There’s a blossom lasting longer
Somewhere in my heart;
Secure, do you belong there?
They said it won’t restart.
It may have fallen from a tree
When cherry blossom’s over;
Petalled seasons aren’t for me,
Feeling better by October.
These sensations take me back
Without compelling reason;
Rose oil scent, where pink is black,
My heart committed treason.
501.
I summoned the rains,
Against the grain of alders
And horse chestnut thoughts.
502.
Success’s victim,
It went to my head, attempts
To deter Time failed.
503.
I have been dreaming
Of being in films again,
While the screening shrinks.
504.
Maybe I should dream
Of just being; that alone
In Time, is enough.
Blonde was the sovereign
Who scrambled and climbed
Up his own private Yggdrasil
Tree of life.
Preserved like treasures
In stomachs of saints
And livers of knights,
Fecundities of countryside
Forestalled and ended
An early bath
Where the blonde becomes bald
In formaldehyde.
To make his escape
From Roundheads redoubled
He dressed as a lumberjack
Redundant of axe,
He dressed as a servant
Redundant of ass,
He spied on his rivals less ribald troubles
As they scythed through
Woodland rabbit-paths;
Between secrets of acorns he listened,
Foresaw how Roundhead
Helmets would glisten
Beneath a Shropshire basking
In puritanical sunlight.
To this day he pays annuities
For usage of the oak
And farmer’s hay.
From Shrewsbury to Durham
It’s all the same;
Courtiers remunerated more
Than officers and nurses
For keeping weary
Electorates guessing,
And the saints as well
For all their blessings,
Safer then is wealth man-made
To fund partisan coffers
Maintaining the wounds
Of truth while bandages
Are sold on special offer
In sanitisation aisles
Beside the bleach and barbeques.
He has no use for woodland now,
No gain from roots;
Canopies and verdant boughs
Bring neither shade nor profit;
So with ironies of cavaliers
And all the seers sacked,
He summoned several Ministers
To dig up every Oak and Ash,
Alders and Horse Chestnuts,
Every tree that ever lived
In fact, and unplugged
Subscriptions for petitions
And forgiveness.
So never again could
Excellencies be compelled
To hide in silence, betrayed
By leaves and acorn shells.
In the whispering pines
Her husband looked just like
Her child, in his eyes;
There’s yellow tape
At the end of a gravel track
Where they cannot walk
Back to his car, but a dog
Discovered a steering wheel
In the whispering pines.
In the whispering pines
She held the photograph
Up to the light, returned
To its rightful place in her
Dungarees’ front pocket.
She closed her eyes
And remembered walks
On a beach in South Carolina
In the whispering pines.
In the whispering pines
Her husband fell off
The eyes of the earth.
The soil rises slightly
Above a shallow plot
But the gravedigger
Had already flown
To Arizona, as they do,
In the whispering pines.
In the whispering pines
It’s so far from the ocean
The shells do not work.
Never trust a property
With woodland and a conex box
Or a man with a complex
As wide as a god, for there
Are numbered yellow markers
In the whispering pines.
In the whispering pines
Life and loss is a template
To be conformed to,
And we all do sometimes,
In our own ways, lover,
Worker, friend, earlier
Versions of what we want to be.
But the shape went wrong there
In the whispering pines.
There is a life that waits
For those who live with love,
And a world which therefore ceases
When love has had enough.
There is a life that waits
Where you and I would walk,
There between the old beech trees
And sit a while, and talk.
There is a life that waits
Filled with lifelong joy,
Your first time on a bicycle,
Your first date with a boy.
And there’s a life that was,
The one we couldn’t share,
The one with you in wonder wrapped
Whilst I walked scarred and bare,
In places where the leaves had withered,
Where heather turned to grey,
Where songs sink deep within the weather,
And no more games are played.
There is a life that with you waits
By some sunny cottage wall,
In a form of England lost,
Where I did not fail or fall.
405.
Love flushed us out,
Inevitably, like leaves
Or blossom falling.
362.
“You cannot draw trees…”
She expressed, “…only treeness”.
Heaven’s never touched.
358.
Sat beneath blossom,
The traveller watched petals
Fall into his thoughts
359.
Money made the world
Go round, but what happens when
The money runs out.
360.
Pigeons courting dance,
Unabashed roof-top ritual.
We meet with April.
With balloons of lead, freely I floated,
Never too soon for my ending;
A bird in the hand with olives I coated;
The more that’s said, soon mending.
On laurels I slept with Time outrun
And resurfaced for the good battle;
When the last cow dies there will be no Sun,
No stones in the sky for the cattle.
Using wire, masts and copper
We called a vet to inspect a sick Friesian;
He spigotted heaven with spotted grasshopper
And found the heifer-lesion.
They showed me the bark with vascular wilt,
Teachings kept me on my knees;
Circumferenced trunks with a black quilt,
They could not see the wood for the trees.
I’m writing now, undisconcerted,
Until I’ve burst through the surface of adage,
Their pith the stuff and substance subverted,
The vet took his tools in his baggage.
338.
Ad-man’s planting trees.
A hundred years’ combustion
Cannot be reprieved.
339.
Your favourite glass,
Subconscious first world problem,
Shattered in a dream.
