last call home

slow gulls hang awhile

the estuary’s glide,

silk sleeking dogs

dash as if on fire

sadnesses are left

tiny wreckages like

spilt parcels over-

looked by passer’s by

people wish on by

like fragments of rain

but are gone by end

of daylight’s wasting

“where i supposed?”, into

their stiff houses made up

of dusk there to pile up

past like pale companions

daily is shouldering us over

into that morgue of spilt

clocks, that hefty horizon

of ending is sure to come

there, unseeing begins,

trespasses inches not given,

darkens and upholsters with

night’s oil-of-ease-black-skin

half-hiddens almost greying,

narratives of squabbled songs

thinning into voiceless sleeps,

aren’t these cradles really coffins?

where stood has gone, pylons

stand fading mid stride where

the sturdy grasses worship

over each limb, stiff and vanish

up on her back the moon struggles

over the hill’s jaw lined silhouette,

where fox stealth is true no owl

can locate, deepness is assured

gulls have gone and the water’s all

sequins, the mouth’s silver where

the surf unfurls, all are buried in

their rooms deeply uneventful

unaware, today will not happen

again, the dew shapes itself one

final load of tears, sunrise done

for the last time

held

song

came

thru’

the

bare branches

i thought you

whispered there

often

tho frost

is frequent

i feel you wrapped

around my heart

it warms me

with sudden

mediterranean seasons

that stripped tree

appears

cherry blossom

like tiny blushes

then that

song went

took the flowers

but left what it meant

the silence you made for me

twelve identical months i tire

of the clocks i have been,

twelve tears of torn time i

reside in, opaque rooms

are sobering sameness

reoccurring wrongness is

repetitive as march rain

and the wintry heart is

bellowed grey, garb the

stray mind bare with pain

eight years have become

cages where the days are

moaned and blown with

such copied skies, half a

life over nearer death’s elbow

the past doesn’t spare anyone

it spares no-one

time’s stealth

occurs,

wasting another’s

fading

i am am drunk with stars

and the bleak hollows that

follow each drowning, i am down

with the ditches that overlap loneliness

where the heart’s rare precipice

has it’s universe swallowed, so

blackly in there where all deafened

statues are fitful

achieved falling for ages where

free-fall is dripping bleak pollution

thru’ the soul, each hole each tidal

mask painful

outside is spun fingers, crippled wood

grasping, trees lose their nourished

fingerprints, lose waking and fall with

ten-thousand-other-strode-upon-corpses

and the skirts that flounced where the

starved honeybee searches are fewer

and dropping colours to their deaths,

wreathes become of them

it was where sunshine was promised

but winter has its spite a whiteness

soon as ghosts light and sharp makes

air shaped, frost is about its arctic

about my blood

this feeling of being gutted whilst grey

has a cathedral-on-empty inside, and

where i stride or stay or stood feels

wrongs feels deliberate as dying

and the sky is mistaken -

bird song does not fit -

funeral scarves have -

obliterated the sun

atoms disconnect

the curve straightens,

silence loses prose

stillness shaken

where are those few days

where the bouquets grew

from such cadavers? why

doesn’t yesterday balm me?

“there is no soothe” shrieks that

someone full of knives

there are whispers that unravel, confused

as breezes, there are whispers that tear

apart from being read, why aren’t you

writing upon my sleep?

in delved roots i follow secure as quiet,

where does anyone’s shadow roam?

“nowhere” replies no-one

vaguely

down thru

thorough lanes

ached over by

embracing

where memoirs

seem to have

ten thousand

glitch and glances

the sea when

remembered

chased inwards

taking all clues of having been

skull-wise-a-

mountain’s-worth

of lit lucid chandeliers

all wished for, unbelievable has gone

teenager

razed with kisses

a bonfire of touches

illustrates nakedness

oh how the maps of

the heart trembled

before catching

truly aflame

but mist catches

the picture’s

opaque pillows

removes from being seen, synapses and all

rain races the

windows where smudges

look out towards

different rusty puzzles

outlines that should

have been filled

that someone i knew

leaves no clue of ever being

was that the wind

encouraging the creaks

and un-worded moans?

or a whisper i have always known

cry-able

weeps the loose littered shore,

pebbles, shell-scree, half palaces

of seaweed torn

feelings that cannot

quite retrace or find

themselves, ideas-

summer strangely shiver

quite unsure now

was that the bough

we initialled and hung

our secrets under?

the room i

tire myself in is

a room full of

uncertain and so full of fading

i’ve

i have

disappeared

into

uneven,

into

possession

of

drifting

thru’

sutures

of complicit

suffering

an ill housed

sun poised

molten

hinged

upon its

axis of

lament

a crippled

song that

knows no

duration or

length

i have

vanished

like a

person

gone or

under a

graveyard’s

attention

over

like minutes,

never really

lived in

their

compilations

every nuance

decayed in

solemn

future

spires,

solemn

asking

“where is

now?

