Everything about the unknown honeysuckle

is and always was un-something:

unseen, untouched, unsmelt

even undone and undecided.

Deep in the equally unvisited sunlit wood

where morning and late shadows

move flickering with the hours across the undergrowth,

this flower’s life is like the shortest night.

But in its heyday

not a smaller jot less dazzling or superb

than the most admired and worshipped garden bloom.

WHY NOT EMBRACE THE MODERN WORLD?



Against some prejudices and tired spirits

I will embrace the modern world.

Tear up the letters, forget the phones with wires:

The postcards and the telegrams already unremembered.



New as the tree-torn apple and the unwrapped sock,

I lovingly accept tomorrow’s latest and I find

A kaleidoscope of media

Converging and expanding

Like waves of starlings in a three dimensional sky.



The starlings chatter in discord yet express ideas in echoes of each other.

By thoughts like these

the useless and the dead are numbered,

a woman is curtailed, a man ignored;

childhood and the child are schools apart

and all my dreams more real than coins or cakes.



POETRY IS DEAD



Poetry is dead He said

Poetry is dead



Poetry is dead in me

Not JUST in me He said



But anywhere and everywhere

In black and white and red

Colours shine in brightest grey

With flat screen pictures

In my head

And all’s the same He said.



Why don’t you come to bed? She said

At once he knew

And she did too

That poetry’s not dead

NOW



Time passes

Life passes

NO IT DOESN’T



There is past and there is future

The present never is or was or will be

Heraclitus was right





SLEEP



They say Macbeth has murdered sleep

may be, but I wish I could

I can’t get close enough



I don’t slip into sleep

sleep slips, slips, slips away

disappearing beyond an ever edgy horizon

a watery cloud not seen

but sly rumour says it's there, not far

and I must believe all rumours

or I’d be eye-poppingly awake

forever

or stand eyeless as a hollow statue

unseeing and unseen

unmoving and unmoved

all still, no breeze or breath

again

NIGHT WALK



I walked one night in town,

Passed 50 men if they were a day.

Glared past one who hated his wife.

Danced past another in love for the ninth time.

Stared red-eyed at the tv watcher.

Grinned at another without any money.

They all get hungry and eat.



Winked at the suit who’d come from his mistress.

Scowled at the prim one just because it was Sunday.

One was boss-eyed – perhaps I’d been drinking.

Dragged past another who lived like a habit.

They all get thirsty and drink



I jumped past the one who was getting promoted.

Had a job getting past the one with eight children.

I smiled a bit at the man with no clothes on.

And I think I made the man with the dog itch.

They all get frightened and hate





THE HEART TICKS



The heart ticks

whilst no clock beats.

The life moves on

though curtains are drawn,

not caring whether the day-light sun pours bright or filtered

onto north or south,

or is moon-bounced and sickly flickering east or west.





The cell splits

to grow and sub-divide

The organ forms

to be a part of you,

that is itself, in part, a part of swirling gaseous

all or nothing.

And what’s complete then? Never you

who cannot see today the microscopic stars

Or feel the dying atoms of your distant brain.





Then float with the ceaseless movement

and sink with straight-lined circles

and with those spiralled ripples into tiny space.

Do not grieve for lost visions that have never been;

when, after all, you are the abstract movement of an instant comet:

gone before your own arrival.



when daffodils die

when daffodils die

next winter is seen

when crocuses cry

grey suffocates green



when snowdrops flop

swallows pass through

when bluebells drop

snowstorms ensue



as each spring ends

Christmas is there

summer only pretends

autumn is where?



as first youth is lost

old age can be seen:

your prime is a ghost

middle age a has-been

HEADLINES

Vain bargain for the hour that death is due

Though: “she has time to come to terms with

dying”

For headlines blazed in black are always true

Minutes for sale, each one can buy you two

We haggle with, not for, our final sighing

Vain bargain for the hour that death is due

In Third World floods ten thousand dead too few

Whilst one lost westerner has nations crying

For headlines blazed in black are always true

So make your devil’s pact and see it through:

You may, but will not, stop the seconds flying

Vain bargain for the hour that death is due

Though death is old as hills and never new

It makes great copy with the ink still drying

For headlines blazed in black are always true

Dozens blitzed for a cause without a clue

From instant life to nothing without trying

Vain bargain for the hour that death is due

For headlines blazed in black are always t rue





CO LO U RS



Red are her moods

Her trust is green

Black are her arts on me

She broods unseen these colours three.



Brittle gold, her heart is yellow

Her hate, fired up, glows white

She’ s fashioned into evil every hue



And yet I mellow in her sight

just because her eyes are blue.

EYES DOWN



Your feet are clever: they know just what to do

There are no precious stones strewn before you

The streets aren’t paved with gold

The gaping holes that scare you aren’t in the road,

but in your head

Keep your feet on the ground,

OK, but not your eyes

Look up, my friend, the world is level

With your sight imperfect, yes,

but flawed not floored

Join in, accept, embrace :

At least if you collide, you’ll see it coming .



THREE SHORT SELF THOUGHTS