloth of art became more sparse.

Lured by the hint of fame from overseas
the bon viveur made plans to boost his name,
and leave the wet and windy shores of Wales
to seek his fortune in the lecture game.

The brightest star in Cymru's Constellation
Crossed the rough Atlantic to Idlewilde,
where to the consternation of his hosts,
became a stellar pain and problem child.

The winds of death unhinged the family door:
his purblind father became sick and died,
unleashing a poetic storm of woe
that ne'er abated with the ebbing tide.

Deaths dominion entered into his soul,
for a god denied was his salvation,
and with the tolling of this final bell,
the downward slide fed his inspiration.

A growing family, snug by the sea,
hid discontent and longing to be free.
The dollars came in bundles for his toil
but soon were spent on droll profligacy.

His sonorous and mesmerising voice,
booming through pendulous, booze moistened lips,
thrilled the Yanks and paid for his frequent jaunts
but left his family to their fish and chips.

His dissolution became near complete,
but even long bouts of poetic drought
could not douse his Welsh promethean fire:
his still prolific verse came pouring out.

The triumphant finale came in New York,
where author, actor and drunk pyknic clown
created the mad world Under Milk Wood,
the final drama for his Bardic crown.

His downfall was not long coming after,
despite drunken parties and the laughter,
mixed with regrets and pleas for forgiveness
the ruined body was ripe for slaughter.

Spurned by his wife, his bloated body lay,
filled to the brim with whiskey and decay.
Death's guise was Dr Reitell with his drugs,
who stopped his pain but sent him on his way.

Shadow Song

2010-03-06T05:20:00.000-08:00

With less than five and twenty winters,

sheep herded through the blood dark years,

to chequered floors in London flats,

the war formed children sat in mews,

bemused on sofas by atomic fears:

slyly amused by sneering Frost,

sniping nightly from Shepherd's Bush,

they thought their luck had come at last.

Hallowed edifices still stood tall,

basking in the smog filled air,

not suspecting that the winds of change

would soon sandblast their dirty hair.

Sweltering in the sardine tube,

thrusting through the teeming throng,

the young and weak were soon delivered

into the arms of the hard and strong.

Driven by desire and necessity,

the half open buds sweetly entwined,

each spindly thread of destiny,

drab grey dross or rainbow tress,

defied the scum lined tidal flow

to weave the city's tawdry dress,

and paint the garish daub we knew,

as London, swinging high or low.

Only sad memories remain a part

of who they were and what transpired,

in some dark stairway or untidy room,

in the gloom of buildings, now torn down,

where each crazed tear or love soaked stain,

sang with pain and joy a weary song,

casting faint shadows from days long gone,

within a now tired and lonely heart.

Remaining Grace

2010-03-04T21:07:00.000-08:00

Some small space where the world does not intrude
must preclude the well quilted countryside
of large estates and busy tenant farms,
fenced off by hedge and ditch or sharpened wire.

But, before the cunning of the chemist
had improved seed and beast to feed the world,
there was a brief respite when butterflies
and birds adorned the fields on summer days.

Now the hand of profit lies on the land,
forbidding the slightest impediment
to the optimum exploitation of
every rude clod of earth and grain of sand.

Never have so many been fed by so few,
so who dare oppose this economic
point of view, where great machines sally forth
to till and reap the bounty of the earth.

The swarthy swain and his coy shepherdess,
long since replaced by tourists on a bus,
have no place behind computer screens
that display rainfall or the price of beans.

Even now, beneath some Hawthorne hedgerow,
grasses flattened by youth's illicit love
hide, secreted in an empty matchbox,
their weeping joys within a plastic glove.

The sentimental poet overstates
the bucolic pleasures of past ages
when bestial toil on empty bellies vies
with our present sybaritic luxuries.

How easily, the memory excludes
the painful nettle sting, the bramble scratch,
and in its stead recalls the glory of
a Celandine upon a Mallow patch.

Nature's aboriginal plan gave way
to the unremitting toil of calloused
hands, nurturing their world according to
the bucolic religion of rustic man.

When the pall of winter sits on the land,
frail nature's face assumes those sickly hues
that hide the inner powers we hope withstand
the claims of greedy bankers and their dues.

Let the poet recall spring's kindly face,
when nature's great mistress is past her best
there will remain the memory of her grace,
though industry has taken all the rest.

Fountain of Words

2010-02-28T03:23:00.000-08:00

I

When did a cry of pain become the word,
or shout of joy proclaim a hunter's name?
To mimic bird or animal with dance
and song, came long before those constant signs
were formed with breath and tongue as human speech.
But who decreed which grunt or scream should mean
hunger, thirst or water and mouth that feasts
on grubbed root, berry or fresh slaughtered beasts?

Pointing, touching and vocalising formed
a little stock of sounds for the leader
to impose a lexicon on his band:
the wind, the rain, the sun and moon became
magical sounds and gestures of the hand,
signs that could conjure up what was not there,
and so bestow the wisdom to deceive,
that devious basis of shamanic power.

And those who could not learn remained dumb beasts
to be shuffled off to low servitude.
Mayhap some babbling child became a fool
until grown savant, broke a tribal rule
of silence and became a talking clown,
tolerated by his small mob as mad
but good to laugh at for a half chewed bone,
but then cast out to wander off alone.

In some chilly cave, gorged on mushroom tart,
our sage may have beheld some shining god,
bearing the gifts of poesy and song
and, inspired, rushed back to the little throng
to share with them his new found powers of speech.
risking all on performance of his art,
there to be driven out by shaking spears
or to be welcomed home with grateful tears.

II

When the world had grown rich with spoken words,
and wise shamans had moved from songs to signs
those queer lines pressed on clay or carved on bones
appeared as sacred writ on standing stones:
secret language known only to a few,
preserved the power of scribes and priest who knew
that meaning carved on obelisks or tombs
would outlast mortal flesh from royal wombs.

Writing became the new game of power:
drawing contracts for pots of oil and grain
was all the same to the assiduous scribe,
but laws and speeches of great princes called
for subtler minds who weighed the loss or gain
that might hang upon the right turn of phrase
to calm an angry mob that could erase
a century of plutocratic ease.

Then libraries and scriptoria came,
where silence ruled and masters of the scrolls
accumulated works by men of fame,
and preserved the ruler's laws and decrees.
Knowledge, stored up like sacks of grain, became
the aim, attracting wandering scholars who,
by degrees, established their own schools too,
each with its rites and most peculiar rules.

The heaped up mountains of subtle doctrine
caused an avalanche of violent strife,
when youth, intelligence and beauty clashed
with desert troglodytes who'd tired of life.
The monotheists could not tolerate
so many contradictory points of view,
they sliced the font of learning to the bone
and set alight her seat of learning too.

III

Now safely in the care of monks and priests
the words basked in bold illumination,
scripted on white calf skin by fish stained hands
amid arabesques of red, green and gold,
God's glory was revealed to western lands,
until German monks and printers unleashed,
on rag paper, a leaden storm of words
set to be read by draper or great lords.

Once set free, to roam university
or private hall, the political tract
or scientific fact, laid plain and bare
the corruption or scandalous affair
of corpulent king or venal patrician,
seemed to pave the way to freedom for all,
but soon led to the gibbet or the noose,
once the dogs of law and order were let loose.

The need for lexicography was seen,
by Dr Johnson, then Noah Webster too,
who sensed the time had come ponder on
all the English words that had ever been.
Imprisoned at last in leather binding,
the word-hoard was finally brought to book,
so to find a word's accepted meaning
the curious scholar had not far to look.

The wordsmith jerks the strings of memory,
a clumsy puppeteer who mimics life,
but poets know that words must represent
the world of sensual play before the sign
can intervene and kill each pleasant state,
dreams or sublime feelings of joy or strife.
The art commands each desiccated word
to bathe in life's fountain and re-hydrate.

The Cry

2010-02-25T01:31:00.000-08:00

A lonely ape sat on the highest rock,
beneath the circling stars and wondered why,
but then forgot what it was that moved him
to emit the dreadful cry that echoed
down the chasms beneath the darkening sky.

At rivers end there is no rhythmic sea,
just a muddy hole bounded by salt marsh
where thirsty beasts huddle in steaming mire
and baleful raptors circle patiently,
waiting for one to stumble and expire.

The city's glittering organ pipes rise up,
self reflecting in narcissistic prayer,
they sing silently of wealth and power,
swaying a foot or two in mourning air,
to Mammon's strains of infinite despair.

Red, green and amber, the congregation's
conga snakes below, exhaling foul airs.
Within, the informatics screens glow blue,
counting up the souls of commodities,
in mockery of ozone's failing hue.

High in the boardroom the ape screams again,
feeling the vertigo of falling stocks
as pain, but conquers fear with bonus plans.
Beyond, the desert and the mountains wear
that calm expression that was always there.

Mystere

2010-02-22T00:51:00.000-08:00

She will not reveal her identity,
or show her face to a curious world,
except for a brief glimpse, in a mirror
or a fragmented image here and there.

The lone suitor must prowl among the trees,
praying for a flash of bright clothing that
would signify his prey is moving near,
gracefully on foot or astride her horse.

Lying in wait, telephoto lens bared,
a sudden crunch of gravel and white flash
flushes him from his hide as Mercedes
clad, she wings by to some assignation.

Darkness falls, and worried night-jars chatter;
the stars peep out, soon to be covered by
moonlit clouds drifting over chimney pots,
where a few lights gleam behind ancient glass.

Waking to dawn's fog filtered misery,
a car door clunks and the house doors bang shut,
too late for even the slightest glimpse of
his elusive quarry who remains discrete.

Where the noble cheek and the merry eye
that struck the errant heart with deadly fire?
That convex geometry of beauty glimpsed
but once must now remain a mystery.

Dream City

2010-02-21T19:54:00.000-08:00

Living within the riotous realm of flesh
we forget duties owed to gravity,
until we stumble and fall to soft earth,
or sharp flinty ground, unexpectedly.

Even within our own teeming city,
our rule is slight, where breath and beating heart,
autonomous and true, make us forget
that their feigned allegiance is fleeting too.

Each motion of limbs seems to follow will,
another name for doing what seems right,
in seeking to satisfy appetite
and dark desiring of the inner ghost.

All our senses tell us in unison:
'this is real, this is you, they are other,
total strangers, outside your city gates,
not to be admitted, at least not yet'.

What goes on within is more alien
than those companions of our social life;
fellow images on our inner screens
where life's dark drama flickers fitfully.

Geometries of plants and animals
speak convincingly of law and design
but beneath all flows an endless river
of seething chaos so much more malign.

Our weighty substance is forged from pleasure
and increasing pains: the I is dancing
alone in delusion's bright theatre,
treading its treacherous, subconscious boards.

And when the curtain's drawn, sleep lulls us too
into some nebulous remembrance of
a world that never was and cannot be
those unknown canyons of reality.

Waiting Room

2010-02-03T04:29:00.000-08:00

The future is a doorway with no door
and the present a room where no waiting
is possible, unless it is the last
room, hospital ward or mortuary.
Of course, it might not be a room at all:
a pavement, hard and cold upon the cheek,
a patch of damp grass, bedewed by morning,
or a sandy beach with driftwood and shells,
a library, perhaps, sudden collapse,
from a chair or through an open window,
falling, half surprised by quick gravity.
Not now, no, never now but later on,
when there has been some warning of the end,
an announcement of probability.
Meanwhile, pass again through all those old doors
preserved in memory: Doors to those rooms
with their promises of desires fulfilled
or sanctuaries from danger or despair.
Wander alone in deserted mansions,
among the dusty splendour of lost lives,
or sit here and now in life's anteroom.

Oleander

2010-02-01T17:40:00.000-08:00

The avenue of oleanders ran

from the hollow of the suburban sprawls

to the gum tree lined road which once began

as forest track between the rocky walls

of a much eroded volcanic range.

A sea rose bound path of shady bushes

rose in stately clumps of gothic foliage

waving in the breeze like giant rushes

as bloomed on attic shores in Hero's Age,

those blossoms clutched in drowned Leander's hand.

Glorious masses of flowers pink and red

lifted the spirits of kids off to school,

gave joy to lovers with blooms overhead,

soon to be downcast by a Council rule,

writ by fools in antipodean Thule.

Foreign, toxic, too fatal to allow,

oleander was added to the list

of dangerous pests that councils must not grow

in public parks or nooks where lovers tryst:

and the order was given, "root them out".

Brown stubbled gnomes in green livery came

quickly with chain saws, spades and loam filler,

and slashed down the blooming lot with no shame,

gouged out roots or sprayed them with weed killer,

and planted the native lilly pilly.

Now order has been restored to nature

and insurance companies' fears assuaged

we must wait some years for lilly's stature

to rival oleander's when she's aged:

vain hope for such a vapid little bush.

A few green shoots of oleander thrust

up hopefully from the earth after rain,

fatal signals to those who feel they must

with diligent hate mow them down again:

beauty sacrificed to bureaucracy.

Death Note

2010-01-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

One more small death will hardly move our hearts
beyond their customary heartlessness:
inured to claims of second hand distress
they soon return to a steadier beat.
Far away, the chaos and screams of death
and misery must become attuned to
our habits of compassionate response.
The Earth moved, but you did not die, Fabienne,
There was work to be done and family
relying on your daily heroism.
You did not falter or fail when they came
to protect the rights of private property,
and the unseen masters whose laws they serve.
Your last thoughts were for your small possessions,
and their importance to your family,
when the bullets spread your blood upon the street.
In your name, then, let those who caused your death
suffer the most awful torments of Hell.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/26/haiti-earthquake-shooting-girl-story

Fortune's Rules

2010-01-14T04:29:00.000-08:00

Our wandering home is a dangerous place:
now and then the Earth adjusts its mantle,
or takes breath and lets loose a hurricane
upon our carefully protected lives.

Falling walls, burning ash, or creeping floods
remind us of our small stock of fortune
when forced to play in nature's casino
where the house rules are hard to determine.

