Tag: creative writing

Spiral

Nick3 Comments

In the Autumn of my thoughts,
I poured my exploring self
Into one of my known past lives
Where somehow I became caught
Inside the awful seven lies.
Not the life where you
Track me back to a
Red-throated gecko’s crest
In my headwear,
And not the life
Where poems were tied
By one red ribbon
To my samurai chest;
No, deeper again,
To where our wagons petrified;
This is the clearing
And this is the song,
A place we are nearing
Where we do not belong;
Here are the stones
And here are the flowers,
Though petals have withered
And the stones block each hour.
They visit here in their hundreds,
Luxury coaches, air conditioning,
One hundred students
With pre-conditioning
And pink pleated curtains.

My meditative ability
Underneath here,
As much as an oyster and eyeless,
Shucked for humanity’s
Gut and its gears.

Time is a spiral
We surf southwards on,
God’s corkscrew pulls out
To produce the Big Bang.

I can tell you, all physicists,
What’s on that other side;
No more nor less
Than my lost love’s
Champagne-scented sky.

There’s A Quiet Joyousness

Nick4 Comments

There’s a quiet joyousness
In these rites of Spring,
The cuckoo and the pigeon’s breast,
Seasons on a wing.

Dawn chorus is my necklace,
Morning dew my rings,
Sublime the geese-calls overhead,
Divine the dew-blade sings.

My needs no more than gods would bless,
I know I’m better off,
With sun and moon, a place to rest,
All other gains are lost.

Song Of The Lone Nomad

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He steered into town
From the Elephant Road –
Historical misnomer;
For the locals don’t know
Where ivories go

So kept the tusk-gates open.
He peered from his howdah
With a bowlful of chowder
Atop a crowning dust-cloud;
And vials of musth

Faked from the husk
Of Arctic walrus,
Narwhal or seal.
Opulent earring,
Summer sun searing,

The townsfolk gathered
In wonder and thrall.
His name did not matter
And nor did his platter
Bestowing cassowary galls.

He talked of cladistics,
Gujarati mystics
Seven-feet tall,
Harmonious yoga,
Callisthenics diploma

He kept in a scroll.
Sirenian slaves
And a third murdered charmer,
He talked of mermaids
Braiding a harbour,

Catastrophes, yes,
And distant disasters.
Just as curious as his arrival,
Hostage to his survival,
He departed on plumes of fern,

Turning dirt to marble,
When the district police descended
There was no apprehending,
He crossed alive into Nepal
And left the dead to marvel.

Red Moon Blues

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I am your red-moon camisole,
A cheongsam of satin,
Lunar satraps patterned there,
A chaffinch in the cabbage.

I am your wardrobe’s winter-wear,
I trapped to bay a blizzard,
Then husky-sleighs across the lake
Beneath an eagle’s eyelid.

I am the fire in the hearth
When you return from working,
And water-ice for your champagne,
Cheongsam drapes a surface.

Umbilicus

Nick5 Comments

Constant reminders
In my body’s retirement
Of your indelible
Indiscretions
Dissolved into me,
My skin the sea
Filled with your molluscs
And a coprolitic fossil
Of your movements,
Your impossible
Puzzles and befuddled
Cryptic sentences
Like lugworm trails
Where the blight receded,
You see his sand-cast there
But not his burrowed body,
For flesh and form
Took leave long ago,
And all that remains
Are contusions.

Emerged from your gulf,
Urgent as a siren
Until the giant waves
Rewound, every mole
A continuum from times
Of settlements in iris,
Unfunny jokes,
Inverted laughter,
I made no demands for
The complexities of your
Shell-emptied nautilus,
Salvaged from a sea-bed,
Thrust up through a hole
With samphire-weed and poison.

Seagulls squawk and spiral
On a Fibonacci horizon,
I do not own a hair on my heart,
I do not own a thorn-seed;
I was born on Steppes of Despair,
And that is where I am mourning.

Spiraea Song #2

Nick1 Comment

Sing to me Spiraea.
Blossom white-wisp floss,
I missed your softness in the Spring,
I missed her whispers in a stream,
Another year of loss.

My life’s a simple pebble
On the pebbled-path,
Every stone unpolished there
Another death to cast.

I sing of songs your bones would hear
When no man would then listen,
And in a moonlit clearing there
I tuned a light blue whistle.

Sing to me Spiraea,
By Autumn be denuded;
It’s been a year,
We dance my dear,

Like friends who never parted.

Seven Abysses

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Should you go to descend
Those infamous seven abysses,
Beware of the bones you’ll find.
I am not one for spelunking
In karst dolomites of my mind.

Endless mineshaft’s metal cage,
Canaries for the gasses;
From Flemish sellers
Brought those birds, sold by
Old oblast-men with molasses.

Rattling seven strata through,
No safety gear, no time for fear,
Down to a sunken pool;
Its secret waves will gently spool:
Thoughts are born in here.

Arriving in your evening light,
Sunsets seen renewed!
There’s no such thing as death
I said, collapsed on our bed
In a miner’s welfare cottage.