Poem 1

1998

For days his armour pains many.
How a lesbian lacks real oppression! Would a wearing male? No.
No male ring-wearer would. Unpressure, relax, an'be lesser.
How many pains more are her days for?

All hate that cares know our day,
To speech, time's past. Hatred rose, whether I love you - Or
You love either where rose-red hate passed.
Time's speech: Today are no cares that hate all.

This that death of its sting did tackle
Met sharp with vowed demand, commence,
Mens command devoured with sharp metal tack did sting - 
It's of death that this verse reminds

Sonnet I

Mar 2001

Sonnet II

24/4/01

If ever I should find that we were forc'd,
 To be apart, unable to convene,
To be away afar, from you divor'd
 By reason's need, or by some fate too mean
What manner of bland song might my heart chant?
 A dirge, a threnody, a sour lament?
Such music melancholy merely grants
 The tortured soul an uninspiring vent.
So what then sings my soul, begrudged of thee
 To point of desperation driven hard?
A prayer I sing, explied defiantly
 To evil fortune's curse that has us barred.
  The time we share not seems eternity,
  But suppliant hope will yield love's destiny.

Sonnet III

30/4/01

As I return lugubriously to bed,
 And draw the dour, unyielding sheets yet cold,
My tired and stubborn limbs attempt to spread
 Or curl, too restless, you're not there to hold.
There, mental torment might begin to brew,
 Where mem'ries mirror one more magic night -
A scene where Tantalus is rendered true,
 My heart remembers bleakly old delight.
But dreaming hopelessly I stop despairing
 To realise that my long awaited Mel,
Who always came back loving kind and caring,
 Would wait for me for ever I can tell.
  Thus future joys outweigh the misery
  Of waiting to elope to Italy!

Sonnet IV (Ozymandias)

21/6/01

The twinkling specs that dustily do litter
 The deep concealing darkness of the night
Are weak to throw their rays, and faintly glitter,
 Casting nought but barely perceived light.
Whence are these signals, and what godly kind
 Did set them so to gaze with presence unfelt?
Only the most meticulous of mind
 Observes their detail's undeciphered message.
The Mercury of stars is science's gift,
 Fortelling and retelling history:
A relic ancient, Ozymandias' shift
 In timescale vast, conceals cosmology.
  Ye dusty belts, be measured, and converse
  True origins of our great universe.

Sonnet V

26/3/02

Six thousand is too large for mortal mind
 To comprehend in magnitude of scale,
To face how far I've left my love behind,
 That many miles of distant onward trail.
For onward looks he in his outward face,
 To worlds beyond and ever broader scope -
All covering the wistful yearning base
 The lonely heart beats, only love's his hope.
For time will make the heaviness reverse,
 Will break the bleak unyielding shade of lack,
And in one stroke shall lift the short-lived curse
 By giving him his deareset lady back.
  The vacancy once filled will prove the pain
  By sweet reunion turned to joy again

Sonnet VI (Flight and Fright)

3/7/01

When parting 'sunder rips those close-pressed lips
 Whose wonted contact silky slipping past
Each other's bodies, arms necks chest and hips,
 The pain of amputation felt at last
Of greater parts of me than know I yet,
 That gape untorched burning by the heart
Doth never quench, yea never let forget
 That my beloved's gone, my missing part.

Sonnet VII (Wales)

13/1/05

Prostrated silently below some hill,
 A seaweed soup distorts the evening glow
Beshrouded dark by muddy clouds who chill
 Once tepid crests that guide slow ebb and flow.
Now drowsy waves shall shred a barren scene,
 And furrow and churn up the empty rows
Of soil and sheep, like earthquake's shake has been
 Or by Fontana's blade on mirror'd pose.
Now look - this snotgreen liquid's frankly grim,
 Disgusting, yes. And no, it's not just me -
So dull! There's nothing here to see except
 That manky brown horizon of the sea.
  Nowhere is artist needed more than here,
  To appreciate grotesqueness as so dear.

Sonnet VIII

19/4/05

To recollect your silhouetted spine,
 Construct your primal sketch, your form procure,
To abstract out your fundamental line,
 To watch you reflux till each drop is pure.
To fathom you, to draw your syntax tree,
 To formalize your argument entire,
Divest you, bridge your etymology,
 To see the world through your uncanny eye,
To crystallise your winding pleat and sheet,
 Infer your spectral class, condense your text
Divine your corpus mundum, enigma sweet
 Decipher you, predict what you’ll say next –
  O worthy quest, Nirvana’s prize so high,
  The cause wherein I live and why I die.

