Eats its own body weight and more through the witching hours
In mists and under a moon
To leave the world clean -
But who can complain ?

Feeds hedgehogs, foxes, toads and birds,
Stretches eleven times its own length,
Has 27,000 teeth,
Can crawl along the edge of a razor.

Only brute flesh, but see the wonder !

Clouds shine bright beneath cold stars
As a moon’s strange light falls onto rocks,
And out of all our fevered minds
Blows the stench of a terrible pox.

We banished Nature, sowed dark seeds
(As if Nature’s mightiest deeds can’t kill us).

Wild waves fling broad across the breeze
As birds on the wing so blithely sing
And all our spreading cities bring
A creeping dread disease.

We banished Nature, smashed its creed
(As if Nature ever had to heed fool us).

Mountains rise, sweet waters spring,
There’s beauty found in everything -
But we keep chasing bitter dust
In crazy, grasping, gasping lust.

We banished Nature in our greed
(As if Nature can’t one day be freed of us).

Dreams fly soft across the air,
Silence gathers everywhere -
We really haven’t any care
About the damage that we’ve done.

We banished Nature with all speed
(As if Nature won’t one day feed off us).

There’s nothing now that’s left to die -
The smoke is rising in the sky -
And if you listen there’s this one cry
To signal that we’ve gone.

4/00

See, how it swims!
But in its head alone, my child,

And look!
There again!
It caught a fish!

But the fish is dead,
And the brain registers not a clue
In the drab white of the Bristol zoo,
As the sworn shadow of the seal
Locks in a battle royal round the concrete den,
In the caged-up pen,
Not a trace that’s true -

See! How it’s gone, my child,
How it shakes its’ head,
The spirit’s dead, my child, the spirit’s dead!

Sept 2001

Yet though the air is still and crickets sing,
My thoughts turn back, and worse hours spring to mind -

And contemplation turns to fire each sting,
And whips my savage soul to cringe, then shift its fling
From such bleakness with a shrug -
‘Tis too terrible:

I find myself again, and mind the time,
And settle down to hear life’s brief rhyme and ring.

Sept. 00

Of soft relief sighing in a sunlit run,
Hisses in a struggled sprawl strung
As softened threads on the sea-shore’s smooth tongue
In a whispered haul of faint breathed sussuration

Washing on the firm-fleshed sucking sand:
A gull calls, wheels, shrills, spills and dwells, mills
In a high melee, chases, races, flares in to land
As a breeze blows, crows, tucks the hands of flags

Flapping in restless flailing strops
Atop blind poles lopped; time itself stops
In a gathered instant as meaning drags
A long stretch writ across the day’s full cry.

I sigh …

Feb 2000

Speed!
The machine is running,
Jaws clamp on what life is left,
Swift bungee-jump through space back to the centre of the web,
And a black mess of compressed bodies
Turned in a bundle by vast front legs.

Gagged voices would tell of death.

Oh, terror is a beautiful thing to behold,
So strong, so desperate, vibrant, life -
I cannot watch it die and feed it just enough
To keep it tamed, raw fingers grasping,
Caged …

The venom in its song would eat me in a whisper,
Pouncing like a crab or spider -

And still it tries to lure me in,
Those many eyes glinting, lies,
‘Come closer, come here … ‘
Cleverly done, but I am more clever,
And feed it less until it cries out for more …

Subdued, its terror tamed, closed in,
It holds itself now in a little heat,
Unwilling to lose its small full meal
Which is its life,
And I bask now in its tamed warmth,
We have an understanding -
I feed it, she smiles, chuckles,
Bursts out small lies,
Loves me,
But underneath there lurks a monster,
Waiting to leap out and CONSUME !

19/9/99

Like lissom sheets of rippling light,
Steel-tendoned, creeping-toed on arched hams,
Stalkers of poetry,
Dance-floor heavies, disdainful,
Gulp-centred to the very bowels of their being,
Rumin-waiting for their own wise conclusion
Where grey meets clear and nothing begins,
Pursed feet in tidy smiles and tails drawn round in a neat
Period -
Stop!

With skin-full satisfaction wiped across their faces
Cats carry their pride in bellyachefuls,
The Mr.Razors of the neighbourhood,
Sharpening their nails on epithets and hard currency,
Chatting only to their own wise God
(Who of course treats them as equals) –

… the Earth nudges a fault
And cats run in like mangy turds,
Skulk-eyed slithering, full of guilt,
Venomous at the turn of a name,
Haughty, indifferent, bad-tempered,
Noisy like banshees on perma-wail…….

… and yet tomorrow smooth-tongued they’ll sigh their way through a leap,
Flick up a jump indolently as if for small boys’ scratches (not worth a penny),
Nod onto the grass,
Bounce to a butterfly or piece of string,
Dive, somersault, chase as though their brains
Are tied to their motion …

We lead them on and laugh -
But the cat is the one who walks away.

1989 ?

We scuff amongst the golden leaves of autumn ,
Crisp, dry, fragile , crunching,
Looking for the next,
Perhaps a loose traveller split by the bounce
At the end of the lonely fall
(Listen, barely a rustle in the leaves,
There is no breeze,
And another one lands in the silence
Amongst barbed-wire rolls of twigs , musty fungi , decayed wood,
Birch and rhododendron ).

Thick-gloved we twist and wrench,
Cruel,
Gleaming-eyed,
Excited,
As others utter little cries,
‘Come here!’ and
‘Look at this!’
Until at last, full laden, sated
We retire,
Trek back by the sparkling stream in the deep-down ditch,
Through ranks of beech forming mats of nuts,
Past the raft-shaped rotting wooden bridge
With gaps and moss on its slippery trunks,
To the bikes , cold cycling , home …

And the sizzled yellow meat burnt under the grill,
And the black-charred skin curling slowly off,
The full bowl slowly emptying,
Appreciative grunts –

Eating chestnuts.

1988 ?

Then I had a brother,
Moulded in the songs of infancy, full of delight,
And my spark touched fire and burnt his face
And we shrieked
To our mother’s song
In a bundling of frenzy
And ran for the dark oak by the barbed wire fence
To scrabble and duck
In our youth
Into the summered joy of the hunt

Running with the airy limbs
Of children playing castles in the green of the woods
And the wild sunshine smiles of the chased,
Past hazel,
Shadow of hawthorn,
The horse-mushroom patch and tree
Where the high pigeon stood its calls on the air
And there was I free
Of myself,
And in myself most freely given

As we lightly played out our lives
In the emptiness of our understanding,
And troubled not the trees nor the world
With our weight
Of unseeing years :
And the morning was unspoken,
Unbroken, kissed by unseen hands controlling this,
The new-born moments
Together
Tumbled into childhood’s fractured bliss

Until we found a stony track,
Drifted slow, with switches flicking, broke the hollow back
Of time, dawdled on a mystery,
Spun out purpose,
Stretched our living rhyme
And walked towards our destiny:
And there, beneath the worn bones standing guard on fear
Where time had told
We began,
Beating out our song in morning’s light

As we strode like giants
Into the captured land our slung sticks framed,
Gathering silences for inspection,
Dissection,
Long-lost reflection
In the loneliness of quiet
Carved from the sun-buzzed nested briars our tired limbs made:
Until, at long last worn,
We were done:
Had called for the day, and won the morn.

2004?