Mostly we feel safe inside our boxes,
watching the fate of others on flat screens,
shadow beings guarding against our fears
until misfortune crashes through the door.

The hungry and the poor cry out for help:
often there is none, or when aid comes
it gives only temporary relief that
is followed by a lesser misery.

The mangled and torn struggle in the dust
but we are too distant to hear their cries
until their tortured images appear
on our ubiquitous computer screens.

Our mirrored pain or pity soon abates
as ten thousand words beat upon our brains,
depleting shallow wells of empathy,
dulling compassion's broad but arid plains.

In our safe and comfortable havens
we cannot feel the surging agonies
of the snapped bones, the pulverised flesh or
the awful fear that death is drawing near.

We see the incident occur and hear
the reporter's rational tone explaining
the situation, while the camera's eye
picks out the highlights of the tragic scene.

Broken buildings and belongings are mixed
with the tattered remnants of human life,
stunned zombies circumambulate a road
as flies converge upon fresh breeding grounds.

In a while, weighty misery may prick
our conscience just enough to overcome
the inertia of will divorced from pain
to find and type that credit card number.

Foolish Wine

2009-12-31T03:01:00.000-08:00

When the fool begins to play the lover
the wiser fool's the fooler of another:
none other than his wiser muse amused
who delights in the foolish fool abused.
A muse provokes the poet when she's mute
her fingers toying with her unstrung lute,
as passions fruit hangs heavy on the vine,
the press of love is filled with foolish wine.
Speak, from the belly of your instrument,
let us hear the depths of your heart's intent,
beat upon the frets of passion's rhythm,
stir up foolish hearts and all those with them
who cast wit aside in passion's favour;
foolish wines breathe the most heady flavour.

Bookend

2009-12-27T19:40:00.000-08:00

Out of this now rises that future when
this now becomes the shadow we call then,
a conundrum in the clay of being
smeared by time and moulded into meaning.

Within each now a world is built anew,
complete, entirely in itself a view
of that ego striving and remaking
heart-beaten paths between now and dying

Images, sounds and sense rise up to make
a dazzling panoply, just for the sake
of preserving that teeming bag of skin
and wayward journey to that carnal sin.

Yearning nomads on the road to nowhere
we monads flee the here and now to where
our gonads lead us on a merry chase
to that inner land, our most happy place.

Words rise unbidden and conjoin to form
those chains of meaning that define the norm
by which we know the world is what it seems
and not some supernatural land of dreams.

Words rattle on the ear like passing trains,
riding rails of discourse forged in our brains,
towards destinations not of our choice
determined by some dark, unconscious voice.

The distant now that was our beginning
marked in units of our planet's spinning
will become the bookend of our season
and, between, a book that had no reason.

Our Lady Earth

2009-12-21T16:13:00.000-08:00

Our Lady Gaia
hallowed be thy name,
may your reign continue
and your ways remain the same
in Heaven as they have always been.
Give us our daily sustenance
and forgive our transgressions
as we must forgive yours against us
and lead us not into unreason
but deliver us from ignorance.

Our Mistress, and only home
foundation of our being,
protect us with your breath
from the wrath of your Master,
round whose awful fires you dance and turn,
who fecundates your body from afar.
Between the circuits of Venus and Mars
you blindly follow him, your shining Sun
among those distant and too many stars
turning slowly in spirals of despair.

We, your youngest children, are myriad,
our small fires burn away your precious breath,
mingling your life inseparably with ours,
tiny stars we blaze and quickly fade
but together feed insatiably
upon your withered breasts.
In your youth, you spawned monsters,
now petrified or burning on our pyres,
and the trillion eyes of the smallest things
that watch your skies, not knowing hope.

Obedient to your voracious laws
we have lusted and consumed your wealth,
enjoyed your bounteous ease of youth,
and suffered from your moody ways,
the pains of drought and joys of better days.
Gaia, always fickle and inventive
we must now face your mindless enmity
your finest progeny cast out
as you endlessly create anew,
blindly shuffling your genetic cards.

When our last wanderer sinks down,
exhausted from your cloudy temper,
and mingles with your teeming soil,
who then will praise your cornucopia?
Millennia, aeons must pass away
before new sentient progeny
could rise triumphant from your hardy womb,
and notice that the rocks bear faint traces
of our kind, who share what we call the mind.
How long would you allow them to endure?

Loggerheads

2009-12-16T17:03:00.000-08:00

Behind the mask the supreme egoist
flaunts himself upon the stage of comic art,
no crimes too great to shuffle off with wit
are absent from his merry masquerade.

Childish fingers grip the dripping wafers,
melted ice-cream running down upraised arms:
the mothers lift the smallest up to see
the ire that reigns within the human heart.

Crouched down within the red-striped canvas stage
the Professor jerks the loggerheads around
to the squawking sound of his swazzling reed,
while seagulls feed on scraps upon the ground.

What journeys the hunchback has undergone,
since his surprising birth from Zeus's thigh,
from Greece, through Rome and France to his new home,
washed up and confined on England's windy shores.

Mean, vicious and crafty, Pulcinello
struts, hunched over, with timid Cockerel step,
pretending to be stupid, but clutching
a club behind his back, ready to strike.

Nose nearly touching chin, he talks without
pausing, his rictus grin beguiles the crowd,
who cheer his escapades and sympathise
with his vicissitudes and suffering.

The ancient plot has been transformed by time
and place, where clown tries to befriend Toby
the dog, who bites Punch on the nose and old
Scaramouche beats Punch until Punch fights back.

And so it goes, with endless violence
our hero murders wife and child, doctor,
constable and even the hangman too
when they try to bring our hero to justice.

Every man and woman looks on, knowing
in their hearts that the cruel blows rained down
on Punch's crooked back will be answered
ten fold by the undefeated peasant clown.

What better education for the child,
as foil to mild doctrines of religion,
than the knock-about fun of Punch and Judy
that tells the awful truth of human life.

Valhalla

2009-12-12T14:32:00.000-08:00

Aaron could see from the window monitor that the Earth had shrunk to a grey dot, set in a black sea punctuated by glistening stars. The biggest shock, though, was the overpowering brilliance of the sun, electronically muted to protect the eyes of the travellers. Born after the destruction of the old atmosphere he had never seen the Sun before, except as a brighter patch in the daytime sky. The Moon and the stars were no longer visible beneath the dense clouds that now wreathed the Earth. Everything was grey and gloomy, but often punctuated by violent storms that lit up the clouds from beneath as the torrents of rain washed everything away but the giant cities of the survivors and the matted forests in which they were embedded.

When the blue ticket had been delivered by special courier from the Retirement Commission it had been a shock: fifty-seven was hardly old, even in the long established pyramid of Citadel Nine. He had heard about the great ships that left on a regular basis, but had taken little notice except when one of his colleagues had been summoned. Dora, his wife, had been shocked of course, and had hardly stopped weeping since the truth of their separation had sunk in. He had tried to explain that it was a necessary service to society, like the colonists on Mars who could never return, but they both knew the voyage on the black ship had a quite different purpose.

The lottery was fair, or so he believed, a privilege really in recognition of his public service. As a physicist, he had been involved in the fusion breakthrough that had replaced the nuclear plants that powered the pyramids. This had made life much more secure and had delivered virtually unlimited power to safeguard the Citadel against external attack and for all their economic needs. The population was relatively small compared with those who had been abandoned to the wastelands. All the food had to be grown hydroponically inside the vast structure, for nothing useful could live beyond its artificial borders.

The price for the continued existence of the community was strict economic control of all resources, including the population. There was a quota for children, and this was allocated without the possibility of appeal. For those not on the register, sterilisation was mandatory. The old idea of reproductive rights to satisfy individual needs was no longer possible and had passed out of social consciousness. Dora had been granted one child, but he had recently migrated to Citadel five, on the American continent, a much larger unit that provided more opportunities for the young than the European Citadels. There was even talk of reclaiming land for agriculture in the more favourable areas, but there were no such plans for Europe, much of which had suffered nuclear pollution from the rush for energy solutions. Solar power had quickly become useless as the cloud cover became permanent, turning the planet into another Venus.

The number of travellers was not widely publicised, and he guessed it varied each year according to the managed birth and death rates. Age was a factor, because no one under forty was included in the lottery, unless they requested it. He thought it might be around one thousand, out of a population of roughly a million housed inside the pyramid. There were a few scientific and military outposts dotted through the forests but these would have numbered no more than a few tens of thousands.

The popular story, learned in childhood, was that travellers would be sent to colonise the new planet that had entered the solar system just over a hundred years ago. It had been named Valhalla, presumably because the Earth's population was entering the last days of the great civilisation that had been destroyed by the unstoppable progress of climate change. Images from satellites had shown a completely black planet about the size of Mercury that barely reflected any sunlight.

He had been about twelve years old when news of the planet's approach through the Oort cloud had filtered through from the dying satellites. The energy wars were in full swing, including tactical nuclear exchanges in the Middle East. Miraculously, all out war had been avoided, but the vast displacement of populations had led to the breakdown of all but the pockets of civilisation that had erected the energy pyramids. It had been a time of great uncertainty, as to whether they could be completed and secured before the starving hordes succumbed to the hostile environment outside. The sieges had lasted for many years, in dying waves of hopeless struggle between the powerless masses of outsiders and the military organisation of the pyramid dwellers. Eventually, nothing remained outside but the ugly tangle of vegetation that had adapted to the ruined atmosphere and the burning temperatures beneath the roiling clouds.

The chosen ones were not allowed to congregate in large numbers, but there had been a celebration of about twenty of the travellers in his sector of the Citadel. They had been given special presents for their families and granted permission to move freely about the pyramid for a few weeks, the nearest thing to a holiday that was on offer in the work orientated community. There had been some muted discussion of what it all meant, and even attempts at jocularity, but the end result was a cloud of worry and depression once the party was over. He had been given a bottle of tranquillisers, but threw them away, deciding it would be cowardly to use them.

A short week later he was lining up at the vast dome, beneath the sinister bulk of the transporter that would take them on 'holiday' to Valhalla. Saying goodbye to Dora was the worst part, but half his mind was focussed on his own fate in the darkness of space, where the black planet had stabilised some fifty million miles beyond Jupiter. As a scientist, he could not remain unexcited about actually passing near Jupiter, a sight that only the travellers got to see. This, he supposed, was what much of the fuss was about. They were going into a heavenly region that might even hold out the prospect of a better life: nobody knew but the travellers who had gone before them on the robot guided vessel that would return to Earth after they had disembarked for Valhalla.

After a long ride on the motorised pavement, they had been herded into elevators by uniformed monitors, and whisked upwards into the belly of the Leviathan at frightening speed. Instructed by small drones they were guided into their seats in pods of twenty. Soft music played all the while and quite luxurious refreshments were freely available. The interior was otherwise Spartan, but well furnished with monitors showing the world outside the transporter. Some of the travellers conversed with each other, while others maintained a gloomy silence: Aaron, too, remained subdued.

There was a knot in his stomach as the robot voices issued endless instructions about the rigours of take-off and the pleasant flight thereafter. He knew a bit about the electromagnetic pulse engines, because they worked on similar principles to the plasma bottles he had designed for the artificial suns that powered the pyramids. Enormous repulsive power would build up and hurl the giant ship into the clouds at around nine Gs. Some of the passengers would not survive such strains, but that hardly seemed to matter. Maybe he would be one of the lucky one to go early.

The take-off was more terrifying than he had imagined, but the interior magnetic fields were used to cushion the enormous G forces. In less that five minutes, they were above the cloud cover and exposed to the light of the Sun, at least via the wrap around monitor that gave the impression that they were completely exposed to the airless space outside. The nearest drone explained that he could turn off the monitor if he wished, and ride in the muted darkness of the pod, but the view was too exciting to waste cowering in fear. The experience of the traveller was indeed a privilege and a wonder beyond belief, after years of confinement inside the utilitarian environment of the pyramid. He thought of Dora weeping below, but there was nothing he could do but participate in the experience until the end.

The journey was a long one; even with the ion drive speed of some two million kilometres an hour Aaron knew it would take about twenty-five days to reach Jupiter and several days after that to Valhalla. The majesty of the stars was incredible, but the human mind soon tires of even the most magnificent experiences. Staring at stars, however bright, soon palls, especially when faced with the dangers of the unknown. The in-flight entertainment was extensive, ranging from a wealth of programs about astronomy, pure science and the arts to pornography. Needless to say Aaron avoided the latter as quite inappropriate to the seriousness of the voyage. Then there was sleep, aided by a selection of psychotropic drugs that promised thrilling experiences that had never been available in the Citadel. Morality, it seemed, was an earthbound constraint, which did not apply to the travellers, who were being invited to indulge in all manner of hedonism.

He reflected a little on the huge cost of the enterprise and its utter uselessness to the community trapped below. Perhaps it was the kind of hope that religionists had indulged in before the collapse of the old world. As a scientist, he had little sympathy with delusions of longevity, let alone immortality. His satisfaction had come from serving the community and the aesthetic delights of scientific discovery. Still, there seemed no reason now not to enjoy what delights were on offer on this unique journey into the unknown. He could see from their expressions that many of his fellow travellers were partaking of the multitude of delights on offer, and he gradually succumbed to the sybaritic life-style that seemed to be expected of him.

The days passed quickly, once he had become accustomed to the cycle of drugged sleep and the intensely pleasurable experiences available through a combination of electronic stimulation and drugs. When the finally reached Jupiter, the giant planet loomed with awe inspiring power in the monitors, rivalling anything he had experienced before. It remained in view for several days as they flew past the ever-changing panorama of the biggest weather system in the Solar system. The four great moons provided some further distractions until the great planet shrank in size as they moved swiftly to the far side. He had seen many astronomical images before but never with such intensity, and it was with a sense of foreboding that he realised his journey was nearly over.

