Asleep With my Eyes Open

The sky, framed within the old sashes,

Is painted by someone rather slapdash,

Whose palette was not truly clean,

And yet it is so complicated and perfectly itself;

Though the clouds resemble both bruises and ‘Germolene’,

That it speaks of endless time,
And the beauty of the world to my sleeping brain,

So that I am suffused with an intense sense
Of how interesting it all is.

And the greying wood of the shutters,

And the faded green damask of the curtains,

Are one, in the sight of my mind's open, sleeping eyes,
With the wet May garden,

And the warm heaviness of limbs.

Troll

Temptation rears its ugly head and I
must raise mine in return and stutter out
a half thought, half baked, half witted reply,
more instinct than intelligent, a shout
from some more reptilian part of mind,
which must act first and doesn't really think
at all.  And yet as far as science can find out,
this is how we work, living on the brink.
For consciousness comes at the end, it seems
we are the last to know what's going on.
As if our waking thoughts occur like dreams
self assembling into sense, but sometimes wrong,
or with bits missing which come to light too late.
And thus to be a troll is my poor fate.

HANGING ON TO TOAD HALL

Hanging on to ‘Toad Hall':

trying to keep it heated,

ignoring the damp patch on the wall,

hoping one’s not being cheated,

burying one’s head in the sand,

holding fast to that which is grand,

knowing one’s standards are slipping,

closing one’s ears to the gutters, which are dripping,

living in one or two rooms,

breathing in coal smoke and fumes,

hoping one isn’t deluded,

or that others have not so concluded,

keeping appearances up,

turning a blind eye to the half empty cup,

knowing deep down the struggle is worth it,

you have your reason; others mayn't un-earth it.

And always robbing Peter, to pay Paul:

But hanging on to Toad Hall.

Cat

Cat in the window, like a birthday card,
Bewitched by the birds and their sudden movement,
Sitting and purring and thinking quite hard,
And watching the rainbows on the curtain,
Caused by the light rays through the decanter,
And lustres from the oil lamp,
Thinking and purring and trying to be certain,
Thinking and purring and trying to decide,
The urgent dilemma of the moment:
Whether to pounce on the shifting sunlight,
Or whether he really should de-camp,
To take the morning air outside,
Absorbing the heat like a solar panel,
Hoping perhaps for a chance encounter,
With a soft, caressing human hand.

When all in a flash, his tongue, like a flannel,
Whips out and suddenly comes to land,
On a place on his back where he feels an itch is,
And in this moment he knows what is right.
He knows if he is to find great riches,
He must venture forth to the bird-table place,
Swiftly, silently, leaving no imprint.
And there with his skill and elegant grace,
He must leap and strike and snap and kill.
For he knows with his excellent instinct,
He knows it and suddenly grows bolder,
That to act and to act with intention,
And to do so without intervention,
Of conscience, or guilt or self loathing,
And without looking over his shoulder,
(And without the appropriate clothing!)
To achieve things by sheer strength of will,
Is better by far than just watching,
Watching and sitting still.

Fog in the Vale of York

A misery of teenage proportions,

deceptive and causing strange distortions,

showing the trees but hiding the railings,

shifting the focus onto ones failings,

wrapping the promise of spring in a shroud,

making the internal voice curse out loud,

growing in density, never lifting,

coldly, gloomily swirling and drifting,

an almost too obvious metaphor,

attention seeking and hard to ignore,

mist made emptiness like La Folia,

meteorological melancholia.

CONFLUENCE

At the Aire’s end,

At the close of the day,

The sky, a rather boring grey,

Melds with the waters at the bend,

Where the Ouse, pale and wide,

Still and listless at ebb tide,

Accepts the waters from Leeds and Keighley,

Almost half heartedly, swirling them briefly,

And the wind turbines stand unresponsive,

With a correspondent despondency,

Brought about by their failure to whirl,

And the smoke and steam from Drax,

So often brilliant white,

Is an absence of billowing curl,

A barely perceptible haze, 

And the dripping trees in greens and blacks,

Add to the dull scene, absorbing the light,

And I stand here trying to erase

The thought : ‘I am part of this desolation,

Subsumed, at one with the gloom,’

Until the sun from behind the power station,

Suddenly highlights the cooling towers,

And in that moment all is changed,

And we are ourselves again,

Me, the rivers, the sky, the warp-land plain,

The cold wind and the icy showers.

In the Bed Opposite My Father’s (Surgical Admissions.)

My sister once gave me a walnut shell

and in it was a foetus, ‘Bubbly’ pink.

The purpose of the gift was hard to tell,

a joke, an expression of hope?  No, I think

the intention was to shock; the contrast

of the smooth improbable embryo,

with the wizened, indehiscent case.

The miniature wrought from the soft ‘Fymo’

a miracle hidden within the space,

a perfect, flawless detailed description,

the start of human life, down to the last

fingernail on those amphibious hands,

a recipe almost, or prescription,

the sculptors’ response to nature’s commands,

the model of the life giving placenta,

twisted from clay, both pink and magenta,

the tiny worm-like fallopian rope,

carrying imaginary blood and hope,

maternal, arterial, artistic,

venous, formed in a shell, Aphrodite,

Or Venus?  And I thought of it, when I saw,

across the hospital floor,

a Gurnigo Gubbins in hospital nightie,

curled on his bed and moaning quite loudly,

the foetus and walnut rolled into one,

casting nets in a ritualistic,

purposeless pattern, and rather proudly

gazing about him, then sinking back down,

and curling around the catheter hose,

the umbilical, miracle demi-john drainer.

No need for nappies or stinking bed clothes,

no need for any other restrainer,

for the catheter pipe as it racks,

the fine yellow vintage into the bag,

is tugged and yanked by the old wizened claws,

and a cry escapes from the toothless jaws,

and the other old men, flat on their backs,

wince in sympathy as he starts to drag,

and I run for a nurse, but he’s lignified,

callous, calloused, compassion spent. He knows

senility cannot be dignified,

and he casts it aside if his sympathy grows.

Does his atrophied outer shell retain

the embryonic, empathetic grain?