topples and collapsing

hollow

hopelessness

impermanences,

makes me an atom in

great churning

wildernesses,

is drowning

this continuous?

statue-

pointlessness

absurd, and

preys on stillness,

to die further

to achieve

undeniable

anchors and hearses

i find

myself

quickening

to its

dirge,

below has

roped itself

with waves

come

soar

downwards,

i

have

deceived

all, even

waking

try not to become the cobwebs i think in

many eyes have

confided silences

all gasps caught in

a mirror’s lost terrain

upon its inedible

silver catches a

house upon a

gleam less moor crouches

graveyard-

sleeps galore

torn windows

ripped door,

rants overgrown foliage

somewhere a stream divulges

a far away breath

that rummages,

winter has its robes

here, each room billows raw

my, him, her

curled like an

unsettled moon

setting inside a crowded darkness

slouched there

like a stone, and in

each of these unfavourable

rooms, falling

for grief only

knows how to

fall, from a light’s

escarpment into abysmal deeps -

no voice ever returns

from whole as it was

spoken before, terrible

skies are upwards

entire mouths full of

broken, full of a circle’s

unending, find no rapture

or the glory of a sunbeam

once the sea has

claimed its calm

i wish my footsteps

there at the clear edges

there are many

thwarted, their stories

captured yet unable

to unfurl to tell

the things we think

haunted

sketch

of hillsides full

of creases, colours

losing, leaning onto

lungfuls, onto hospices

grasses ill sit up

amongst fragile

bracken, what sang

has had its soar

and reaches where

ending rusts its hello

readying its mausoleum

for tired to rest its deep down

mobs of handprints falling

to their lifeless tombstones,

unable to pause as skies scarper

and bare cathedrals throw their-

wooden hands and drown their

sap for this year’s goodbye,

the sun is further low and

can’t seem to climb

no sunbeam straggle no

sincere blush to give

waters more that its pale

stubbornness, but more paleness

more numb comes to

disclose every ending, a

return to fireside blazes

where those lost are -

seen in the flames,

somehow we forget

their charcoal names,

back then thru wades of -

corn, that gold sea has

entirely gone and pheasants

ghost their paint, and air

empties itself

berries at their fullest

and fading is started

whilst elsewhere has

already departed

another’s goodbye

water unfurls its

mirror copies,

gleams each glint

then perishes to

rise only to vanish

here is

finding

people

nameless,

faces

that

should be

known

grief has carved most

and their pasts of honey-

combs now considerable

holes, few have a smile

but confused to why

another

person

ghosts

whilst

sat

nearby

most faded,

gone most jaded

i undid the constellations

undid their reminders, made

here vague, i am sure

someone loved i named into

rain and forsaken them

abstract

into

forgetful

seems

like

everyone,

dribble written

on many chins

she slots into her initialled chair

and drifts amongst the skeletons

there, melted sullen hair that used

to show flowers as a young girl

chased but now sediments being erased

i think as i reread yesterday’s

same page i hear a tide re-rattle

the harbour gates where the

mackerel gutted gleam freely, and

cormorants shrug in ancient scarves

must

be the

medicine

it tastes

of sleep

and

downward

anchors 

in here will never collect the

sun's stray beams, the beds

are rippled and unforgiven. mine

has shells for the ocean to repeat

yet still they muffle

there is hopelessness it falls out

from each mouth, exact words

know not their shape, hence

weird speech, and sense never

quite reaches

i had loot once of fairytales and

a lover, a gilded house and music

that played to and thru out the soul

but loneliness now has its inches

swell, a sky-less-ness says “bury me”

and the horizon’s noose keeps

shifting, seeping its dusk of lids

they are soot deeps reaching like

a bleak albatross outstretching

to gorge upon and perish light

footsteps taken to be here will

not repeat their travel and backwards

usually unravels, i sit among

distorted albums, lyric faded and

discrete autumns

and those pewter hills mocked with

grey can no longer be roamed, it used

to have mauve butterflies and other

flights i used to chase, now pursuing is sat

here stitching old leaves thru out the mind's unsettle

we all know what dismal exit beckons

inclined with black lettered invitations,

the doorway is rinsed goodbyes

and figures half lit outlines erasing

mouthfuls in processes of quiet

time gnaws, it moves thru breathing

rubble, there’s slurs and speeches

that sound like fractured birds in

deepness, grunts from the wrecks

as their keels slant with piss

there goes joan in her canoe of light

fistfuls of us are too drugged a sky

to even mention any goodbye, another

disappearance slides on by a tar-

paulin like sheet like the last coat -

they’ll ever wear, when will such silence

adore and wrap me in clothes that know

far too much past, waits in a waiting room

of paused clocks, waiting for the lung’s

announcement and drifting onwards, silhouettes