My Soldiers Are With Me

Someone has asked me how I write my poems.
I can't control my episodes as I call them. Brief blazing patches of time when an almost anarchic creativity sets up camp inside of me. The arty soldiers dressed in cobalt blue and rose storm my otherwise sane buttresses releasing every colourful feeling in my body. Whilst at the same time keeping a vigilant eye on the copious blackness of the other place.
In other words I have an imagination.


Shocking New Love

Mr Pennington heard the first crack and dismissed it as hearing problems
After the second crack he stood stock-still silenced by the thunder of new love
His heart was being handled
set free
Something was squeezing it
just to see how much life was still there
And old blood flooded his face
and steeped in this good red blood
Lonely out of date Mr Pennington wondered 'what'll I do now?'
***********************************************************************

Happy

Up with Monty and the pigeons.
A cold quick breakfast
Hot fast thoughts.
Dressed in red in seconds
Whoosh! I'm Gone!
**********************

Wasted Life

Forgotten Mr Worthy aged 72
spent all day searching for happiness
A dusty diary and all was revealed
Days and days of a loveless life pencilled tidily and without drama
a 2/6 book of misery.
************************

Regrets

When I got lost yesterday
I found a sun lighting up my path
and on it were strewn fragments of past maps and plans
pebbles from untaken holidays
photographs I should have snapped
sex I wanted to have
laughs that should have deafened me
and
love that should have rocked me.
**************************************

Hope

My room with its pallid death drapes
hems me in
this Abaddon, this Gehenna, this hell
But through breaks in the curtains
and through the cracks in my splintered mind
I see light.
************

Prostitute

The legless old lady steeped in heady perfume
weighed down by heavy pearls
twists her mouth into fantastical shapes,
bringing down onto the velvet table her translucent head awash with love dreams.
Clenching knotted fingers she bangs and bangs and bangs till she can bang no more.
Her reddened knuckles standing out like splattered blood against the cool white of her pavement hands.
******

Lone Sparrow

And one lone sparrow isn't being deterred from his natural actions by the blanket of frost which covers the grass in my front garden
His tawny head swoops down
then shoots up
then swoops down again
as he pecks and digs and drills through the ice on his very own lot
his very own plot
within the slab of my snow clothed green

Then a flutter
a sound
so he stops
head darts from here to there
a shake of feathers
a re-adjustment
seconds to sense
then still again

A pale grey pigeon is comfortable on the wall
The sparrow hops and springs
spindly legs taking him to the mossy cloaked bottom of a broken gate post
then off he flies to another lot and another plot to wile his time away.