New green comes
with the fullness of summer,
the accepting leaves thickened
by lush plump rain.
Life is ripe
with wet dogs
dashing grasslands,
as the rain clears
a prism in the mist
and an exhalation.
Poetic Offshoots from the Scottish Jungle
New green comes
with the fullness of summer,
the accepting leaves thickened
by lush plump rain.
Life is ripe
with wet dogs
dashing grasslands,
as the rain clears
a prism in the mist
and an exhalation.
May
and a shedding of youth.
Every petal now
has decidedly fallen-
a shoal of pink,
imperceptibly shifted
by a slow nodding breeze.
A limp velvet quilt.
New green coming
in the fullness of summer.
Because I had no family
In any meaningful sense,
I had no silence I understood.
Not the silence of omertà
against outsiders and authority
but the silence of within,
the silence of personal shame.
A silence that leaked out
in the actions of co-conspirators,
parents, grans, grandas, aunts and uncles.
It seeped into their cosy knowledge,
until it distanced them to far flung streets
until they had nothing to say, finally.
When they started dying
I tried to talk. Got half answers,
still half-a-silence. Truth was poison.
I have the freedom of the unknown.
I remake them in the truth I choose to give them.
With love.
From capsules of classrooms
we ran, the wind and playtime
sparking the fibres of our nerves
and jackets. Spat out, fizzing blindly,
zigzagging, jumping, blazers
for sails, legfuls of youth.
Fifteen minutes of mayhem
before the clanging bell
died us
back down
When a tree falls
We don’t hear it crash.
If it’s in a forest
It will be held up
By those closest to it.
Propinquity, said Freud
Is the catalyst of treehood.
Shopping at Asda.
Black refuse sacks for the bins,
Carriers for food.
Escaping the News,
Shovelling buckets of grub
Into the trolley.
Family rubbish,
The routine consumption, not
Bodies in a ditch.
Paracetamol.
You are welcome to
these words, my orphans
embedded
unhaunted and pastless
lacking a mother’s breath
blanketed in other things
collected lonelily
in solitary childhood games
grace them with your eyes
lashes softly brushing
there, there, there
Locked out again.
There’s a way in, I know.
If I could hear it.
Listen harder.
Swim upstream or go…
When it washes,
will it seep
to my skinkept understanding
or will the
chanting of abstract breath
suffice?
Almost strangers,
walking the same path.
Synchronous-
a turning of heads,
an eye-catch.
How did we arrive here
in this beauty, breathlessly
sharing our air?
Inhaling the quiet ecstasy.
understanding
you feel what I feel.
O won’t you sleep my boy
in the dark mid-day of death
with your won’t-close eyes
in the mist’s fraught periphery?
Don’t you sleep my darling
in memory-fog,
don’t you dawdle there
in the half-light yearning.
Can’t you sleep my heart
in early evening shadows
with your can’t-unravel mind
and your love enfolding?
Let me be your heart.
Let me sing your rhythm.
Let me be the dream
you need for sleep.