The deceleration could be felt as a continual force as they approached Valhalla. His first view of the planet was in some ways more frightening than Jupiter, perhaps because they were much closer as the great ship sought out a stable orbit. The planet appeared smooth and featureless, and very, very black. The robots began to twitter information about what was to happen next. He was amazed to hear that they would be actually landing on the planet, not in the transporter but in the pods, which would be detached from the mother ship. He could hardly believe it, but what else did he expect.

As they moved closer to the planet, mysterious geometrical features began to appear on the dark surface, which could not possibly have been natural rock formations. The detail increased until the landscape seemed to be some kind of complex artefact, which reminded him of the old printed circuit boards that had once been used in computers. The robots began issuing instructions in earnest now, warning about the discomforts that might be experienced as the fifty or so pods detached from the mother ship. With little time to prepare, he felt the sudden surge as the pod was ejected and saw in the still active monitor that he was among a regular formation of glistening pods showering down towards the blackness of the surface.

The fall towards the surface was terrifying but exhilarating, and his hopes soared when the monitors began to display what appeared to be vast cities below the falling craft. It was all there, the advanced society that men had always dreamed about, perfect in every detail, the glistening buildings that must contain countless millions of settlers from the once fertile Earth. He understood the secrecy now. It would have been very unsettling for the majority on Earth to know of this far flung Utopia, the finest achievement of a race almost doomed to extinction by its rapacious way of life.

The pods slowed in unison now, as they approached a vast landing ground upon which many vehicles moved about their daily business. Aaron realised that the surface was deliberately black to maximise the absorption of radiation from the distant sun. It was all too amazing to take in, and he gasped in wonder at the scale of the achievement by the tiny, vulnerable creature that was man. He felt a twinge of sadness that Dora could not be here to share this moment of surprise and triumph.

The long-range cameras on the mother ship recorded the succession of flashes as the pods struck the barren surface of the planet, proof that another mission had been successfully accomplished. The Retirement Commission registers would be updated when the data reached Earth and any pensions due to relatives credited to their accounts. The dream of a new Earth and a new life was kept alive, and unrest quelled for the time being. The public relations division would celebrate with a modest party to mark the success of another mission to the dark planet.

*******

Restless Dust

2009-12-07T19:51:00.000-08:00

To speak or remain silent is a choice
that we can make, but not to stay the mind
behind the restless words; thought, spoken or
set down, is a more stringent discipline.
To ignore or be deaf to unwelcome
news is a choice that suits our purpose best,
when mind will not be still at our command.

The impulses of mind are never still,
but flash and scintillate unseen behind
the dull screen of habitual response.
In sleep, the music continues to play,
albeit in quiet whispers, rustling through
old leaves, fallen memories of past lives
real or imagined, rolling stones in streams

Layer on layer of semblances and signs
are sifted and arranged into the past,
discarded or held ready for fresh use
when light and sound stream in through tiny gates
with the endless question, is this a new
configuration or is it déjà vu,
or maybe unreliable memory?

The wind that is not restless is no wind
at all, but an improbable average
of air's gasses in equilibrium,
its motion independent of all sound
until mouths and ears make their messages
heard above the atmosphere's unceasing roar,
adding meaning where there was none before.

How calm the seas would be without the winds
to stir the surface into waves and spume,
like the mind endlessly disturbed by sense
to respond with motions in its defence
against real or imagined enemies,
or seek out ways to preserve the idea
that the cacophony it knows is real.

Deep beneath the earth, massive changes ebb
and flow, fissures form and mountains slowly
grow, unnoticed until the sudden strain
tears earth, sea and sky into a new Hell
for the tiny creatures scurrying below:
and in the brain, the subterranean
forces slumber, until they burst out too.

The Sun, so calm from where we stand, is the
paradigm of violent motion, restless
in its fearsome grandeur, implacable
in its burning majesty, so that we,
insignificant children of the stars
seem just like ephemeral motes of dust
rising and falling in a fading beam.

Kaleidoscope

2009-11-30T20:34:00.000-08:00

Beauty in the viewer's eye, deceiving
by intent, turning chaos to order
by a slight twist or turning of the wrist,
endless snowflakes permute from coloured stars,
small beads or snippets of shiny paper:
sudden shifts of delight held frozen for
a magical moment, before a drastic
change befalls the prismatic world of kalos,

Light, conspiring with glass and geometry,
creates a fascinating world of joy,
a seeming order imposed on mere dross:
endless play in a tiny tube or box
that contains the infinity that we
desire to inhabit and control with
the easy graces and careless gestures
of a god at play in the happy fields
of hope and endless possibility.

A musical instrument for the eye,
the jerky hurdy-gurdy of patterns
eventually palls, as the childish
visions migrate to that complexity
of living forms that cunningly obscure
the awful truth of the inanimate
and arid geometry of our being.

Warfighter

2009-11-28T03:43:00.000-08:00

Dog faced and dead eyed the warfighters sit
behind their winking terminals, guiding
the gyre of the gold clad satellites,
aligning and repositioning their eyes,
and their ever open ears to the ground,
listening to the coded babel streaming
from a billion mobile phones, and to the
signals from the hunting predator drones.

Medalled and beribboned officers
from WestPoint orient toward the East,
guarding the homeland's vultures gathered for
their never ending feast, pointing the spear
dripping with poisoned intelligence, honed
and sharpened by daily propaganda,
at the long imagined beast that shambles
in the shadows of their patriotic hearts.

The green-eyed girl pulls the flimsy cloth across
the crying baby's eyes to hide its strange
deformity, cursed by Allah and the
deadly chemicals that swim within her womb.
She does not know about the socialites
whose glittering charity affairs fund
both the bag of grain spilled at her feet
and the rain of death a joystick click away.

The bearded taliban warrior squints
into the dusty haze at the tiny dot,
and spits, his brain a maze of daily prayers
and faint hopes for the rain that will nourish
the poppies that will eventually become
the people's bread, after the crop of western
junkies bloom like fungi in the bin lined
alleys of the enemy's decaying streets.

The dust blows in the children's eyes stirred up
by the churning wheels and tracks of tanks
and Humvees, drawing lines across the sand,
soon to be can-opened by an IED
or blown apart by a well-aimed RPG.
Neither warrior nor girl will live to see
the foreign blood upon their soil, because
the slit mouthed sergeant guides his missile true.

The Angel's Smile

2009-11-25T01:02:00.000-08:00

I have seen an angel smile at our world
of poor delusion, at our confusion,
over simple things, which to an angel
are easy as a smile would be to us.

I have seen the pinkness of its features
and the ruby of its lips as they smiled
upon our simplicity, exposing
the white tips of angel's teeth between

those lips that woman can never have kissed,
passionately or even in devotion:
androgynous and without desire for
another creature to complete its being.

So intelligent, this automaton,
whose wings seem atrophied or hidden from
human view, but suddenly spring open
in a blaze of light, as its eyes close in

contemplation of worlds beyond our sight.
What rapture is upon those fine features,
so unlike the inconstant face of man
who rages at his fate or weeps for joy.

Emotionless, the angel folds its wings
according to the most advanced theorems
of origami, which lie beyond the ken
of mere men or those great creatures kneeling,

bowed down in prayer before the throne of God,
whose host resembles an infinite field
of wheat that will nourish nothing and no
one other than The One who reaps their praise.

Three Cheers for Santa

2009-11-21T16:47:00.000-08:00

Santa Claus sent an elf round to my door

disguised, it seemed, as a religious boor:

he had two fairies with him for support,

pretending to be children, so I thought.

The elf beamed, waved a pamphlet in my face,

and said, "I'm here to save human race".

my wife whispered from behind the door,

"It's the Mormons, they've been round here before".

"No, no, leave this to me," I said with glee,

"I just want to hear what he has to say,"

(always ready for a bit of cruel sport)

"I'll send him packing soon, I know his sort."

"Santa has a message of glad tidings,"

holding up a book with Christmas bindings,

the elf said confidently, with a smile,

"I hope to read it to you in a while."

"Right, and Yggdrasil was the Christmas tree,

decked out in pretty Northern Lights, you see,"

I said sarcastically, hoping for

a short cut to his tales of Christmas lore.

"Oh no," the elf replied, "Richard Dawkins

is quite wrong. Santa really does drive in

a sleigh, the North lights are the landing strip

for his hyper-dimensional reindeer-ship."

"I thought Kris Kringle was of German mien,

but your message is from an alien?"

"Yes, there has been a change of policy,

about who is bad and who acts nicely".

"This criterion no longer applies

now human hearts are filled with hate and lies,

besides, the North Pole has begun to sink

and we have lost our summer skating rink."

"Global warming I suppose" I replied.

"exactly, loss of faith in Christmastide

has undermined the etheric stasis

of the underworld that's Santa's basis."

"We're surely doomed, unless you take my hand

and chant: 'We want Santa'. You understand.

Carbon dioxide is not the problem here,

it's simply a shortage of Christmas cheer."

The youngest girl fairy began to cry,

"Please help," she said "if you would only try

and be nice, for once, and listen to our plea,

we could go home and have our Christmas tea."

"What exactly am I supposed to do,

save Santa and stop global warming too?"

"Never mind," the elf said crossly, "we can't stay,

I can see you don't mean to help, anyway."

With this remark he gathered up his things,

and flew off down the drive on stumpy wings,

My wife said, "You were rude again today,

I hope there's no damage from that hyper-sleigh."

Speak Bones

2009-11-19T21:02:00.000-08:00

The gleaming bones lie restless in the sea,
picked clean by the hagfish that squirms and sucks
the bloated bag of flesh that still remains
of some lost sailor or would-be immigrant.

The desk light glistens on the worried brow
of the lately deposed man of power
and glints on lenses over rheumy eyes
that flit upon the endless, scheming words.

Heavy jowls ruminate on the meaning,
the mean mouth turned down in a scowl of scorn:
the well-worn phrases burnt into his brain
must be repeated over and again.

The shifty words lie restless in his mind,
disturbed by the waves of controversy,
rearranging themselves from false to true
by the logic of hatred and despair.

The heavy shoulders heave and shrug away
fearful thoughts as the sweaty hands lay down
a sheaf of papers and some grey reports
that document the plans of covert men.

The desert bones lie piled beneath the sand
in random heaps, some hastily interred
in grieving sheets or boxes roughly hewn,
scrounged from the heaps of military waste.

Too many bones to be accounted for
by Infidels or sparrow counting sheep,
their accusing mines of calcium lie
unrecorded but heavy on his sleep.

The capacious earth receives its tribute
without demur, its countless minions
recycle and reuse war's refuse heaps,
layering its geology with death.

The gold gleams dully on the guilty hand,
as it reaches into the bottom drawer
for the medication that will preserve
a life, honoured only by a hapless wife.

His muscles and his bones strain with the load
as rising from his seat, the ageing toad
leans heavily on the bone handled stick
that keeps him on his feet since he fell sick.

The guns gleam silent in the cabinet,
a well-oiled reminder of his status
and the feathery piles of avian meat
that yearly rained down from the autumn skies.

Slim pickings compared with the hail of flesh
and bones brought down by presidential pens
that signed the secret horde of documents,
sealed for a hundred years in private dens.

Old Then Young

2009-11-18T04:17:00.000-08:00

First young then old, there's no escape from that

you say, but from the vantage point of age,

when actors are about to leave the stage

without applause, a life that's fallen flat

cries out for yet another curtain call

before some fatal pratfall ends it all.

Do you remember that first Christmas tree?

when mother held her darling up to see

the candles and the tinsel finery,

in days before the blitz when they felt free

to laugh at tyrants strutting through the streets,

and we not old enough for boiled sweets.

Running on the lawn, imperfect cartwheels,

forward rolls, twirling round fast and falling

down, the world is spinning your head reeling

from vertigo, remember how that feels?

Probably not, but such past memories

await their place in your untold stories.

When puberty set in and warned the host

the seething body not the mind is king,

chemical bonding was the only thing

that satisfied the growing child the most.

This natural imperative was blocked

by grimy hypocrites who said, "we're shocked".

Our young, ambitious thoughts and acts prevailed:

exactly what direction they should take

was unclear, except to those on the make

whose parents, without pity, never failed

to force upon their kind the proper mould

that made their children prematurely old.

For the rest, unguided by convention,

wandering off the well worn tracks, among

woods and thorny thickets of right and wrong,

the quest began, to challenge and question

every impediment to the rampant growth

of those glad branches of our gorgeous youth.

When joy was safely circumscribed, marriage

proved how right the circular argument

was, that repressed joy and youth's prurient

but delightful urges that fend off age:

all that energy must be used for work

by bovine labourer or sheepish clerk.

The remedy for scarcity was work

but the urgent need for that ceaseless toil

was rarely questioned as we tilled the soil

or balanced those ledgers we'd rather shirk.

Work minus sleep left little time for aught

but careless merriment or futile thought.

Under grim flags of red or striped with blue

the state guides and enforces all it can

the fate of the average man or woman

being most determined by what others do.

When the time came and progeny popped out

It was all over bar that painful shout.

The bitter conjunction of nature's plan,

and the machinations of devious minds,

bent on exploiting toilers of all kinds,

mapped out the concourse of the race we ran.

In middle age prosperity peeped out,

but soon retreated at the first redoubt.

The cycle of generation came round,

and what we received so ungratefully

we spitefully passed to our progeny,

who, we must hope, became less tightly bound

to the economic merry-go-round

that we rode lightly to our dying ground.

Old then young was, perhaps, our final hope,

invented by ageing psychiatrists

who secretly hankered for loving trysts

with pubescent patients who could not cope

with life's bewildering and cruel schemes

that, like ours, end as unsatisfied dreams.

With all the hunting and gathering done,

tending the flickering fires of life's lost loves

is slight recompense for the fateful moves

that led to losing games we should have won.

Now our instruments of love lie broken

hope remains that wisdom's worm has woken.

The Pole of Scorn

2009-11-11T19:30:00.000-08:00

Know you how to sing a tune?
Know you how to carve a rune?
Know you how to cast a spell?
Aye, I know that very well.

