Sitting with a distributor

Why should you fret, and why should I rage?
I’m trying to sell you something.
In the back of my mind are images you cannot see:
A skeletal ship upon the moonlit sea
A Saxon raiding skiff that time forgot.
I cannot see their faces, yet their eyes
Glitter like green diamonds in the mist.
A pair of lips half-opened, then the time
She slept with me for what I thought was love
And yet you rant, and half your words I hear
The other half, a Stuka engine roar
Above doomed London; now my cell phone rings
A porridgey voice tells me your cheques have bounced
So you can basically roll that order into a cigarette
And light it in your butt.

I
Diseased mind, why do you stray
The length of a mental holiday?
Be warm in your little box
Blanketed by travel plans
Warmed by remembrance of children’s hands
Fur lined boot and socks.
O do not think of breast or butt
Nor stare and strut
At bygone tarts and their appurtenances
But wallow in full room and board
Not thinking, when the lid is shut
Which Babylonian slut
Opened the gates to Persian horde.


II
How shall I look
Upon her face, O monster moon?
How shall I brook
Her seeming unaware?
Her glance would arrest
The sun in his flight
To steer in her sight
And swoon.

Better

I shared a flight with YSR once: he looked like an honest man; I am sad he died.
But a sage said, it is better to be a python’s prey than a rat’s:
To be devoured by death than nibbled alive, like those that have cancer, say –
But then who am I to judge
If he was right? Maybe it is better to die everyday by just little bits
And plan the afterlife, to have time for solace
In the smell of sticks, or the shadows inside
A church at dusk, with a nun in silence
Bent over the pages of her vast book.

Star to Mantua
...the vaulty heaven so high above our heads...

Not the trill of the lark
In her high hung heaven,
The darkling is ridden
With wasteful alarm:
But lie in the blackness
Of dream-dark tresses
And savour the sadness
Of farewelling arms.
O see not the awning
Aglow in the dawning
As the dappling of daylight
Unmakes the moon.
Unheeding its warning
Fickle fortune scorning
O dally, till the daybreak
Comes soon, too soon.

So tonight, like the night before,
When a full moon flushes on the white-sand shore,
And the Arquith of Noth come hunting – aye,
In their tens and their milliards, to quarrel over billiards,
And stamp the frightened woozy-possums scampering by –
So tonight, like the night that is gone,
When silver teaspoons tinkled on your moon-swept lawn –
We shall sing, we shall play,
Though flattened-possum mothers sing a mournful lay,
We shall dance with the Arquith and all be gay.
We shall sing with the Arquith, the young lads croon
O kings of the Noth-men, the ladies swoon,
Fly us away to the monster moon.
Deep in the lairs of the Big Red Sea
The hoary-haired ogre-mogre waits in glee
To feast on the Noth-men is a life-long wish
His ears are cocked – did a possum go ‘squish’?
Deep in the bowels of the Big Red Sea
The maids of Neptune lay out their tea
Crumpets and chocolates, a treacle-box treat
With rolly-polly pudding of Noth-men’s feet.
The vile tempered Noth-men are yummy to eat
When stewed with a carrot, and a kilo of beet
We shall stomp on the Arquith, the Jijama drone
O chomp on Arquith, the possums mourn,
Far, far better than Neptune’s seat
Is a treacle-box luncheon, with Noth-men meat

Don't ask me why
I love you – don’t ask me why.
Ask why the wind blows
Why ice is cold, why snow is white
Why milk never sours in the breast
And whoever knows physics, he will answer, but –
Don’t ask me why I love you.
But if you will not ask
If you will not pry
I shall tell you, let me tell you now:
Because this world has nothing in it
Not the smell of half-remembered days
Nor dreams of times to come
That matters more than the soft
Supple skin of your immediate hand:
If this isn’t love, then call it what you will
Call it what you make of why it matters so:
The wheel of time, the siren of our visions
The vagabond of our loneliness’ longing:
An ocean
Of diffused metaphors.
You do not understand: that’s the reason
I told you not to ask.

Suddenly

Suddenly, when spirit
Coils like a serpent of the ancient seas
And life like a lyric
Leaps in the blood blue age cannot freeze;
Suddenly, when summer
Burns in my veins like a spoonful of sun
O voice, grown dumber
Than the silent woods, is your shouting done?
Defying the sorrow
Black putrefaction of the soul’s decay
Blue birds of the morrow
Jabber, gibber, intonate you lifelong lay.
Suddenly, when giving
Thought to the dead, where the dead have a name
The limbs of the living
Draw to the grave as moths to a flame
Cold as a glimmer
Born of the fires that forever burn:
O eyes grown dimmer
Than the sinking sun, is your sighting done?

Untitled

I dreamt of you tonight, no face
Was ever so long to linger
While swiftly on the tread of time
Sped morning’s red harbinger:-
Though time and tide at odds with men
Now break the day too soon
I dreamt of you tonight, by light
Of cold November moon.


Unitled II
The heart is a friend
Of its own moody seasons
In its vacillations
Neither reason nor rhyme:
So why need I wonder
Years having blown asunder
Memories and mooring to a forgotten time -
My heart’s mad beatings run
When I see your face again
Like a season that has lain
In search of the sun?


Unititled III
Night after night, when darkness covers me
You visit me dreaming, like you were not gone
And there you are loving, as you once were loving
Where the curtains of slumber are deepestly drawn.
Night after night, when starlight is twinkling
And a red moon rises over foglands forlorn
And the forests are flooded, their rough trees rudded
You visit me dreaming, like you were not gone.
But daylight brings parting, bitter as our parting
I wake in an unrest, you vanish anon.