In this light the shadows
walk away from me
then turn back,
after I’ve gone.
I don’t look my years
out here in the dark.
The trees lie on the floor
before jumping up
as if they don’t want me
to know they sleep
lying down.
The colour has been sucked
away by the sun
leaving cloaks to wear
and hoods to pull up.
In this light the shadows
walk away from me.
I take a glowing nozzle
in my hand, entering each patch
to see what I’ve known
is now gone.
The day closes down, hangs out this sign
The season slams the door, this is winter’s
Discontent, disconnect, our yard is buried
Windows secure, lawn furniture stowed
Away, everything is put away, stacked up
In the garage, in the cellar, holding, waiting
In our cloistered world of forced hot air and
Early dark we pace, we wander, bide our
Time as best we can, like old time shut-ins
Outcasts cast in, looking out at this snow
This cold, the wind still whispering, but it’s
No longer whispering our names.
Why the extinguishment of consciousness
causes me such distress I do not know
for that nothingness into which we all go
will surely put my preoccupations to flight
nullifying everything in an endless night.
I am the extrovert who keeps to himself.
I think about myself before anyone else.
I look myself in the mirror for myself.
I talk to you but about me.
I selflessly extend my hand when yours is full.
I am the introvert who only believes in extroversion.
I am kind and gentle in most extraordinary ways.
In a way that I appear when you need me the most.
It is most unlikely that I might be of use.
I am soft and trusted when you whisper your secrets.
Your secrets are mine, but mine are distrusted.
I am rude and harsh in the face of self-beliefs.
I am courageous to the cowardly.
I stand up to them who can’t stand up for themselves.
My strength in my arms is a symbol of size.
My strength in my heart is nowhere found.
I protect myself from external disasters.
I am a coward to all the internal monsters.
Am I the face that they recognise?
Am I the name that they plagiarize?
Who am I or what am I?
Am I not to ever understand in this lifetime?
Am I human being that counts?
Or am I just another package of weight?
Who am I?
More at http://pepperscript.com/.
Born during the famine
my seawoman ancestor set out regularly
into the Atlantic, southwards
and eastwards, towards Bristol,
trading metal and grain.
Though she lies quiet now
in the tomb at Ráth
my mind carries her about,
delicately as a caul,
sets her free on the high seas.
I am there too, at the binnacle,
manning the compass,
plotting our course westwards.
The name of our journey is mingling, or
daring, or dwelling with the things she loved.
In the sea there is no place
that is not her place.
Each journey is an alert
romance.
She respects the ocean’s stillness,
knows its savagery.
As waters rock beneath us
I nudge through her reticence,
amid flicker of whale pulse
and dolphin plunge, touch her heart,
sky sidling away in the wind,
and the notion I share with Kate, that this was our
first home,
that we crawled from its wet turbulence
aeons ago, limped across shores,
loved land later, with its trees and sighs.
Twist fist
power
sudden tighten
nothing
passes thru
strain feign
a grain
of sand
stuck in the sieve
leaves
a vacuum.
I began by floating
above the dull earth, but
soon found that my ascent
was moving in the opposite
direction. A few words later,
an insult here or there,
placed like a hidden blade,
and I was finding my way
quickly to the terrestrial
realm from which I rose.
The neighbors were the same,
and their cooking smelled
somehow worse.
Their children still crowded
the streets like homeless
wanderers.
Now I am merely a heap,
a might-have-been soon
to become a must-have-been
and then a who-was-that.
Stress has been his constant companion
lodestar of his neurotic universe
spanning his life from beginning to end
a rope bridge across a shark-filled ocean.
How he would sweat over school exams
then worry about his college degree
while fretting over his chosen career
and if ever he’d get that first promotion.
A steady girlfriend brought him no respite
only the fear she might not be Miss Right
marriage unleashing a new set of woes
with the bills and the thirty year mortgage
and whether they could afford two kids.
But even retirement gives him no joy
being as stressed as when he was a boy
his golden years yielding fresh anxieties
about his wealth lasting and his health.
Alas it is I trapped in this fraught world
and in this moment of contemplation
I ask myself what salvation there is
for such a man as me yet must conclude
my worries on this earth will never cease
and that death may be my only release
You always were withdrawn and self-contained
so by your nature you are still constrained
for since you have been lying underground
you have slumbered there without a sound
with reports that not a single whispered word
from your abode in the beyond has been heard.
It seems therefore that your taciturnity
is destined to continue in perpetuity.
Hence from beneath your shroud of silence
we can expect no promise of deliverance.
whiskey moon
I collect blown out candles
on the beach
—–
a motorbike
zips through traffic
with my passing years
—–
meandering river
I float
with your memories
—–
cradling you…
I add one more candle
on the cake
—–
new day
a dove silently floats
on a rainbow
—–
mobile library
a ladybird eats raindrops
from the leaf
—–
dandelions
in a spring soaked sky
ponies gallop
—–
moonlight
a silhouette
of early daffodils
—–
old questions
rest in the tornado
of a meandering stream
—–
on the sea
ripples of moonlight
lighthouse on the rocks
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