Sonnet IX

13/8/05

A memory is not water soluble
 But bitter alcohol might it disperse;
As sweeter ones are made more palpable,
 And painful ones, their piquancy made worse.
Each bleach I pour is way too weak, too thin
 To pale th'unfaded image of your day;
How loosely are those bricks cemented in
 Erected once to keep your ghost at bay.
By morning's blade, the canvas of my dreams
 Is daily rent, revealing lifeless shade,
In which my thirst for sleep eternal gleams;
 Unquenched, I hide these oozing wounds unstayed.
  Man's masochistic motive reigns withal:
  The unattainable to want makes all.

Sonnet X

13/8/05

When such a lamp warms up a tingling heart
 Upon which tightest jaws of frostbite champ,
And icicles do melt and pull apart
 These hollow vaults of longing aching cramp,
That self-same substance flows inex'rably,
 First torpid as it wakes from listless trance,
Once fettered and tormented brutally
 By grievous woe, bespeaks a second chance.

Sonnet XI

14/11/05

The gritty painful sinful fragments fast
 Are washed to sea by future waves of bliss
Leaving upon those watchful shores now past
 A finer golden crust of restfulness.
In them we hope both hopeless and forlorn
 That those we love no further out are wrenched,
Lest shore's safe haven leave them from us torn,
 And we more salty left by our tears drenched.
Unarmed, a crying oarsman left adrift
 Begs mortgage of his helpless tiring crew,
Who from their deepest friendship's growing rift
 Await return of their dear lover true.
  Before a storm, prepare we for the pain
  By hoping our dearest will come again.

Sonnet XII

10/10/05

The dust that coats my bookshelf, fine, light, soft -
 Casting those golden lazy drifting beams
Of morning's ruminating thoughts that oft
 Wake Haunted by dark loneliness's dreams -
Is thick and rich, its warmly glinting skin 
 Deposited in moments slow to shift,
in static time grows up in layers thin,
 Layers of mem'ries fallen as they drift.
Condensing yet unseen, that surface plots
 Of stagnant sinking pleasures deep concealed;
Beneath luxuriant pile where skin now rots
 Those long evaporated thoughts are sealed.
  Desaturated fragile flakes abjure
  Our recollection’s bold-tinted couture.

Sonnet XIII

2/2/06

All new, all fresh, the novelty of now,
 A moment in the making, avidly
Embuing every plan and every vow,
 The opportunities branch fecundly.
But while we gloat, this year will make one plan
 To question now the pedant's stubborn will,
To measure every future by its span,
 Its thwarted hopes that time cannot fulful.
How can this new, this fresh pure instant be
 Thus tainted by an unrequited aim?
Now through a glass, it's but the past we see,
 The haunting context, history's to blame.
  Through a conscious soul reflectively
  Nothing truly new will ever be.

Sonnet XIV

24/5/06

Alas, now melts this caramel that then
 Did clam me loving to thy malady;
Thy blemish small, through time lens turns malign,
 To light a lamp whose beam illumines thee
In sweet black honey pall, dark tourmaline,
 Whose fleurs marshmallow smell empower tears.
They spy me lonely, melancholy for
 Melpomene, her clement smiles, my fears.
No muse to ameliorate the dismal end
 Of all my animal, my formal pride,
Though I lament with mellow melody
 Thy problem mine, anomalous inside!
  Polemic moves from elementary
  To complicate dilemma stealthily.

Sonnet XV (MP)

01/11/06

You cannot ever know how much my heart
 Now bleeds for you, the irretrievable
Affection 'twixt us, whence flows all such art,
 Painting and poetry ephemeral. 
Where do my endless tokens of regret
 Lie now? In your top drawer? An attic? Or
Under your pillow? By your breast close set?
 Or burnt by anger, or flames of dolour?
So still this ghost of love that long ago
 Ought to have died but lives still hauntingly
Unlike its former self that well I know,
 Demands expression, hijacks artistry.
  While aching care demands representation,
  Its memory fair exudes faint inspiration. 

Sonnet XVI (KJ)

31/7/07

When rivers of cascading quavers dive
 In dazzling patterned flecks that flurry by,
And brief breath's chasm soaks sound up as a sponge
 Coloured through vibrantly from low to high,
Reverberations bring me purity
 Of beauty, a distilled elixir dense
With chroma crisp tense, chilling clarity
 Of listless overtones, immense suspense
As tenor undertones first flatten, ache, 
 Then anguishing, diminish, vanish 'till
The rush of rippling streams swirl, swash and break
 Agaist the dancing cadence's gasp of thrill.
  Without so much as breath between their chime,
  Entwining lines sublime transcend all time.
  