Then go into the mountains wild,
And take a virgin undefiled,
Carve her name upon a rock,
And descry the entrails of a cock.

If critics say your song’s unfit,
Drain their speeches of all wit,
Shrink their clothes so they don’t fit
And drown them in the people’s spit.

Make all their words seem dyslexic,
Churn their stomachs with dyspeptic,
Fill their drinking cups with arsenic,
And let their wives be anorexic.

Know you how to read a line?
Know you how to prick with tine?
Know you how dye with blood?
Aye, I know that well and good.

Then go into the hazel wood
And cut yourself a wand that’s good,
Lead poor dobbin from the field
And lay his head upon your shield.

If raiders come and steal your corn,
Carve magic runes upon your horn,
Blow hard a blast for Odin’s ear
To fill their thieving hearts with fear.

Call up the winds to tear their sails,
And pincers cruel to rip their nails,
Close all ears to their woeful wails,
And clap them into stinking jails.

Know you how to tie a knot?
Know you how to pray a lot?
Know you how to blot a life?
Aye, I have my trusty knife.

Then go into their drinking halls,
Splash their blood upon the walls,
Cut the hand that lifts the cup
And drive them out with headstrong tup.

If kings and princes rape your wives,
Blast their skin with deadly hives,
Drive them mad with nettle stings,
And close up tight their fleshy rings.

Set their sacred flags on fire,
Fill their friends with hateful ire,
Drive them out from every shire,
And make their library books expire.

Now you know the secret skald,
Avoid offending poets bald,
Lest heirs to Egil’s Pole of Scorn
Make you wish you’d ne’er been born.

Shiny Things

2009-11-09T21:35:00.000-08:00

It is the shiny things that fascinate
the childish eye and guide the questing hands
to satisfy what the brain calls its mind,
but after all those soft, round things have been
withdrawn, and their comforts replaced by pain,
the search begins of that other domain
that yields and resists our fondest desires.

The pin that pricks, the spark that burns, the eye
that gleams bright, but must not be poked or picked,
and a thousand more forbidden delights
that tease and beguile: the mysterious smile
behind the jewelled mask of cruel life;
the splinter and the knife, the broken glass,
the bruises and abrasions on soft flesh.

Before the metals were released by fire,
hands scuttled in the deep to claw the eye
from the musty oyster's shell, and delving
in stygian caves found specks of silver
or crystals of amethyst: beckoning
sirens to the desiring eye, seeking
its delight in the tiny and the bright.

Small accumulations of shells and beads,
feathers and nicely coloured seeds became
property and wealth, that foundation stone
of society that marks out the strong
from the weak and the angry from the meek.
Adorned in the glittering and the rare,
mankind's chieftains showed off their shiny ware.

Sharing the women out was hard enough
but how to deal with all that other stuff,
and the envious glances of the rivals
goaded by their ambitious sons and wives?
A few judicious gifts to the strongest,
or marriages to their fairest daughters
restored equity and balanced power.

Greed and envy gave way to kings and laws,
to divide by force of arms what was theirs
and yours, thus government evolved from strife
and conflict over ownerships of things,
including slaves and wives who did the work,
setting the owners free to contemplate
and enjoy all the finer things of life.

Luxury and uxorious delight
soon supplemented hunting animals
and men, but conspicuous consumption
attracted savage hordes, eager for their
share of booty, so warfare and great wealth
joined forces to defend their shiny piles
of gold and ornamented concubines.

Civilisations rose and fell, leaving
behind the detritus of their shining
past: piles of gold and trinkets to their gods
sank into the mud, overgrown by trees
or washed away by rivers and the flood:
their patient resurrection, piece by piece,
reveals lives of the wealthy steeped in blood.

Palaces and cathedrals rose and fell,
crammed full with all the finest works of art,
statuary, tapestries and murals
delight the eye with paintings, furniture
and jewels by Tiffany and Faberge:
soon enough dispersed by war and plunder
as the poor rise up and cannons thunder.

With peace, the houses of the bourgeoisie
were stuffed with every good and bric-a-brac
that took the fancy of idle housewives:
pearls for girls and fob-watches for the men,
pianos and gramophones with gold needles,
fancy mirrors, and silver tableware
jostled with candlesticks and gaudy clocks.

The engines of production, once let loose,
deluged the markets of the world with goods,
demanding ceaseless toil from lesser souls
and enslaving the wealthy with more goals
to possess the shiniest and the best
of everything avarice could digest.

Now cathedrals arise in every town,
as fast as fields are cleared and trees cut down:
glittering walls of glass contain boutiques
with the latest electronic trinkets,
winking with knowing eyes they speak in tongues
of endless plenty for all with credit
not yet exhausted by the quickening race.

Outside the stars are dimmed by human lights;
glittering towers reaching to greater heights,
dwarf the humbler joys of the simpler life:
a frosty morning with a million webs
adorned with dew, or snowflakes softly falling
on the hyacinth, just peeping through the
last vestiges of dark untrammelled earth.

Bottom Drawer

2009-11-05T21:11:00.000-08:00

The old man stoops, working in his garden,
his past lies living in the bottom drawer:
the old things stored there reveal, long hidden,
the dangers of the life he lived before.

An old squeezebox, hexagonal and brown,
still plays a tune, as once it did in France,
where brash young soldiery relieved a town
of wines and virgins at the local dance.

With gloved hands he squeezes smoke from the cone:
a few stragglers cling to the waxy comb,
while others circle angrily and drone,
about the slatted hive that is their home.

At playtime, the children come out of school:
they do not trespass on the well mown lawn,
'stay on the strip of flagstones' is a rule
the lame teacher, his daughter, has laid down.

Meanwhile, in the drawer, a shoulder belt
and silver flute suggest an earlier tale,
perhaps in South Africa on the Veldt,
than the Fields of Flanders or Paschendale.

In the garden, he ties up runner beans,
puffing on a well chewed pipe, he decides
to spray the roses next with nicotine
against aphids before he goes inside.

He leans closer to the battery wireless,
pencil and sports page ready in his hand:
his horse finishes but without success,
he stumps out to the music of the band.

Old magazines, beneath some well-worn sheets,
the Pink'un and La Vie Parisienne,
hint at past wartime fun in foreign streets:
precious memories of a younger man.

The bell clangs loudly and the children scream:
the old man returns to his lost Eden
away from the throng he resumes his dream
of prizes for the best local garden.

At the back of the drawer dully gleams
a battered Jew's harp, its crude iron bow
once twanged by the light of falling star-shell beams
in bloody trenches under winter snow.

After a cup of tea, some bread and braun,
equipped with trilby hat and walking stick,
the gardener heads to toc-H in the town,
where a brown ale or two will do the trick.

Pack of Lies

2009-10-30T22:35:00.000-07:00

0 The Fool
Do not despise me for what I lack,
the World's burden lies heavy on my back:
hare's foot in my pack and wooden spoon to
ward off the Devil on my journey to
the Moon. But, maybe I'll just return
to the Inn and sup another measure
of ale and wait my turn with greasy Joan.
Anyway, I think the fatted calf would
rather I delay the inevitable
reconciliation with the Father.

I The Magician
As first mountebank I appear as one,
ministering in the marketplace
to both the incredulous and the sly.
My legerdemain is swift and just:
bright coins soon disappear from dupes who stand
before my table; alderman or wife,
mesmerised by cup and pea beneath my hand.
Just a tap of my wand is all it takes
to take it all away, with one quick cut
of my accomplice's hidden knife.

II The High Priestess
If she has a face, it is never seen
in that impenetrable shadow where
above her gleam a circlet of stars, this
Queen of Heaven, seated with the book
of mysteries upon her knees, sees all
but reveals nothing to the common eye:
encompassing and bounding all things real
or imaginary, enthroned between
the pillars of chance and necessity,
one naked foot resting on the Moon.

III The Empress
Sired from the seeds of time and foaming sea,
she rules by love and sweet profligacy,
her pleasures she bestows in abundance
to allay the cruel pains of growth and life,
her gifts transcending the ennui
of dumb being and dull continuance.
Purple and yellow her flowers bloom, signs
of Earth's perpetual union with the sky.
Nothing lives but for her desiring breath
nor dies forever in Love's land of death.

IV The Emperor
But from love's chaos order comes, bearing
the crown and sceptre of rightful command,
decreed by form and number physis speaks
in geometric and unyielding tongues.
How can rule be lawful without a ruler?
lawyers argue by their blinkered rules,
so man reasons that love and freedom
must give allegiance to an Emperor,
aquiline and sanctified by holy sword,
to guide or bind the hands of wayward fools.

V The Hierophant
Temporal power does not rule alone where
the triple crown bows down before the hoar
and sacred mystery of winter's pall,
and Persephone's return from dark
Hades thrall weaves its way towards the light.
In caverns and catacombs militant
monks revere the child bound deep within
the circling zodiac and rocky tomb,
who springs with tauromachian power
to sacrifice the beast of winter's night.

VI The Lover
Now here I stand undecided, attired
in multicoloured coat, caught between love,
sacred and profane, and forced to choose
righteous duty or give in to beauty's
wayward boy. Overhead his deadly aim
will soon dispel those doubts and illusions
that I am free to choose between the
apple and the sacred tree. Why blame me
if I indulge my fancy, and taste joy
with She-Wolf or Chloe on life's stony way.

VII The Chariot
In princely robes, I grasp the reins of force
to draw the Sun along its stately course.
Wayward the dark horse but steadfast the white,
my path will be strewn with roses from dawn
to dusk or with my blood and broken husk.
In pursuit of power and glory I must
cast fear aside and trample opposition
underfoot in my celestial rush to write
my name in history; a meteoric
rise or falling star my destiny.

VIII Justice
Weighing which hearts are heavy and which light,
she sits sword in hand and contemplates
the Damocletian fate of gods and men.
Implacable and inevitable
are the laws that gape open the doors to Hell,
or to freedom and happiness as well.
Each seed of action contains within itself
the root and flower of its consequence.
Without choice, nature knows no sin or flaw:
expect no mercy where this rule is law.

IX The Hermit
Still looking for the way, I'm aged now,
my lamp guttering as the oil runs low.
But with each faltering step my mind grows clear,
as I steer midway between pain and joy.
I hold in abeyance all choices or
decisions which disturb the karmic track.
Like the planets, I wander down strange paths
preordained by the footsteps behind me,
glancing back at my steps in time I see,
the doleful traces of my destiny.

X The Wheel of Fortune
Lashed to the wheel we rise or fall by chance,
powerless to exercise the will or
win Fortune's favour or her baleful glance.
The paradox of will and destiny
resolved only in its contrate motion
or at the still centre of its endless
spin, where the wise take refuge from the world.
The will is but the motion of desire,
which drives the cycles of this awful gyre,
from which not even death provides relief.

XI Force
When the lion of the will is overcome,
the green tincture of the golden sun is
seen. The body becomes inviolate
and strong, exuding power and sweetness from
each pore. The hero returns undefeated
to the city, still bound by his promise
to overcome the cycle of the sun.
Jealous of his sister's love, false Phoebus
schemes to take back the hero's godly power.
Love's arrow strikes him bathing in the sea.

XII The hanged man
Powerless I hang inverted by
one foot from a tree, as others have done
before me and will again hereafter.
What does it mean? With eighteen signs I see
the world tree clearly with one eye closed, the
loving, fighting, healing and mastery
to be gained from thought and memory.
Now my sacrifice is over, I will
fly with ravens and see with eagle's eye,
riding through the branches of Yggdrasil.

XIII Death
Death's farmer does not sow but only reaps,
on high or low estate he levies tithes,
no one escapes the scythe of Thanatos.
All those who prosper now will lose their lives,
for beggars or kings he shows no regard
but mows them down and heaps them by the yard.
Harrowed land lies barren 'neath winter's gloom,
waiting the return of Eros' fertile doom;
love's joyful rains descending once again
herald the groaning passage of life's wain.

XIV Temperance
Harsh absolutes are tempered in the fires
of reason, quenched by dialectic springs,
life and death opposition is folded
in the mercy of an angel's wings.
The eye of Anubis brings the desert flood,
brief relief from Dog Days burning heat,
and greens the delta with the hope of food
and life immortal for the pious kings.
Pouring balm to heal all suffering physis,
Maria Prophetess reborn as Isis,

XV The Devil
Typhon, last son of Gaia and ruler
of all material things, hermaphrodite
with scaly wings, creator of gender
and all disagreements among humankind,
also called Baphomet by Templar knights.
Beneath the sigil of the pentagram,
seated upon the sphere and cubic throne,
'solve Coagula' your baleful epigram.
None can free themselves from your awful chains
without abandoning all joys and pains.

XVI The Tower of Destruction
The fall of Jericho or Babylon
is well known, but any false monument
to gods or men may be overthrown,
but mostly this refers to the hubris
of kings or men of power whose discontent
hurls down both high and low into the dust,
when nations fall or economies go bust.
All forms, manmade or not, are subject to
the sudden shock of change which can unglue
the mind or the fabric of world we know.

XVII The Star
Hope, that last antidote remained within
the box when evils filled the world with sin.
Ishta's star rises early and sets late:
descending, she passes through that dark gate
to gather abandoned souls like flowers
seeking the light in their darkest hours.
She, Queen of Heaven and fertility,
effulgent daughter of the Sun and Moon.
waters the Earth with tears of compassion,
promising suffering will be over soon.

XVIII The Moon
In the city, the dogs begin to bark
at the strange light that banishes the dark.
The Moon attracts, with mysterious force,
all the waters of the Earth and makes them
dance in rhythmic harmony, and rejoice
in a symphony of abundant life.
Strange monsters come floating up from the deep,
and out of mind hidden illusions creep
into the light of new-born consciousness
to weep upon the shores of moonlit lakes.

XIX The Sun
The Sun shines equally on every home
with radiance and magnanimity.
Dawn's twin horsemen too shone down equally
in many skies before they founded Rome.
Staring at the Sun in the midday hour
we see the yods flow from the sacred horn.
The Sun is fount of energy and life,
parching the grass or ripening the corn,
but in Ragnorak the wolves will devour
Sol and Mani before Sunna is reborn.

