Passage

A hand draws a ticket from a machine

it’s going to win a billion, choose to take the ride.

Waken from the torpor of a slumbering epoch

blink, drowse again on the turn of a clock’s wheels.

A sudden leap out of a distance

where other events are ongoing, a flash

a phosphorescent spark of dream

trips a trick of time.

As though to see, a concurrent theme

taking place, handed down as a history

as a mystery hidden within an effigy of fate.

Dismantled, put together again

only as a nuance, for it has no sameness

only an otherness beyond reach -

no matter how much it is remade.

*

Strings of words

the variables of their sonority

arranged in meters

all their assorted trappings

dragging along the flotsam, jetsam of history

their impossible extremes

their limits looped on the gathered threshold

of innumerable untouchable horizons

which already claim our absence

our belonging to the non eternal now

in its carved inscriptions

as the mirror image forms

transfixed in its chemistry of lights, at play

through a relentless brain, a reluctant mind

reflected in the allusion

of the same manifesting in difference

as beyond the level of the eyebrow

the mountain shapes its mind.

*

On the shore the tide leaves a trace of scum.

On the beach bodies boil like bubbles in foam.

Plop, amidst the squalls of gulls.

On the promenade each body has a price tag on it.

In the street, heat on chrome, shimmers

like an artificial mirage.

Monolithic obelisks of the ages

whose pillars support the sky, sink into the sea.

As rubbish is consumed

behold it has an outward glow!

in urbane urbanity

dog owners sniff each other socially

prams perambulate

as row upon row of houses

blink themselves to sleep

where all their yesterdays, tomorrows

are an impression of a story already told

but with no memory of it now

in the cosy cul de sacs of life

gleamed cleaned cars

the phallus of a Sunday afternoon

beam back at their owners.

There is nothing to wake from

nothing to escape from

only a return to the world at large.

*

Darkness rises on the horizon

the dead have gone only their ghosts remain

together with ours.

Winter light darkens the thorn

a frozen pond traced with barbed fencing

trashed with rubber tyres, miscellaneous plastics

a warning sign

Danger, Deep Water, Keep Out

Over hanging trees skid the ice

light glints in the tangled branches

an eeriness, which you cannot touch touches you

an invisible bifurcation

on a plain from real time game

where shapes, fates merge.

Stack funnels like feminine torsos

billow cat grey

into indistinguishable cloud

framed in a train window

by a thin band of pale sky

with paler sun in exposure.

*

Across a Yorkshire down is seen

a yellow jacketed policeman

a car park of gleaming chrome

silver tents like ice cream cones

frisky prancing ponies with children 

silhouetted adults in gathering throng

together with the ribbon of a jangling tune.

A summer’s fair

as if imposed upon an ancient folk lore scene

appears like a fantasy of a dark science fiction.

On a day’s double decker

a woman on the stairway falls

breaks her neck

standing next to her you were contemplating

about a necessary context for the words ineffable, noetic.

*

Through Venetian slats

small events scurry by

sliced apart, stuck together, awry

under the moving sun in the sky

the rolling stars across the plain

the world revolves unseen

by the brain

the mind becomes the split that precedes all others

in doing so, resembles none of the other worlds

where it floats

on the many coloured waters of its own darkness

only its watchful eye images their glide

through diaphanous dimensions

you stride ahead against the receding plains

knowing that the eye that watches you

reflected vertically beyond is your own

luminous forms, chaotic shadows take shape

in clouds rolled up, split apart

a vision comes forward, touches you

as though to step out of a mirror

the world at large shrinks from mind itself.

*

A Tudor Rose

you shove back the shutter of pre-history

squint into the great hallway below

where nude aboriginals bump about

the noise is a bubble of laughter

scream - until the visor snaps down the dream

you see through the slats only their shadows charge

into the valley of the world at large

the procession is already trapped within the image

yet unleashed, so the image that chases the image

is also the image of the chase.

Time doesn’t exist, it merely becomes

its transformation of transformation

leaving as a riddle the enigma of an archaic gesture.

*

Clouds blur, crowds blur

birds swarm in formless form

we expand from the petrifaction of the past

into an occluded present

launched on her curve, the allure of lip, hip

her ginger hair, her auburn eye

is there to catch more than the sky

she spirals from ceiling skies

pastoral painted fields in brocade robes of fire

a vulva impaled upon the lanced tip of a shadowy spear

on a wine dark sea, a litter of flame

down its deadly shaft she coils

a serpent now with wide beaded eye transfixing

in a her looming skull, feline lips of mirth

that dart a black forked tongue in welcome

the gaze of the beholder

whose gaze is the unseen eye in the scene

her bird’s face between her bovine horns is a creature long ago

but we do not remember her as such now, in her otherness

she is a creature amongst creatures, where the mind’s eye blinks

before the mud eye winks in its place.