Sonnet XVII

1/5/08

wisthfle usinking about a day
 where ofter a began me mix't in thought,
the stranger now, compacted lingerie
 with semillon avert comiit tort
us accoladed, ; gratu'tously
 the past passed past me, stretched like old elastic
fragmentitting and nonreversibly
 to splassical, ; yeasteryear, scholastic,
and alazon of lyric on her mnese, 
 undouble nevertives repeat sonart
time's eisenvector given prior-ties
 agronaut's verbindungssalat 
  rollon stown histall factulty deftector
  accureing slowly like a fax projector

Sonnet XVIII (HS)

2010

And What am I to make of your hot smile?
 Your thick arms trapping my tight chest? Your air
Intoxicating mine? Your nose of guile
 Into my neck? My eyes eclipsed by hair?
Maybe perhaps I think I might have heard
 Shy whispers of regret 'I love you' - 
Meaning what you mock, to me absurd;
 You burn me, heat, though you don't mean to.
Oh, seduction's goal, so needed here
 Yet so 

[unfinished]

Sonnet XIX (SP)

1/2/10

Dear sister, dearest father, mother too,
 I'm thinking of you all at this dark hour.
I don't know what to say or think or do, 
 Can't actually believe it, lost the power
To find the language. It is so unjust.
 And so unfair that nature in cold blood
should take her back so suddenly; why must
 she be whipped from her stalk while still in bud?
A widow's she whose husband is interred
 An orphan's she whose parents passed away.
But she who lost her sister: there's no word -
 A parent losing daughter: how to say,
how to conceive, such devastating grief? 
I pray for you, her, and the Christmas thief.

Sonnet XX (RA)

24/11/10

Vacantly, insipidly, I gaze
 past daffodil and rye into a sky
jigsawed in cloud o'er rippling tepid haze -
 when louder from the breeze there grows a sigh
Of distant speed - I know that sound - my spine
 twists with unrest, as racing she appears,
The glint from west along electric line -
 And lo a second! from the east he nears.
Before I know, from growl to roar and hiss
 To ard'rous clatter of their fateful meeting
Thrust into, 'gainst, and past, I see them kiss,
 Once done, receding, fading, my heart beating.
  Alone once more, blown hanging dust above,
  Perhaps I dreamed that fast trains cannot love.

Sonnet XXI (CW)

3/12/10

A frosty azure sun through latticed weave
 Prods in my eyes and breaks the snooze
Uncomfortable stiff and still too brief,
 To perfume of damp hair and sodden shoes.
No dream has mared the night, no sudden storm,
 No images surreal nor haunting shapes,
Just the most dreamlike dear embrace so warm,
 Ephemeral beneath the drizzly drapes.
What's this, that felt so good and meant so well,
 Should sting and bite now chafed by morning frost?
While reason slays desire at breakfast knell,
 We find by hope of winning, we both lost.
  The lark portends in lithe atonal voice,
  Two cry alone by vice of cloying choice.

Sonnet XXII (Hippocrates)

31/1/13

He's an unlucky despot, he who strives
 to learn to heal, to mitigate the wound,
To exorcise the ache of anguish'd lives:
 And surely this man cannot be impugned?
Despite his do-good drug, the doctor's oft
 Contused in his new older world by fear 
That's siphoned from the sick, distilled and quaffed:
 And with each shot, to o'erpopulate this sphere 
With poorer souls! A joy may doubled be
 When shared, so guiltless in my eyes he stands,
But loaves divided shrink proportionately,
 So be he smelted by the future's hands.
  Thus saving man but murd'ring evolution
  Alone is not a curative solution.

Sonnet XXIII

17/3/14

The gentle tick... tick... tick of Time
 the enemy: how long may we besiege her?
The learning of a lifetime, past its prime,
 The doubting of a decade can't retrieve her.
She winks to reassure me that the past
 Is only what I now stoop to recall,
And future what I now expect at last
 to hope to want to plan to then befall.
  How can we fit it all in?
The cycle of my day is but a trick
 To put me back where I was yesterday
Each thought a tock, each fresh idea a tick, 
 Yet novelty and hist'ry both her slave 
 Shall laugh and jeer to watch my mind decay.
  The only cycle guaranteed by God
  Is that my mem'ry rots to muddy sod.

Sonnet XXIV (MH)

17/3/14

If freedom were a vast and empty space
 In which we wandered mapless, unconstrained, 
Without direction, future, plan or base,
 That freedom would be hapless, sad, and feigned.
No, freedom is the silent guiding rail 
 That channels an impatient proud conation;
It brands the will with waypoints, granting scale
 To weight each fork's vague option generation.
Each year the urge to choose is drilled, is whet,
 In sandboxed safety learns to helm and see,
Until it lifts its eyes with thrill beset
 And independently can be called free.
  This freedom's flight was not a free affair:
  To prime it needed nurture, time and care.

Fond Memories

28/9/05

Fond memories thawed by the spring of winter,
A poultice balmed by the fall of summer,
Return, you rolling seasons veneer,
Layering tepid insipid cheer
As leaves above sprout, singe, and drop
Her smiling withered charms shan't stop. 