XX The Judgment
"Judge not lest ye be judged" is not written
in the Angel's book: the strident horn calls
forth the dead to be saved or smitten with
another thousand ills in Satan's halls,
where Gabriel and St George combine
to winnow wheat from the chaff to ensure
that each soul in Heaven is clean and pure.
When humanity has been so refined,
and there is no more need for flesh or mind
will the goldsmith in the sky be so unkind?

XXI The World
The substantial orb and the world soul stand
united in the Anima Mundi,
completing the quest of each errant soul,
within a transcendent divinity.
Once hidden in matter but now set free,
the creative principle of the three,
foretold by Maria Prophetisa
is revealed by the magic of the light,
instilled in air, earth fire and water
by that first great imperious command.

Vitreous Humour

2009-10-27T20:04:00.000-07:00

Gathering in hollows the waters lie
reflecting what's above but not below,
supine eyes staring at the azure sky,
unsighted spurning what they cannot know:
though stray beams filter through the gloomy deep
and keep unconscious denizens from sleep.

Moving on the waters, the winds disturb
the sun's bright paintings with crude striations
and those airy vibrations that perturb
the symmetry of light's fine creations:
below, mother's shells gleam with pearly pride,
where vain procrustean thoughts are wont to hide.

Sheltering from the wind beneath the trees,
a pair of youthful eyes take their delight
in talk between the water and the breeze,
revealed by the play of flickering light
reflected on his features as he kneels
to touch the one who neither knows nor feels.

Fleeting ripples, water's brief memory
of wind, soon dissipate upon the shore,
but nothing catches light's celerity
or persists of reflections made before:
only a perceiving mind can capture
both the cooling breeze or vision's rapture.

At first there was polished obsidian
then beaten copper or burnished bronze for
ladies to admire their complexion,
or for Martial men dressing up for war.
Mercury and Saturn laid under glass,
helped vanity and weary days to pass.

On the Island of Murano a boon
was invented in aid of vanity,
Mercury, not yet wedded to the Moon,
ruled alone, but spread his insanity,
until Bohemian silver paved the way,
leaving Venetian craft to yesterday.

Once the secret was loosed upon the world,
mirrors abounded in the stately halls,
with prancing ladies, hair bewigged and curled,
dancing in glass canyons with mirrored walls:
a hundred candles, spawning hundreds more,
breathed smoke and showered wax upon the floor.

By day Apollo's golden arrows fly
but in the night Selene's silver dearth
paints pale moonscapes beneath the sparkling sky,
where starlings fly above the dreaming Earth.
Young moonstruck virgins rise with restless heads
for naked views in mirrors by their beds.

At midnight, peering in the scrying bowl
may yield apparitions or none at all,
or spell disaster to a damned soul,
doomed to wander hopeless in Hades' Hall:
but broken mirrors only mean seven years
bad luck for those with superstitious fears.

The image in the looking glass I see
contains another I that is untrue:
the mystery of the mirror is not me,
but spatial confusion between the two:
we do not see the messengers of light,
but their messages only after flight.

In the mirror I see another me,
twins fathered by the looking glass are we,
divided by a twisted parity.
Narcissus admires his divinity
and leans forward to give himself a kiss
but not close enough for that spectral bliss.

In the Hall of Mirrors at the fairground,
the twisted forms of friends or family
cause merriment and laughter to resound
from the shining walls, but no enmity
to anyone or even wounded pride,
but relief at being taken for a ride.

The friendly glass confirms identity:
what we appear to be not who we are,
as whole beings of possibility
and dynamic selves who become aware
of others too, caught in imperfect bliss
or webs of pain, when we reflect on this.

Nothing Comes from Nothing

2009-10-22T21:07:00.000-07:00

Nothing took it into its empty head
to speak its piece at last and quickly said,
"Big Bang", but there was no one there to hear
because Nothing had neither brain nor ear.

But nevertheless it got very hot
under the collar, created light, not
before time but just in time to make way
for enough space for what it had to say.

The other story is that Everything,
Nothing's elder brother, continued to sing
his interminable song in the dark.
'til bored gravity struck that fatal spark,

filling the new laid egg with blazing suns
and that noxious gas that everyone shuns
when flatulent theories burst and release
foetid confusions that disturb their peace.

Then sleeping consciousness that nowhere dwells,
except within our brains, those wobbly shells,
woke to discover that the world was real,
because there was a lot of pain to feel.

Eventually, the wheelchair man spoke too,
and put a spoke in the hullabaloo
about the origins of time and space
not showing us its original face.

Now we all wait with baited breath until
the Large Hadron Collider can infill
all the important theoretical gaps
left by God and those other clever chaps.

The Fisherman of Thera

2009-10-21T06:08:00.000-07:00

The naked fisherman stood by the wall,
a bunch of freshly landed mackerel
clutched in each hand, his biceps straining to
maintain a natural and easy posture.

"Why does he want my picture on his walls,
with these fish an' all? You'd think he'd rather
have his fancy women there, with their white
breasts nestling like doves in the trees."

The painter did not reply but added
more earthy pigment to the wet plaster.
"The great dolphins you did over the door,
I can understand that, but mackerel?"

The painter looked up crossly, "Keep quiet,
and keep your arms up or we'll never be done.
The Lord wants a fisherman and you're it.
There are ladies too but not for your eyes."

"Why are you painting my body so red?
I'm not that much darker than you are."
"You ask too many questions, fisherman;
it's true, we both toil too much in the sun."

"While our masters lie inside these cool walls,
laughing and sporting with their womenfolk.
Ah, those women!" The fisherman sighed,
"I haven't caught one of them yet, have you?"

Imago

2009-10-18T03:31:00.000-07:00

Lucifer, rising from the mists of dawn,
clings on behind Aurora's binding ties:
the fading crescent of the moon looks down
on damp fields where the snaking river lies.
The newborn sun soon wakes the dragonflies
and the frothing nymphs who jump and spit
upon the buttercups and meadowsweet.

The swallows quit their muddy homes beneath
the eaves of house and barn, breakfasting
on dancing swarms, taken on the wing: high
above the heath they swing on to pastures
new where the day will host life's frantic play,
that bloody corybantic dance of May
that ends in death for all their merry prey.

At rivers edge the drooping willows sway:
beneath their roots the red-striped stickleback
performs his dance of love to lure away
his bride to be, who never wants to play.
Penitent cows endure horse fly attacks
and lash their tails across their weeping backs,
useless travail as lifeblood seeps away.

From sandy holes along the river's banks
the martins take the air in serried ranks,
and join the swallows scribbling on the clouds,
black surds in Roman numerals describe
the fleeting shrouds that mark the time and place
of the million small funerals it takes
to slake the metabolic thirst of birds.

The footless swift emits its piercing scream,
joining the killing crowd above the stream
where, in the rippling waters, endless stores
of naiads swim, nymphs cling to waving reeds,
some changing costumes for the final act
of love, or sowing seeds along the shores,
before dying, seduced by nature's pact.

Elsewhere, in the desert air, barn swallows
dive and soar over bare Euphrates' banks
oblivious to their brother predator
who drones in circles round abandoned tanks,
where they sometimes nest in rusty hollows,
threatened only by the curious child
intent on seeing nature in the wild.

In the meander of a sandy dune
foot prints of a child at play are memorised
in mud, between the bulrush and the blood
flowing from the mangled bodies, hit by
missiles launched from the whining drone above
the desert sands, guided by foreign hands,
that strike down carelessly each stinging fly.

Gaia, that unprincipled virago,
has stamped the traces of her imago
on the greatest and the least: man or fly
must follow the imperative to kill
and die; meanwhile in the reddening sky
effulgent Hesperus in retrograde
burns as the evening light begins to fade.

Scattering

2009-10-12T06:11:00.000-07:00

Sage scimitars shake in the canopy
beneath the turning Magellanic clouds,
aromatic lungs exhaling fixed air
as the rootless stare at the scenery
of serried arms raised against restless skies.

Counterpoise to diurnal energy,
leaves play night music in the waving shrouds,
nocturnes composed by zephyrs with a flair
for breathing through the comose greenery
an ancient air of life and earthy sighs.

In autumn winds the leafy panoply
advances and retreats in waving crowds,
a motley crew dressed for a winter fair
stands united, a leafy plenary
against the ravages of stormy skies.

The gardener wakes to find that entropy
has redecorated the lawn: his proud
work, curbing nature with much daily care,
clothed with an arbitrary finery
appreciated only by the wise.

With rake he bends to mend the symmetry,
and, with an aching back, complains out loud
when scattering breezes bring disrepair,
which rude nature's careless adultery
will not amend no matter how he cries.

October 2009

Beggar in Belgravia

2009-10-10T04:00:00.000-07:00

Brown girl in Belgravia,
strolling down the crowded street,
your skirt is shorter than
the shiny boots upon your feet.
You seem so very fashionable,
your face so very sweet,
why have you distracted me
from my frenzied cherchez la femme?

It's not you I was looking for,
in this beknighted borough,
I was seeking a milliner,
so meticulous and thorough,
who says she makes hats for the Queen.
I wonder if you've seen her here,
along Kings Road or in between
Rotten Row and Sloane Square.

I mean, I don't expect you have,
but I'll follow you anyway,
close behind your tapping feet
and gaily swinging derriere.
I like your face, so strange and rare,
like a model in a fashion fair,
but would it be indiscrete
to ask you if you really are.

Walking here from Kensington,
I was accosted by a beggar man,
brandishing a safety razor
and a dirty shaving can.
I listened to his tale of woe
and gave him a few shillings.
He smiled at me in gratitude
and showed me all his fillings.

But all the while my head was filled
with last night's banging down the hall;
the pounding of the headboard
in the bedroom through the wall,
where the milliner had donned her cap
to entertain her lover,
or some other lucky chap
she had working under cover.

I called upon the Devil then,
and offered him my soul
if he'd punish that faithless girl
with fire and burning coal,
or better yet the unknown man
whose horrid body she caressed.
spurning the one whose ear was pressed
against her bedroom wall.

But now I'm strolling through Hyde Park,
beside a southern beauty rare,
with raven hair and liquid eyes,
two black cherries sweet and dark,
in a face of caramel and cream,
a feast to match the lovely dream
of swelling breasts and soft brown thighs,
that bold action could soon realise.

In her tiny serviced flat,
I get to see the rest of her,
a generous field of lean and fat,
laid down from adipose to that
pair of soft delights, and soon
a luscious coffee cream éclair,
freely offered up at noon,
at Eaton Square near Chelsea Town.

Sleeping, her eyes still seem to see,
a milky meniscus beneath each lid,
keeping a witch's watchful eye on me,
the restless lover by her side.
I wonder whether to stay or flee
this bond of sudden sorcery,
as from her narrow bed I slide,
and return to where I reside.

At home, waking from a nightmare,
I lie sweating in my lonely bed,
trying to grasp the bright images
running through my burning head.
No brown girl, beggar or milliner
filled my dreams that night,
but angels dark and sinister
guarding a city full of fright.

Strange adventures I had there,
like Dante and his companion,
past Charon into a cave I ran,
and thence into a dingy canyon
peopled by shades in sulphurous air,
filled with weeping and despair.
It was the stuff of B-grade dramas
frightful enough to soak my hair
and the front of my pyjamas.

Facetiousness aside, the dream
was awe-inspiring. I saw outside
a dismal figure robed in white,
dragging a death cart through
a city bathed in purple light.
And in the distance, there were beams
of golden light, where squatted
brazen angels of enormous height.

Then over a barren heath I flew,
across rolling hills and stony ground,
until by force was halted near
a trilithon with that profound
inscription, and familiar sound,
'abandon hope ye who enter here'.
There I felt a nameless fear
and trembling coming from the ground.

Stopped short of being propelled between
the lintels of that dreadful gate,
I need not fear the obvious fate,
it seemed, until I heard a sound,
like some great train, Hell bound,
bearing down on me - too late
I tried to jump aside but down
a hollow plunged into the ground.

Clinging to the heather on the slope,
three times I evaded great engines
trying to press me down into the pit.
The first green, but indeterminate,
which changed into a yellow
juggernaut, and then a final blow,
a whirling cloud of purple mass
tore my fingers from the scraggy grass.

But still I clung on desperately,
not falling to the depths below,
clawing back up the hill to safety,
how I managed I do not know.
Turning, I saw a tiny figure
rising from the gloomy pit,
it seemed rather insignificant,
until I got a better view of it.

Kundalini flowed up my spine,
flooding my mind with ecstasy
as the satanic figure rose
to greet me where I lay prone.
Terrible in its majesty,
it overcame its deadly weight,
and a massive plinth of stone
securely chained around its feet.

Three figures glowed before my eyes,
blinded I could not see their features,
but heard their theriomorphic sighs,
and felt the numinous magnetic bliss
streaming from these creatures,
let loose upon the hills of Dis,
as the triple demon I beheld
raised a golden disc above its head.

A star shell of fear and pain
burst through my body and my brain.
In terror I was lifted high,
bent double, I was forced to pray
levitating before this god,
now knowing what he held aloft,
my soul, surety for that act
sworn yesterday, my jealous pact.

And now I'm scuttling down the street,
accosting everyone I meet.
"Have you seen my brown girl anywhere?"
Some take pity on my plight,
but others cannot bear the sight
of a beggar man in Eaton Square,
with burning eyes and grimy face
holding out a battered shaving can.

Tony Thomas 2005

Coffee House

2009-10-05T03:31:00.000-07:00

The waitress brought his mocha on a tray,
he thanked her but he would have liked to say,
"you're very pretty", but this would not do
for a poor patent clerk, and married too.
He should have said," I will be famous soon",
but might as well have spoken to the moon.

The marbled patterns in the tabletops,
beneath the cake crumbs and the coffee slops
then revealed to him aether's janus face:
ten origins defined as time and place,
tensely reciting their mysterious rhyme
in ambiguous seas of space and time.

