Mutations

If you flew through the ceiling,

The world wouldn’t stop;

You could haunt me at leisure

Or we could just chat.

You could tell me about graveyards,

How ghosts really feel;

How useless a heart is

With just time to heal.

We could pull apart logic

And exorcise fate,

Unravel life’s mysteries,

Make light of love’s ways.

If you turned blue and vanished,

It'd be just like old days.

Weather Girl

The weather girl

Has a way with warm fronts

And isobars.

Her tropical gaze

Makes storms seem tame

As she tells you it looks like rain.

Oceans rise

And villages are swept away,

While you’re off making tea.

Her thermal smile

Betrays no irony.

Her image reigns

long after the programme fades,

Leaving no choice

But to trust each new forecast.

Camden Queen

for amy winehouse 

She crashed through the bar,

Spilling words like discarded notes.

A star,

Bigger than her hair,

On the rebound from fame:

Fake lashes, fate-weary eyes,

As if they’d asked life for a loan.

Still walking tall

Despite all.

‘She hits people’, you said.

Headlines too.

Most nights.

Bodyguards there

For what she might do,

When love’s not enough
To reason why.

I thought she was going to zap us over the tapas,

But she just whispered “Hi.”

Fragments

The photo’s ripped:

Just us,

Kids inbetween,

One face torn off.

A backdrop that day of blue:

Ceanothus, Lilac, Wisteria

Trailing up to our room.

Smiles fixed

On a lens;
The darkroom of trust.

Acceptance can’t rescue

A moment lost,

More sacred than memory:

This missing piece.

Berry Head

The rabbits clock off at six

before the first footfall

shakes

this slumbering fort,

besieged by gorse.

Devonian crags reveal

the scars of vanished time;

and clouds chase guillemots

across a ragged bay.

Waves frisk the rocks

in search of calm:

four hundred million years on,

it’s raining. 

Memoriam

There were no sentries when we met;

Now words betray.

Our past

Lies scattered on some battlefield

We cannot visit.

Your smile,

Like some sad hero,

Plays the part

Where love, like war,

Is posthumously

Paraded. 

Night and Day

Dark fills the pews,

The graveyard’s quiet too;

Down at the ‘Horseshoes’, fiddles stampede

To the sound of the annual cheildh.

There’s a gold harvest moon,

The pints are in tune;

And all’s fine in God’s country.

The hills of West Dorset

Stretch down to the sea

Past sheep and caravans,

And fields which keep watch

On who we once were and how we should be;

While here on the beach,

Clouds crane for a view,

And the waves look

Almost innocent

Today. 

Meltdown

Global warming,  

Can you feel it?

That fire we lit

Is not yet cold.

In cities, passion burns

And temperature is all the rage.

Our nights ablaze,

We dream of yet more suns,

Basking in fire

As oceans rise

And glaciers cry their last.

Vast icebergs melt

As we approach;

And our Titanic sails gently on.