Tuesday, 17 November 2015

For Elsa

Stay with me
A little while longer
Find with me reasons
To forget the clock
Allow me the time
To say some clever thing
To make you laugh,
Ignore the foretelling voices
Whose calls you ought to heed

Stay with me
Just a little while longer
With your beauty
Flowing free as highland waters
On ice, at sunset
To quench my thirst
Restore my being
Still my haunting apparitions
And bring me peace

Stay just a little while more
I’ll write my verses for you
With hope you’ll stay forever.




Absent Heroes

I am saved from madness
By Neruda and the verses he wrote for Matilde
Reminders that love is still possible
Though we be separated by time
And ugly history. Hurting too is inevitable
Taken together, to make a living
Of all our existence.

Henry Charles Bukowski
Kindred spirits, you and I.
Writes his mind as if it were my own
Reminisces of his Jane
And the other broken people
Flitting past by night light
They are my memories, my kind of people

Langston Hughes!
I will call, you will answer
You will bring history, perspective
Words, tender offerings
To help me shatter the darkness
Smash this night, break this shadow
Make from it a thousand lights to guide me home

Tennyson,
With you, my mind and soul make music
Make atonement, find forgiveness
Mourn the passing of the faithful
Friends like brothers, love that ends as all else,
Leaves nothing, only hurting anger
Then hate or indifference. It’s all in the loving

I will not look to Ted Hughes to speak to me of forever
But it is you I’ll remember when I see
The toil of all our ages lost to intemperate men
For whose sins we’ll pay with the blood of absent heroes
In time, in full. Unless I pray to a god I cannot see
For redemption, for deliverance
From a hell he hath by his own hands made



In December

I am amazed by fire
That burns, leaves nothing
But distant reminiscence
Of affection lost
Dreams deferred
Indefinitely.
Longing that persists
Through the days
Resurrected by sound, music
Images, real and imagined
Memories that rise unbidden
To wreck righteous terror
On those feckless lovers
Who set the fire
With minds intact
Eyes wide open
Then only to lament
And wonder…
Endlessly wonder
What could have been
The possibilities
Broken souls together
Facing the world
Mocking them
With whispered words
And private jokes
For not knowing
That we know
That together
Even the fiery fire
Of the desert sun
At noon, in December
Is conquered forever
By the consuming passions
That come alive
When I lean to your ear
To say I’ve missed you,
I wish you were here 

Something Missing


There is something of me missing
Lost in the space between that first stolen glance
And the time of the clashing, dancing eyes that say;
I want you, you want me to want you,
I’ll have you, you want me to have you’

There is something of me missing
Lost to the nights reaching to grasp
The naked flesh of a comely, fire haired girl,
To reach the heavens, to touch God, to keep alive
The nightmares we prayed never to end.

There is something of me missing
I know it in the best of times, riding high
On mountains brought low, valleys elevated, liquor
Spilling to the ground to honour the gods
And ruin the ladies’ pretty shoes

There is something of me missing
I know it in the worst of times, drunk, fighting, losing
Violent battles with the demons that shadow my days,
Memories, like ghosts, that rise to take from me
The simple pleasures of a warm night’s sleep

There is something of me missing
Look! Can you see it in the rage that quietly burns
With the fury of a thousand hells, waiting its hour
To taste the air it needs to break free,
To scorch the earth, leaving a scar that never fades

There is something of me missing
Can you not see the madness of passing passions,
Aspirations that take the place of seeing, of living
Of certainty about who I am, what I’m about,
Who I’m supposed to be. Can you not see it?

Look! Look at me next to you
Body and spirit here content in the familiarity of now
Still searching, not finding, longing for another
To touch my hand and make me forget
There is something of me missing still.