The curving saddle of the violin,
clasped to the softness of the woman's chin,
blended the interplay of cosmic fire
with high vibrations in the singing wire,
suffused Bach's ringing music in his blood
with thoughts of love and happy womanhood.

Like a wily goddess languorously
displayed, the universe humorously
played god's waiting game with her loaded dice,
against his equations until that nice
moment, revealing energetic charms,
she let her mass fall lightly in his arms.

Tormented fires, raging without a sound,
like unabated furies swirling round,
all neatly caught before he was quite sure,
in bold equations in his office drawer.
The three-page supplement should make it plain
another Newton had been born again.

The yellow dwarf was bending light from stars
before mankind had ever noticed Mars,
but now two expeditions caught Sol out
despoiling Newton's perfect world without
a doubt, and confirming, more or less, that
space-time was bent or slightly curved, not flat.

The cream expanding in the coffee cup
spawned galaxies before he picked it up,
the dreaming eyes within the gentle face
rested lovingly on the moving space,
no Riemann geometry was on his mind
when he observed the curves of womankind.

The Spark

2009-09-30T05:20:00.000-07:00

A tiny spark, a candle flame, a fire
suggests the possibility of pain.
A burning house, a city wreathed in flames
surpasses the compass of our anguish.
An atom bomb, volcano or the Sun
Exceed human measures of agony.
A nova, the birth of a galaxy
transcends imagined torments of our gods.

A pinprick, a nasty cut, a migraine
are afflictions most of us have known.
Arthritis, broken bones, an accident
may test the limits of our tolerance.
Executions, murders, or an earthquake
breed suffering that we could never bear.
A plague, a widespread war or genocide,
are woes mocked by singular empathy.

Experience of pain, or fear of it,
finds deathly limits to our suffering;
beyond these we cannot honestly go.
The summits of possible agony
seem infinite mountains to the victim,
but can never reach the imaginary
summum maleficium of worldly pain
posited by philosophers and priests.

As if the pain and suffering we know
were not enough, they must construct a world
of fanciful torments to disgust
and harden our soft sensibilities
to the unnecessary agonies
caused by the institutions that they serve:
this Man-God, standard-bearer of our ills,
Hell, a realm of pain for his enemies.

By what divine accountancy must we
balance our joys against the sum of pains,
or for each bit of happiness offset
a thankless life of toil and misery?
The body knows its rightful boundaries,
the self, seeking to increase its empire,
applies its tiny spark to the kindling
of others to create a reckless fire.

By hateful word and angry glance the nerves
dance hot from eye to eye and ear to ear,
until the groping hands grip throats, or pull
at knives, guns or the levers of despair.
Cool bureaucrats ensure the strong prevail,
as smoke grenades and rubber bullets hail
upon the fleeing mob, nursing new hatreds
from the stinging blows of their master's boot.

Pain, then, is the governor of desire
and so too of joy, that surplus extreme
that persists after nature's tasks are done.
No wonder then that men of power Invest
in the pain of others and constrain their joy,
all in the interests of good government.
Money, token of desire, decides who
shall suffer and who will be relieved.

Living together in society
has not increased capacity for pain
or pleasure but overfills the amphorae
with vinegar or musty wines of joy.
Ascetic or sybarite must adjust
to the accountancy of boom and bust
as the spark falls through dust and smoke to be
quenched at last in oblivion's dark sea.

Folly's Playground

2009-09-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

At opposing ends of life's seesaw sit
the complacent sage and careless scholar
candidates for the thorny crown of wit;
one crammed full of phlegm, the other choler,
but which is which is open for debate,
or who will prosper at the hand of fate.

Such a dialectic opposition
defines polarities of fool and sage,
but hasty judgment of one's position
still leaves the other standing on the stage,
pondering how the question should be put
if his boot were on his adversary's foot.

Impartial, standing in between the two
an invisible acrobat keeps the peace
by varying the pressure of his shoe,
a spritely dance that he can never cease;
this trinity of actors can be found,
in market place or martial killing ground.

Within the sage, a fool longs to get free
and the fool hankers after wisdom too,
the former tangled up in logic's tree,
the latter's thoughts mired by custom's glue;
one seeks his freedom chasing after facts,
the other lives a life of thoughtless acts.

Both sage and fool are bound to action's wheel,
forced to participate in Fortune's game.
The wise man wonders if the play is real,
while the fool struggles to advance his fame:
neither can be certain of success or
if wisdom lies in seeking more or less.

As the pendulum swings from side to side,
the sage devotes his time to find perfection
while the fool races down a winding slide
convinced he's going in the right direction;
one renounces joy for a final end
the other finding hope round every bend.

Anger, fear and greed are among the signs
displayed by those human beasts we call fools
but these traits were part of nature's designs
to protect and satisfy, before rules
were writ by clever kings and priestly stealth,
dividing human kind by wit and wealth.

Hatred, lust and envy, too, are despised
by seekers after truth and harmony,
who by their careful moral works revised
brash natures harsh and cruel symphony,
inclined to maximise the spread of life
despite its ravages of pain and strife.

Folly is wise judgment on the fool, but
fools think not sagacious judgment wise;
opposing wildly when the case is shut
they curse fate and shout anger to the skies.
Caught in wisdom's nets of specious laws
they damn all order and unsheathe their claws.

For each false notion the sage holds true
a hundred thousand true ones lie in store;
as many more false ones the fool holds too,
waiting ready to refute wisdom's lore.
This balance between notes of true and false
makes raucous music for the Devil's waltz.

Wisdom consists in more than doctrines tools;
the wise must assiduously enquire
into the validity of their rules.
As foolish lore falls short of fool's desire
they too must revise their kit-bag of wit
to repel wise assaults from logic's kit.

The continual question 'is this true?'
is too tiresome for the man of action,
a modus operandi for the few,
so no fool would crave this satisfaction;
but the seesaw of doctrinal debate
is too often the stage for fools to prate.

The miserly buffoon guards well his hoard,
as the sage keeps his library well stocked,
and is loath to throw old saws overboard.
The academic pantaloon is shocked,
when new ideas rain down upon his head,
taking shelter beneath old books he's read.

One hundred and seventeen kinds of fool,
listed on the manifest of Brant's ship*,
set sail upon the medieval pool
of wit, which makes this verse a tiny blip,
but that history of wise and foolish strife
stays much the same as in our daily life.

* The Ship of Fools, Sebastian Brandt, 1494

Queen of Heaven

2009-09-24T23:51:00.000-07:00

Oh Cricket stridulating to the Moon,
are you hoping your lover will come soon,
or are you singing to the night-time queen,
who watches you with such a frigid sheen?

What imagined terrors we humans find
among the creatures of our clever mind,
pleroma's infinitude is too small
for a learned treatise on them all.

With what eyes could we see such majestic forms
or with what ears hear their clamorous storms,
and with what tongue could we make our replies
to their rowdy discord from the skies?

No human tongue could wean the Milky Way
or taste the honeyed mead of night and day,
and no earthly nostrils could smell the musk
of that great goddess of the rosy dusk.

With what lips could we kiss the star strewn hair
of chained up lovers like Andromeda,
or with what arms could we hope to embrace
the gravid charms of some rejected grace?

What straining sinews could withstand the pain
or heart bear the lance of royal disdain,
when mortal being tries to match the fire
of the Queen of Heaven's dark desire?

Praise for such splendour would be otiose
as the cricket's moon songs are grandiose
attempts to stem the heavenly tides of love
that pluck its tiny heartstrings from above.

But casting down our eyes to sticks and stones
reminds us of the cage of flesh and bones
that is the basis of our earthbound life
and undistinguished state of pain and strife.

Small wonder then the thing within the skull
looks to the skies, where the heavenly pull
sends poets chirping madly to the Moon,
hoping their song will be an endless tune.

Washed up

2009-09-18T06:14:00.000-07:00

Aimless in the antipodes
swam the untanned Englishman,
temporarily abandoned
by a late returning bride,
washed up on the empty beach,
naked but for a seaweed wrack
wrapped around his pallid thighs,
garnered from the petticoats
of the deceptive turning tide.

Civilisation lurks behind the dunes,
waiting to reclaim the stray,
lately unemployed émigré.
The alternative is freedom,
generated by inaction
and the promise of new tunes
to play or unforseen events
that prey upon the stranger
in a dry and uncongenial land.

Maybe near this very spot,
Flinders said to Bongaree,
'best you go and speak to your kind,
while I observe from behind this tree'.
The Lieutenant's hat was spied
and demanded by the indigenes.
Refusal prompted a single spear,
and Mathew returned a musket shot
after several misfires, on bended knee.

What dangerous possibility
attended naked Odysseus
as he spied upon the princess
washing her dirty linen; she
likely hoping for some amour
but finding a middle-aged
ragamuffin on the shore, he
too thirsty and tired for love,
a king became a supplicant.

But our pale man well breakfasted,
with wife at work and children taken
from their bed to a nearby school,
is in a wayward state of mind,
and walking down the beach
is surprised to find his Nausicaa,
sprawled out in scanty bathing suit,
posing the choice of turning back
or explaining his garb of briny wrack.

No bright-eyed goddess had whispered
that morning in her ear, warning
of her unreadiness to wed,
just hormones and the radio
with Streisand's Rose blooming in her head.
Nor did Athena glamorise
the balding stranger's age or looks,
but left him like a fool transfixed
'twixt dire straits and the siren's hooks.

Some conversation did ensue,
between forty two and turned sixteen,
mainly about her love of ten pin bowls,
and why he had no inkling of
how to pitch or the proper soles
of shoes that he would have to wear,
if he were to succeed at bowling
in the American hall, built nearby
to entertain MacArthur's men of war.

It seems what gods there might have been
would brook no union, forced or not,
between the virgin bowling queen
and her suitor dressed in brackish thong.
No feast and stories by the fire,
or return to Ithaca would be his lot,
but ignominious withdrawal along
the beach to find his shorts and towel.

The marks upon the bone

2009-09-12T06:40:00.001-07:00

The untrammelled world awaits our care,

when all that we believe is ours has gone,

as well it might be from the usurpers

of Her state, nature will return to us

our yearning bodies and soul's lost estate.

Stooping, at last, to drink from some clear pool,

a glimpse of self as other is dispersed

by oscillation and impatient thirst,

giving way to that incessant need to

find the shortest path to satiety.

No time for idle play, while hunger drives,

to contemplate the rippling of the waves

left behind as you leap after the band,

pursuing its scampering prey, for soon

the night will cut short the brief hunt for life.

Then, in the darkness of the cave will come

memory, replaying the stored pictures

of the tiresome day of blood and death

until later sleep mixes world and mind

into brief pleasure or some fearful bind.

See the flint scratches on the well-gnawed bone,

that may soon mark the passage of the moon,

and so time works its way from mouth to hand,

whose bloody imprint on the rocky wall

lifts up the butcher to shamanic rule.

Small means; flint, wood and bone lacked that power,

not stolen yet from gods unmade in clay,

or whispering their beguiling songs from

woods and streams, or in the dying screams

of that first oryx battered by the axe.

In the heat of day, hunched over a pile

of flint and stones, some brute hammered away

among the trees and swathes of drying hay,

amused by the occasional shower of sparks

spurting from the hard rock gripped in his hand.

Later, wild explanations would be found

for the forest fires and burnt creatures

on the ground, nicely roasted for a feast

and then, in due time, to be sacrificed

to imagined benefactors of the tribe.

But when well mastered this dangerous boon

roared its dire warning to those shrinking beasts,

who circled round the living space of man,

and rivalling the burning heat of noon,

defined a place for feasts called hearth and home.

Now, with all the elements gathered round,

wind, water, fire and earthy ground were theirs

to manipulate until the fifth was found,

lurking behind the eyes or pulsing

in the blood, sweat and tears of toil and lust.

Dead branches stark against the waxing Moon

define for man a triple space within

the brain, but to the wolf remain an eye

without a head, mysterious and cold,

calling forth mindless howling to the sky.

Relieved from the immediate needs of life,

the mind is freed to contemplate its fate,

an endless task mistaking signs for things,

reducing the world to marks on bone, wood,

papyrus or clicks on a mobile phone.

Dissipated into a mental cloud,

the world seems amenable to control:

a grand delusion that soon stubs its toe

on the first obstacle to the notion

that mankind is free in thought and motion.

Truer was the shaman's drumming dance,

mimicking the lupine prance and tripping

on the roots of chance to discover how new

paths are made through the labyrinthine caves,

across the rippled sands where Charon stands.

The Flower Bride

2009-08-28T05:07:00.000-07:00

In the land of lost content,

hard by the little bridge of Clun,

I see another Chloe walk alone,

dreaming among the trees

of a second Daphnis who

will pirate her away,

or carve her name upon an oak,

bound within the circuit of a heart,

in remembrance of young lovers,

destined to lie apart, though

not yet struck through by Eros' shaft

or long separated by the sea.

The letters carved there should have been

A...... , one not worthy of her praise

and B......, the flower bride herself,

signifying past dreams of innocence

that never came to be, or lie cast down

by life's vicissitudes, diverted

as the purling streams by rocky ground.

Here, strewn with broom, and meadowsweet,

between the hawthorn hedges, stiles

and five-barred gates was Arcady,

bound round with farms, a little town

that gave birth to the Queen of May.

Who dare say it was not Zeus himself,

all idle on a springtide day, who saw

this prize and coveted the beauty

of the flowers of May in human form,

called Danae in Greek isles so far away,

and as a burning cloud came down

the fecund vales and rolling hills,

all hot with lust from out of Wales,

sowing golden rain upon the storm-tossed flowers,

in the mythic hours of youth's eternal rage,

saturating Bloduewedds's glowing bowers,

a verdant splendour never lost with age.

While lovers sup upon the curving lips,

the busy bee within the rosy cup

tightens his grip upon the heaving hips

or despoils the yellow livery

of Iris blowing in the marshy field.

