Springtime

Drifts of rain cascade lightly over shoulders
Of the strolling eco-romanticists;
When in smogging London
Everything is melting
Smog on streetwalkers
Who assault the High Street
With credit cards on galaxy limits.
It is springtime, the lord above
Smiles behind cautious sunrays
And sends sweet aromas to fumigate the bleak
In this carnal time,
When a young girl displays her breasts
Before an April flecked mirror
And behind which a young man stands
He could touch her, but not yet
Her shyness has not fully melted.
Sun showers gliding, flippant and askance
Over soiled pavements
And traffic moves slowly enough
To leave imprints
Of tyre sweat of the overworked bitumen.
Everything is melting,
Grime of conservative buildings seep slowly
Down to the junction of wall and footpath
And lubricate revolving doors.
A bystander lingers just slowly
For his clothes to melt into spring fabrics;
Everything is melting
It is springtime and windowpanes
Distort into psychedelic faces
Pedestrians recognising themselves
And look away.
The hours of spring lose their way
As clock faces on church steeples melt;
The minute hand shakes hands with the hour hand
An agreement to merge
It’s springtime and everything is melting.

Bored vs. Bored

Untimely but true, it’s the beatified daily
Reportage of the unseemly few;
Beatified celebs, chrome celebrities
Celebrating themselves by remuneration,
A groan of pop art incidents
For the wordless we, passive celebrants
Gesturing to ourselves, genuflection
To the daily void, boredom becalmed
By the bored who worship themselves bored.
Feeding on arid sentences
We’ve lost control again
Like the anonymous everyday
Burdened by a messed up identity
Reports to sell a glossy gossip mag or two,
The readers and the celebs
With tales of their secret fears to share.

Demented

They call me demented, and they speak
Of me helpless and non compos:
True, I am near ninety and have lived
The full cycle of life;
Their whispers of warring respect and fury
Swirl around my ears, and from whence
This reason for reproach confuses me;
I know my name, though I cannot mouth it
In the way I charged the enemy’s front line
A hero in waiting, when I survived.

My deepest feelings dwell impotent
A vegetable without a mask; I sit aware
Yet unaware of life’s panoramas
And sitting as I daily do, sometimes
Mouthing for a kind of relief best dealt
With by my own hand which I cannot raise;
Damn this incapacity to control destiny
For I’m a plunger toward an eternity
A peace sought after by all who believe
In the ultimate and the terminal.

How strange I’m in a bib worn when
I was a baby fed stewed apple on
A spoon guided by a sure hand to a
Mouth open for this sweet nutrition
To kick-start a life of total fulfilment
Swelled with hope and expectations;
Babe I was who subconsciously knew
Joy when grasped but ebbs away
Like dribbling and porridge from my
Gummy gawp, the blank expression.

Today I was bathed, toileted and
Clothed to be ready for a beautiful
Day of sunshine, songbirds and
Relatives in a mode of intense attention
Over this truly helpless man-babe
What a life to be. Wait! A life that was,
A life ebbing away with no reason
For this living decay, my mind snap
Frozen then thawed; a quantum
Step into a wooden box for burning.

I am demented and feebler than when
I first emerged into the world of ninety
Years or so; and mother, who she was,
Was there! I’m sure someone was there
A body like here; but no, I hear voices
Cutting my thoughts like a surgeon’s knife
Into membrane, and I’m drifting under
An anaesthetic and sorrow flitters, the
Sorrow of all that is past and swoops
Like the hungry eagles on Prometheus.