Poem 2

2003

As man has, like a god, choices, no-one can what done is speak.
You, what sure enslave his honorary callous soul,
You soulless carrier-on! His slave, ensure what you speak is done. 
What can one know is choice? God alike has manners.

So say time's tunes for mistakes. He that loves the furnace dark,
Open an eye (a needle eye!), thus hedonise far away the pain-camel.
Heaven'll campaign the way afar, eyes an' head thus. I'll need an Iron pen-
Oh darkness further loves that he takes. Misfortune's times say so.

Words have I willing sought for, but none useful. 
You get to sell brains, each for weight. Many do partly realise,
to lying applause, that laws applying to lies really part.
Do many wait for each brain cell to get you full use?
None. But for sorting, will I have words left to write?

Rhapsody

4/2004

Tis more with whom you live that counts
 Than whom you share your heart,
Or whom you wait all week to see
 And shed tears when you part;

It's more about the time you spend
 In social lazing 'bout,
Much more about the friends with whom
 You sit, chat, drink, go out.

A week may pass with fearsome speed,
 And at long last we meet,
But love I see not in your eyes,
 Cold hard uncaring stares,

And unappealing laughter peals
 Like stones across my smiles,
And all my tries, my kisses, hugs,
 In vain they all fall flat.

I kid myself, you fool us both,
 Your times away from me,
Are dragging you away in tides
 You can't break free.

Each moment you with others roam,
 In parties, clubs and bars,
Rends us apart, you love me less
 And less, You need me less and less and less.

Remaining teardrops signify 
 Those hope-filled hugs gone by,
Distilled with mem'ries still romantic,
 Venice, Naples, Rome,

With bridges gilded by the Sun,
 With passion-cored romance
Cathedrals' art, with frozen Prague
 White midnight drank red wine;

With warmth of sweetheats lying close
 Co-duveted to feel
Warm noxious breath, sweetly exhaled,
 Inhaled, exhaled,

A thick heat swettles languidly
 On energy now spent,
And a kiss marks the beyondscape dark
 Charter'd by touch alone.

Uniquely cling we, parasites,
 Require the host alive,
Affection vird'infection,"Come!" I craugh
 In joy, enjoined enjoy,

Beneath each gentle stroche, each mumber
 Hid by all babba lim
Concealed unnakedly shawn
 Lunking under squeezes mental

Stark stirrs unkind some sentiment uncouth and vulgar
 Knowledge good bad prevents our purity from innosense
Corrupticationing
Defies love
Belies fear
unpleasantness strove to beguile 
 the "I glove you" a record stuck glove glove glove
reverse the glove and it fits - the same its owners pair -
 ensure you reverse both sides alike
each must like key in lock abide
You do, I don't, you might, I wont, you moght I mignt we miohgt
the indecidion unmade remad make madness tremble
with knowing of no ultimate fate not a problem
but a goal, in destiny an infidel.

Nigh draws a meeting, tommorow cru we
 Strife's too short, the pleasure's thought
enouff izi flowering roamance. future Need for instability.
live          to get her?
chance non    never get her

un safe dchancer
 )there's no answhere
  waytn C(
Say tea first
b4u w8 ur night away

schmorzandi sh0uts, pröjectile scrEams stain caress!ng
eacho down bottom less whole

The future hold a cure of Sistine wealth
 unaffordable without a sacrosanct life spent entire, devotion papal
live, come, go, fly, nay die, sigh,
My will not mine. 
Never was.
Thoughts, half-misbaked

rain scorn on me ignorèd,
 me out of mind, me made mad
blanked by you you drthink to much,
 Laid waste by Lhips unviting.

And would the past in mind remain,
 Beset by lonely dreams
Afforded by reluctant us,
 Less empty than it seems?

Damage

13/9/2010

Hello peony tender,
Your slender stem bruising in my hand,
Why won't you glow
neon green and pink
as you always would?

Your half-silvered mirror
pales you, stales you, betrays and stays you,
splitting the autumn crown
wherein you once would think -
I still think you could.

Are your petals crushed?
No answer I expect, except respectful silence.
A cracked shell feigns to hold
The languid gale from your mind
whose voltage now falls cold.

First date

2008

He's thinking now, he's thinking.
What is her game? How can I play?
 Acknowledging the wind direction.
Will her banter entertain?
 We greet, exchange nice weather.
Could she possibly be my type?
 So do I - that's funny.
How much's the maintainence?
 Never seen a handbag like it.
I wonder if she would say yes?
 The eyes meet, reciprocate, and hide.
What does she look like unfurled?
 The lying drapes lie, poker-faced.
Is there a smirk of fun between the sheets?
 A glint, a cheek, laughter tells.
How'll she look in thirty years?
 That's why men play, I suppose.