Storm rent skies painted by the Sun abate

and the gently falling rain creates

a bow that ties the knot of promises,

made but neither kept by gods nor men.

The fallen leaf now floating down the stream,

that once trembled in the morning Sun,

drinks in the import of the darkening dream.

Simulacrum

2009-08-23T16:47:00.000-07:00

We makers wonder how this world was made,

before our busy hands and cunning brains

tore up the rocky soil, and so despoiled

that finely woven tapestry laid down

before we came upon the sylvan scene,

and formed the notion we could do better,

draining swamps of bestial desires,

crossings oceans and setting forest fires.

Beneath the cast off dolls and building blocks,

at the bottom of our nursery box,

lies a mysterious game, long forgotten,

played with tokens and broken instruments,

a pastime too enigmatic to explain

but one fraught with forbidden joys and pain

banished to forgetfulness into the

lost lands of our gelatinous domain.

Grown now from childish things we wonder where

we were before our fleshy clock began

to tick and tock our imaginary

lives away, or who our real Mother was

before that first comforting softness we seek

was born out of some viscous discontent,

under a tumultuous sea or sky,

to form a nurturing breast or downy cheek.

In the vessel, ready made, the child lies

undead, not hoping to be born to light,

unafraid, waiting in the limpid dark,

floating in the airless void, not breathing,

armed with the possibility of life,

a being not knowing if it will be,

not yet hearing the voices that proclaim,

'you are human and must bear your pain'.

Those silent voices that lie within, where

none can hear, insisting that the bather

must now descend into the clammy tube

below, expelled from the fruitful garden,

so carelessly planted by the Father,

onto the earthen floor or sheeted bed,

without a bye-your-leave to indicate

if there were a choice to be born or dead.

A ghostly being, seeming whole, conjured

From the shuffling toil, rhythmic spirals twist

and spin, grasping the noumena within

to release that first gasping, choking breath:

achieving life it must prepare for death,

or so the judgment goes by those who have

seen how things are with that mutual bond

between knowing flesh and its phantom friend.

With all the crying and the bloody waste

the time for metaphysical distaste

must be delayed, until our newborn ghost

can master the intricacies of life,

and consider at last the peculiar

genesis of its being from pleasure

that, as physicists, we cannot find,

at least not without admitting mind.

But when the word is finally spoken,

It will be a simulacrum of its source;

rivers without rain and rain without clouds,

words before words could be, sounds before sounds,

void before extension, an infinite

sentence without punctuation to parse

eternal laughter from the endless pain

of the never being from whence it came.

From cloud to shroud

2009-08-20T21:04:00.000-07:00

Wondering, wondering why She is rapt,

like duty in its flight from lawful pain,

a flag before the storm, ideals aloft,

tidy morality, a banner held

like Joan's defiance of the English might.

Thundering, thundering before the rain,

relief that never comes from mere shadows

cast upon the grieving Earth, dried out from

Heaven's just neglect of its mongrel brood,

howling for its lost lupine nourishment.

Blundering, blundering below, shrouded

In miasmas of half created dreams,

poetic fight impossible without

that tense space between Earth, cloud, rain and drought,

hiatus interruptus in between.

Sundering, sundering the connection

Of Earth and Sky, star clad Nut falls below

To patient, waiting Ithyphallic Geb,

then clouds are rent asunder by the light

trapped within the shroud of self becoming.

Death Star

2009-08-13T20:13:00.000-07:00

It must have been November. The distant chestnut trees were already bare, but no snow yet lay on the ground, just a sharp frost beneath a clear northern sky, filled with pin-sharp stars. Forty years later, the constellations of the southern sky appear blurred, less familiar to my ageing eyes.

I remember it was cold walking down that stony road, where I had lived from infancy to manhood, if you could call it that. We groped in the dark, my mother and I, down that unlit street of pre-war houses.

"Blast, I've lost my shoe," she said, stumbling behind my longer stride. "Just wait a minute, will you." She had broken her foot as a young girl and limped a little.

I halted and waited for her to recover her balance and catch up. She had been complaining ever since I could remember about the lack of street lighting and the rutted surface of the road, but nothing had ever been done. I took a last drag on my cigarette and crushed the glowing tip underfoot.

A dozen or so semi-detached houses ran down the hill, facing south. There were no houses opposite; just a strip of long, faded grass where the speculative builder might once have planned to complete his Garden City.

We lived at the top of the hill, where the houses were a little larger, but not much better than the vamped-up workers cottages that architects had deemed suitable for England's petit bourgeoisie in the years between the wars.

Doris Hogget, a belated friend of my Mothers, lived half way down the hill, and was, commensurately, lower down the social scale. My father had been a surveyor before his death and Doris's husband Les was a stores clerk at the ordnance depot where I now had the misfortune to work. Lower down still, various tradesmen safely grazed.

We didn't have a TV in those days. If there was something special on, a state funeral or a wedding, my mother went to watch it at Doris's house. I sometimes went too, although with some reluctance. It was a grim affair with Les, Doris and their teenage daughter, crammed into the pokey living room. My mother and I sat in the back row, with our backs to the wall, behind the dining table.

Les's bald head glowed in the firelight, the smoke from his cigarette coiling above his chair. The monochrome set flickered fitfully, blaring out the band music of his favourite programme, 'Billy Cottons Black and white Minstrel Show'.

Les was the spitting image of Billy Cotton: five foot four (the average height of an Englishmen in the middle ages), barrel-chested and almost bald, given the severity of his short back and sides. Like Winston Churchill, he was a paradigm of the bulldog breed.

Les and Doris had fled the London bombing, bringing their children to the safety of the Midlands. Her sister had been killed, and Doris had adopted her surviving daughter, Polly, as her own. That was the story we heard, anyway. Polly had found a boy and got married since my last visit.

Doris had rung my mother late, around eleven-thirty that night.

"Can you come down; Les has taken a turn for the worse. The doctor gave him an injection to help him go, but I can't get him out of bed."

"I need you to come with me to Doris's," my mother said, after putting down the phone.

That's why we stumbled down the road on an errand of mercy, not exactly my cup of tea, counting the dark shapes of the houses against the gloomy backdrop of the ancient woods. The living rooms were at the back but a few windows at the front were lit with an orange glow, where the inhabitants were going to bed, but probably not enjoying connubial bliss.

"It's here," My mother said, fumbling with a gate latch.

We crunched down the sparse gravel of the drive to the back door and knocked. In a while, the passage light went on, shining through the marbled glass pane of the door. It opened to reveal Doris's pale face beneath a mass of reddish frizzy hair.

She was a tall, gangly woman with a big nose and buckteeth; quite a catch for Les in the pre-war years, I suppose, discounting the time that had elapsed.

"Come in, come in dear," she said to my mother, in her slurping cockney tones. "I'm sorry to call you so late but they're away next door."

I refrained from saying we had seen 'a light from yonder window break', out of sympathy for her distress.

We followed her into the kitchenette, as she explained Les's unfortunate condition.

"It's the emphysema. I keep telling him not to smoke so much, but he won't give up. Now it's turned to pneumonia. I have to keep sitting him up, but I can't manage on my own."

"I know, Norman died of pneumonia, you have to be so careful," my mother replied.

The lower rooms were in darkness. Doris led the way up the narrow staircase to the landing.

"He's in here," she said, pushing open the door to the back bedroom. For some reason she did not put on the bedroom light, so we had to see by the shaft of light from the landing.

A strangled cry came from the inner corner of the room, where Les lay in striped pyjamas. He was flailing weakly with his arms and legs in the gloom, eyes rolling in the beefy folds of his face. He was obviously trying to speak but could not muster enough breath to get beyond incoherent cries.

"Get round behind his back," Doris said to me. "Try to get him upright. I'll try to get his legs on the floor."

I moved over to the corner and bent over the struggling man, but I could not get much purchase on his beefy shoulders. When I did get a grip, I realised that I was just not strong enough to lift him. He must have been at least sixteen stone, all blubber and muscle like an elephant seal.

Les fixed me with a baleful glare, his beady eyes like angry buttons in his pyknic face. Grunting, he forced himself up on his arms until he was sitting half upright. The women dragged on his massive legs until he sat, panting, his feet planted on the floor. Even in the gloom, I could see his face had turned purple with the strain.

Les began to whimper in great agitation, looking wildly from face to face.

"He has to go, the doctor gave him an injection," Doris said, grabbing a shiny tin bucket from beside the bed.

Placing the receptacle strategically in front of her husband's feet, she stooped down and draped his left arm over her shoulder. She gestured for me to do the same. With a mighty heave, we got him to his feet.

My mother withdrew respectfully while Doris fumbled in Les's pyjama trousers, and pointed the weeping sausage over the bucket.

Les's beefy arms began to shake and contract around my shoulders as he tried to summon the waters. I was relieved to hear intermittent spurts ringing in the bucket. The diuretic finally did its work. The spurts became a foaming flood, filling the bucket to an impressive level.

"He'll feel much better now," my mother commented from the doorway.

Les collapsed back onto the truckle bed, moaning with relief.

"Help me get his feet back up," Doris said, moving the bucket out of harm's way.

When the invalid was restored to a more or less supine position, I was glad to leave the room. I joined my mother on the landing and listened to Doris soothing her husband in the darkness.

My reflections were interrupted by the rattle of the front door knocker.

Doris emerged quickly, smoothing down her hair.

"That'll be the doctor. He said he would come back to see how Les was after the injection."

We followed her downstairs and stood in the hallway while she opened the door.

The doctor entered, bag in hand, tube of office draped round his neck. Grey faced, nondescript with rimless glasses, he shot us a quizzical look before running up the stairs. Doris followed on behind.

We stood looking up the empty stairs, listening to the creak of floorboards and the murmur of muffled voices. Les coughed a couple of times.

It seemed quite a while before Doris came unsteadily down the stairs, followed by the doctor, snapping shut his bag.

"Are you relatives?" he asked.

"No, just friends," my mother replied.

"I'd like to speak to Mrs Hoggett alone, if I could," he said. "It might be better if you left," he added, rudely.

He ushered Doris into the parlour and closed the door. We withdrew to the kitchen and listened for a while.

"It doesn't sound too good," my mother said, "I don't want to leave Doris on her own."

I was dying for a fag but decided against lighting up.

The lounge room door opened and the doctor emerged.

"I should ring your son right away, see if he can get round here tonight.

There's not much more I can do tonight but ring me in the morning and let me know how your husband is."

Doris let the doctor out and went into the living room to use the phone.

"I've got to ring John," she said in passing, "the doctor thinks he should see Les tonight."

"Is there anything we can do?" my mother said.

"No, nothing dear, I've got to ring John, and Polly. I'll be alright, you go now."

It seemed we really were in the way.

"If you're sure," my mother said, making for the back door.

We let ourselves out.

It was a fine, clear night outside, with no moon. The sky was a leaden blue colour, above the darkness of the southern horizon. A solitary oak, blasted and hollow, spread its leafless arms towards the sky.

"What's that?" my mother said, as I was fumbling with my cigarettes.

"Where?"

"Over there, that star."

I was sure it hadn't been there earlier, but it could have been low down on the horizon, behind the bulk of the hotel.

"It's a bloody comet," I said.

It was indeed a comet, very neat and clear, with its tail pointing to the East.

Not a big, nebulous one but very bright and well defined.

"I saw Halley's comet when I was a little girl," my mother said.

We didn't say anything about Les on the way home. It seemed to me rather a waste to display such a fine comet for someone so unimportant, so perhaps it was a harbinger of someone else's fate on that clear November night in 1963.

Max's Magazine

2009-08-01T19:45:00.000-07:00

Max's Magazine

Hello, I'm Charles Blain. I've only just got this job. I used to work in insurance, selling life policies door to door at local businesses. I've always wanted to be a writer of some kind, maybe a journalist or even a novelist. Not that I ever could be, of course, I'm just a glorified tea-boy, really. I'm exaggerating as usual. Here at MAX, that's Max's Magazine, I do the mail, the filing and any odd jobs that Rick Sneed, our office manager, wants doing.

I got the push from selling; couldn't get my foot in the door, so to speak, or meet any of the quotas. I'm lucky to get a job like this, what with no qualifications, except the GCE in English and Art. This place is brilliant, though, especially the women, and Max, of course. I love the arts, don't you? It beats working for a living. The people here just write about all the good things in life. Susan Smiles (I think that might be a pseudonym) is the Women's Editor; she covers the fashion scene; Jasper Potts does theatre, films and TV; Betty Grogan does literature and Sylvia Jarman does a page or two on restaurants and haute cuisine; Arthur Nesbitt does all the advertising and gets me to do a bit of canvassing, because of my sales experience, I suppose.

Before the insurance job, which I was forced into by the Job Centre, I was on the dole, bumming about on the embankment, feeding the pigeons and wishing I were dead. London's not the best place to be down and out, especially in winter. Anyway, enough of my troubles: now I'm starting out on a new life, a reformed character, so to speak.

I should tell you about how I got this job though, just a fluke really. When I got sacked by 'Secure Life' Social Security said I had to wait three months before I could apply for the dole again. Then they said it would take another three weeks by the time I got any money. After a couple of weeks with nothing coming in, mostly spent lying in bed with severe depression, I was destitute and my landlord told me I would have to get out if I couldn't come up with the rent by the weekend. He was as good as his word. He got my key off me and chucked my bits and pieces out in the street. After two days without food, except for a bun and a cuppa down at the Sally Army van, I was reduced to begging in the street.

I managed to get the odd coin, approaching travellers in the underground but soon got attacked by the local buskers or moved on by the police. Vagrancy is still an offence in England and I didn't want to spend the night in jail, although it was one way of avoiding the cold, I suppose. I could have gone to one of the flophouses but I'd heard bad stories about getting lice, mugged or even murdered. When you're on the street day and night, you soon find out the hard way that there is army of beggars out there you have to compete with.

I soon learned that I had to have something to offer; a Beatles tune on the violin or an old music hall song, or something. Lacking such talents I decided a bit of street selling would have to do. I managed to nick a few things from a busy chemist's shop in the King's Road; a safety razor, a bottle of aftershave and a packet of condoms. Trying to emulate the professional costermonger, I would jump out in front of a likely prospect and say, "Cheap razor sir, very good value at fifty pence," or " What about some nice aftershave, name your price." One bloke snatched the bottle out of my hand and dashed it in the gutter, snarling, "Get lost, stupid beggar, you ought to be locked up." I did manage to sell the condoms to some schoolboys, though.

I kept trying to sell the razor without success, until Max came along. It's hard to describe Max. When I first saw him, outside Sloan Square Station, he had on a pale grey suit with just a hint of a chalk stripe. Very expensive it looked and beautifully offset by a dazzling white shirt, obviously silk, and decorated with a subtly pink tie, identical in colour to the fresh carnation in his lapel. It's the lapels that announce the true English gentleman to the world, with those deliberately imperfect hand stitches, which only the best bespoke tailors can accomplish. How do I know? My uncle Simon was a tailor, that's how.

Max looked fortyish, with a shock of greying brown hair framing his almost too handsome features. His face was very masculine with the healthy complexion of the bon-vivant who works out, or goes on skiing holidays.

"Do I look like I need a shafe?" he said, looking askance at the razor I was brandishing under his roman nose.

"No, No," I said," stepping back before the force of his forget-me-not blue eyes, "you look fine, sorry."

"Vot I vould like to know is vy a fit young man like you is begging on de street. Vell, tell me, I demand to know."

Not receiving an immediate reply, he turned and walked away, without bothering to hear what I was struggling to say. I followed his athletic stride, scuttling along beside this tall but muscular stranger, blurting out my tale of woe.

Finally he stopped, and said, "Giff me de razor."

I handed it over and he put it in his pocket. After a moment's thought he took out a slim wallet of the finest leather and extracted a crisp banknote and a business card.

"See me on Monday morning, nine o'clock sharp, he said, pointing a perfectly manicured finger at the address on the card. I looked at the hundred pound note in amazement but before I could say "thank you" he had vanished into the crowded street. The card read "Maximillian Van Der Vroot, entrepreneur and Magazine proprietor, 217a Sloan Street." Anyhow, that's how I got the job here at the magazine.

*****

Once I've opened and distributed the mail and done a bit of filing, my time's my own. I have to take care to look busy, of course, getting up now and then to look in the cabinet at some file or other, or checking to see if I've got any Email messages from the staff. Most of the time I look furtively at the women in the office, particularly Susan, who sits nearby. Today, she's wearing a skimpy blouse, despite the cold outside, and a skirt two sizes too small for her ample nether regions. Her hair is just on the red side of blonde; fiery I would call it. She has the face and figure of an ex-fashion model or movie actress, very much like Kim Catrall. A real English beauty she is; the kind that turns your brains to mush when you see her in the flesh. She's lovely, I fell in love with her right away; I could stare at her all day.

Oh God, she's getting up and coming over here. I'd better look busy and pretend I wasn't perving on her.

"Charlie, darling," she says, perching a broad buttock on the edge of my desk, "I've got to go out for a bit. Would you be a sweetie and answer my phone? I'm not expecting many calls, just take down any messages for me, will you?"

I recovered from her megawatt smile and stared at the expanse of thigh lying along my desk, at the slight bulge of bare flesh rising and falling above the lacework of her blouse, and at the moist redness of her slightly parted lips.

"Yes, Susan, of course. Will I sit at your desk?"

"Of course not, silly boy, I'll transfer my calls to your number. If a man called Jack Spencer rings, he's my Ex, tell him I'm not in this week, will you."

I feel myself flushing and my mind reeling as her expensive perfume overwhelms my senses.

"Yes," I hear myself croak, "oh, yes."

When she returns to her desk, with sinuous motions of her ample hips, I immediately reactivate the fantasy I indulge in during the midnight hour. Despite the rings on her third finger, I now know she is divorced. There's no way I could ever get inside her expensive knickers, the taut outline of which I have just glimpsed from beneath the fine material of her skirt, but I'm allowed to dream, aren't I? I've noticed that girls called Susan resemble each other. The type is quite tall and full-bodied, with exquisite white flesh, which is both firm and yielding. I become lost in a vision of Susan's naked back, curving to a narrow waist and then widening, suddenly, to the entrancing mounds of flesh below. I'm trying to decide whether it would be possible to see more from this angle when I'm jerked back to reality by the sudden clamour of my phone.

"Charles Blain, Susan's phone, I mean."

"It's Max, Vere's Susan?"

"I, I don't know exactly. She's gone out, to a meeting or something."

"Vere? Vere has she gone? She must haff told you."

"No, I'm sorry Max, she didn't say where."

"Damn," he said, slamming down the phone.

My heart starts to pound. It's not my fault if Max is upset. This is the first time I've spoken to him since the meeting in Sloan Square. It was Rick Sneed who got me started when I first arrived here, it must be two weeks ago now. I know Max has got a big office upstairs somewhere but I've never seen it. I've overheard that he hardly ever comes into the office. Apparently, he's out and about most days, hobnobbing with the rich and famous, picking up tittle-tattle about the high and mighty of the land to use in his exclusive column. He knows what's going on behind the scenes, even at Buck House; that's why we get the court circular and all those upper class mags like the Tattler and Country Life, I suppose. Rick told me there were to be no scandalous revelations in MAX, just some subtle hints about who's in love with who, who's falling out of favour with the elite and a bit of discrete satire about the inner circle that Max inhabits. It all sounded a bit tame to me and I wondered who would be interested in such stuff.

Thank God Susan's back; I can just see her taking her coat off in the lobby.

"Any Messages, Charley?"

"Just one from Max, Susan. Well, not a message really, he sounded upset that you'd gone out."

"Christ, trust him to come into the office when I'm not here," she said, turning paler than her usual peaches and cream. She gave her hair a flick and rushed out into the lobby, as if drawn from afar by Max's magnetic presence.

Not long after, Susan returned, red faced and crying. She went to her desk and just sat there, working her way through a box of tissues, sobbing every now and then. No one went over to comfort her. I just sat paralysed with longing, wondering what Max could have done to upset her so much. I considered calling a taxi and taking her home myself, hoping to comfort her in her own home, since mine would be out of the question.

Before I could pluck up enough courage to go over and offer my services, the glass doors swung open and Max strode into the office looking grim. He was an inspired speaker, I had to give him that, even if he had upset Susan, but his message didn't go down too well.

"Ladies and gentleman. You know how important it is in dese early days to maintain de highest standards of professionalism, both as to behaviour in de vorkplace and to de contents of our vunderful magazine. It's vital dat our first issue makes an outstanding impression, since all de vorld will be votching and vaiting for us to fall."

This was when I realised that MAX had not yet appeared on the newsstands let alone on the coffee tables of the rich and famous.

"Vun mistake, Vun vord out off place, Vun article giving offence to de arbiters of taste and we're finished. You know we are relying on our exclusiff advertisers for funding; and dey will not settle deir accounts if de magazine is a flop. It's unfortunate ve have to go trough dis temporary cash flow hiatus, but dat's de nature of new ventures, I'm afraid. I vont you all to share in de financial success of Max, but before dis can happen ve must stretch every fibre of our being to bring dis about."

I felt a bit guilty about the lack of exercise my fibres had received over the last fortnight but even more fearful that my first monthly pay cheque might not be forthcoming. I was grateful to Max for the original handout, but that had long since gone on advance rent and a few mouthfuls of second-rate food.

"I call upon you all to be patient and rally round de flag. Let's make dis de best magazine launch effer." With these remarks, he swept out.

When he had gone back to his office or driven off somewhere in his Bentley, there was a general gathering of the clan and a lot of muttering about 'broken contracts'.

"Jesus, I can't work like this," Jasper Potts shouted, waving his arms about. "It's months since I've had an advance: who does he think is paying for my theatre tickets, the ballet, the opera or my lunches with agents and managers?"

"Don't you dare speak about Max like that," Sylvia Jarman said, raising her voice, "where would you be without him. You're just some cheap hack Max took pity on."

She was a young, ash blond with a slim figure, which now quivered with indignation.

"Well, my dear, we all know how you got the job, don't we," Jasper replied waspishly.

"How dare you speak to me like that, you pathetic little queer. What would you know about a real man like Max?"

""More than you might think, dearie."

"For God's sake stop bickering," Betty said, "Max is our only chance; without him where would any of us be?"

The third member of Max's female troupe was short and dark, with a neat figure and a pretty mouth painted with purple lipstick. If I hadn't been in love with Susan, I would probably be mooning after her.

*****

The next week passed without major upsets, but my workload increased as the printing deadline approached. The office seemed to be filled with new faces, photographers, models, the odd celebrity, graphic designers and printers. My time was taken up with receiving supplies, ready for next week's print run. The supplies were stored in the basement at the rear of the premises. I hadn't realised that there was an editing studio and print shop below stairs, where recently employed Morlocks were busy setting up and testing their machines, while the Eloi played about upstairs.

I learned from Rick that Max had convinced the bank to increase our overdraft facility, so we could finance the first production run. I was relieved and asked him about my pay. He acted cagey and suggested I could have a small advance from petty cash if I was really hard pressed.

Things were a bit of a mess downstairs and Rick was worried about supplies going missing, especially computer equipment. He asked me to stay behind and check on deliveries against our inventory records. He said it would be a disaster if the print-run failed because some crucial supplies were missing or not delivered. I was a bit pissed off, being kept behind and in doubt if I would ever be paid. I was really hoping to catch Susan on her way home, for a quick cup of coffee and a meaningful chat, but she had already left by the time I went downstairs, clipboard in hand.

When I reached the basement and put the key in the door, I found it was already unlocked. The computer room was at the front and the larger print room next door. At the back was the storeroom where I was headed. There were no lights on except for the winking eyes of the computer terminals. Suspicious now, I crept into the darkness of the print room and listened. I thought I heard a scuffling sound in the storeroom and went immediately on the alert, thinking a robbery might already be in progress.

Then I heard a woman's voice begin to moan. "Oh, Christ. Yes, yes, do what you want with me. I love you so much. Oh, God, it's so good I can't bear it."

The thrashing noise became louder, interspersed with gutteral male cries in some foreign language. I felt sick at the thought that it must be Susan, but the voice was younger, almost certainly Sylvia's, but I couldn't be sure. I would have to make some excuse to Rick in the morning, saying I couldn't find the key or something.

*****

The date for the print run had been set for Thursday and things got so busy that Rick didn't even mention the stock take; presumably because he thought I'd done it. It was all hands to the pumps; finalising and checking articles, making sure every detail was correct. To make matters worse, there was even a sealed section, whose contents were not disclosed to either the reader or to us. The only ones who knew anything were the printers and Max himself. The price was another bone of contention. Max insisted that it had to be ten guineas, to show it was a cut above the competition. If nothing else, it was a clever stunt to get the readers to pay the V.A.T.

Thursday finally came round and the presses began to roll. A security guard had been posted at the entrance to the basement and we were all forbidden to go into the print room. Around three o'clock, after a tense wait, Max came into the office, brandishing the first copy of MAX. It was big and glossy and certainly looked like it was worth ten guineas. The front cover showed the elegant figure of a man about town, standing beneath a big neon sign that read 'MAX' in electric blue. It was the kind of visual pun that appealed to Max, or so Arthur Nesbitt said at the time.

"Ladies and gentlemen, congratulations! At dis wery moment our magazine is being shipped for distribution both in England and abroad and will be awailable tomorrow morning at high-class newsagents and bookstores. I haff arranged for your monthly salaries to be paid into your bank accounts tomorrow morning. I'm sorry dat I haff to leave you now but I've a press conference to attend."

With a cheery wave of the magazine and shouts of joy and clapping from us, he waved goodbye and left the office.

That was the last time any of us saw Max. When we turned up on Friday, everything had been stripped bare overnight. All the office furniture, fittings and computers were gone. Down stairs it was the same; all the graphic design equipment, and printers had been cleared out. Rick rushed upstairs to Max's office, but nothing remained, not even the carpet.

The wailing began in earnest when it was discovered that no money had been deposited in our bank accounts.

"Jasper Pots strode up and down the boards repeating, "Dirty swine, rotten bastard."

Worst of all for me, Susan had not turned up and there was no reply when I tried her home number. I had to assume she had done a bunk with Max.

I couldn't really grasp what had happened. I'd seen the vans myself, through the window, collecting bales of magazines, so they must be on the street by now. I rushed to the nearest newsstand but they had never heard of MAX. By the time I'd checked out Smiths and a couple more newsagents in Sloan Street and the King's Road, I became convinced that all was lost.

I returned to the office with a heavy heart to see if the others had had better luck, but by the time I got there the place was deserted. I went down to the basement to see if I could find any clues but there were only a few empty cardboard boxes and the detritus of the hurried evacuation. I searched for anything that would explain my predicament but found nothing. Finally, I wandered out to the loading bay and found that the steel roller door had been left open. Among the litter of wood shavings and cardboard, I spied the glossy cover of the magazine. It was little compensation for losing my job but I kept it as a souvenir. I wondered if I could sell it outside the station for ten guineas, or even more since it was a unique first edition.

Not wanting to go home to my lonely bed-sitter, I went to the nearest coffee shop and treated myself to a cappuccino and a piece of cheesecake, breaking into my last five quid.

I sat alone at a glass-covered table and sipped my coffee, leafing through the heavily printed pages of the magazine. It was the usual stuff; adverts for shoes and watches that only the very rich could afford; snobby gossip about princes without principalities looking for beautiful wives.

The sealed section was very thick but I managed to rip open the plastic with the cake fork. At first I thought it was just a big advert for American Express but on closer inspection it turned out to be twenty pages of $1,000 dollar bills, printed five to a page.

I had just received my first paycheck from Max, $100,000. My rent was overdue, so I wondered, frantically, where I could get a guillotine at that time in the evening.

*****