The wind, this winter, has blown from the West.
And, since February silenced the bird hunter’s guns,
Dudley, Eunice, Franklin, the rest
Have battered and bruised us uncomfortably numb.

And the frosts that before rode the back of the beast,
That flew in from the tundra, the ice of the East,
Didn’t come. But as daffodils hopefully lift up their heads,
Eastern winds may yet kill them, ice cold in their beds.

We hear a deadly thunder, rumble in our screens.
A harder, crueller winter from the East, and children’s screams.
A devil’s breath now moves, remorseless through that waking land.
It freezes love and kindness, crushing freedom lately won, with iron hand.

Its source, the frigid logic of a madman’s spleen.
Its crusade now to forge a second winter; cold, obscene.
Those Western winds will bluster, batter, ultimately sparing.
But Eastern blasts will freeze both shoot and root, uncaring.

I do not want to be old before I am wise.
I do not want to see the world,
Through Daily Mail eyes.

I do not want to rant for young joy's removal.
I do not want that puckered mouth,
Of disapproval.

Lord, give me that kindly smile of toleration.
That slow turn of the head, that warmth,
Of moderation.

I will not rage against the dying of the light.
I do not mind going gentle,
Into that good night...

Now farmers store their harvest hoard,
And Xylem sleeps sound with Phloem,
That time again? Oh spare us Lord,
Not another Autumn poem!

Now woodsmoke fills the air once more,
We warmer clothes and Gore-Tex don.
And wistful verse returns to bore …..
Us, happens every year, move on!

And mushrooms, yes! And misty morns,
Dead leaves? Break out the garden rake.
More Autumn poems, stifled yawns
Been done before, for heaven’s sake!

It’s getting harder every year
To think of Autumn things to say.
Keats’ ‘mellow fruitfulness’ I fear’s
Just wasps and rotting pears; decay …..

Remembrance Day comes every year,
Don’t even get me started …..
My memory will soon, I fear
Join with those brave departed.

So pity me this equinox,
Smoky days and lethal conkers.
The endless cycle taunts and mocks,
And sends me stark, stone bonkers!

I have seen the moon
Rise from the dry paddy's dust,
To climb past the flat, smoke halos
Above the sleeping Grams:
I have seen great beauty
In many lands.

I have seen the peaks
That ring an improbable plain,
In the thin, clear breathless sky
Where two ranges stand:
I have seen great beauty
In many lands.

I have seen a red sun
Sink at dusk by a mud-walled town,
Through a blood-mica mist
Of Sahelian harmattan:
I have seen great beauty
In many lands.

I have seen eagles hang in the
Soaring sky
Above a ruined and crumbling fort
Raised by ancient hands:
I have seen great beauty
In many lands.

I have seen hares
Dancing in a frosted dawn
In fields above the Suffolk Brett,
And jewels on a North Sea strand:
I have seen great beauty
In many lands.

In a sun-filled
And frozen day I saw and heard
Ice diamonds falling and tinkling
From a blackthorn hilltop stand:
Beauty profound, here
In my heart's land.

I have seen great beauty
In many lands,
But your sweet beauty yet
Beside me stands.
I seek not now the beauty
Of other lands.
Since all I need of beauty
Before me daily stands.

Where once the Aston Martin stood,
All thrusting power beneath the hood,
In rustic coach-house framed in wood,
When life was full and plump and good.

Now rests the dull Volvo Estate,
Capacious with its broad tail-gate,
Its usefulness commensurate,
With owners superannuate.

The children gone to here and there,
Their absence haunts the silent stair,
And only thou and I to share,
This long-house melancholy air.

When all life's joy before us waited,
Lust and loins yet unabated,
We little thought we could be fated,
To lives so dry, so desiccated.

Through youthful roads we raced and blasted,
We drained the cup while passion lasted,
We gorged on life and never fasted,
Weep now for love and youth departed.

If love is hard to come by,
And passion at an end,
And timing wrong and gone by,
Then let me be your friend.

But if the heat yet smoulders,
And lust not yet took flight,
Drape your ankles from my shoulders,
My love, be mine tonight.

Before the winter binds the land
And frost snaps shut its frigid locks,
One last caress of summer’s hand
Soft comes our Autumn equinox.

In slower times the miller’s sails
Hung limp with sun and summer rains.
Then filled with equinoctal gales,
And creaking, ground the harvest grains.

Now leaf and wood smokes fill the air,
And mushrooms burst upon the rides.
The winds strip trees and hedgerows bare,
And whip the great Autumnal tides.

Our shops retract their summer awnings,
Swifts and swallows flit away.
Russet sunsets, golden mornings,
Day and night hold equal sway.

This lovely, dwindling summer’s end.
These wistful, smoky leaf-strewn weeks.
This stealthy surge, this season’s scend,
When quietly, whispering winter speaks.

This equal match of warm and storm.
The sun and moon in synchrony.
Still leaves of green and gold adorn,
All beauty lies in symmetry.

And shall our children yet unborn,
As Earth and air and waters warm,
Know of this Autumn equinox
When seasons founder on the rocks?

Old Eve, she took a tumble,
And ever since it's 'bin,
Opinion far from humble,
That it was woman's sin
That made our lives so dreadful,
And lived with so much pain,
The priests stuffed all our heads full
Of woman's guilt and shame.

But if you think about it,
It doesn't quite ring true,
'Cos Adam was a geezer and
That serpent, he was too...
...and so was God (they tell us)
Yet His will wasn't done,
Eve's evil won while woman was
Outnumbered three to one.

Now maybe Adam and the snake,
Approved by Him above,
Joined forces down below and gave
That poor old Eve a shove?

Our land, of summer's beauty shorn,
Our sadly wistful, misty dawns.
Our land prepares, in russet browns
To join us in our next lockdown.

Our drowsy, melancholic land
Prepares in beauty for her rest.
As we prepare for lockdown, and
Re-insulate our winter's nest.

Though autumn riots red and gold,
The sun subsides in cooling rays;
Drab, damp and dingy drizzly days,
Presage the winter lockdown's cold.

The leaves relentlessly are falling,
Autumn's smokes besmirch with soot.
And sadly raucous rooks are calling.
We tread the summer underfoot.

Yet, autumn's not the end of things.
All pain and sadness loses force.
All pestilence, like kings of kings,
Must fade away, must run its course.

This current, sinister, oppressing fear
Will have its day, then disappear;
Our yearly cycle must remain.
The land will die, yet rise again.

So listen to the season's words,
Though hope may fleet with south-bound birds.
Despite the locked-down winter sun,
We shall endure! The spring will come!

Metallic coppered mirrors in a quiet dim-lit lift.
Cruel mirrors, bright in hotel bathrooms,
Their mean, vindictive truth like an evil fairy’s gift.
That truth is that my trousers lack for arse-room.
That no matter just how slimming I had thought my chosen clothing,
And despite my satisfaction in my mirror on that morning,
These horrid hotel mirrors cause such hatred and self-loathing,
I’ll be dieting and fasting ‘ere the dawning!

I skip nimbly from the shower and the looking-glass attests,
That I’ve been joined there in the bathroom by a person
With a pink and wobbly tummy and sagging hairy breasts,
And he’s staring at me rudely with aversion.
And as I step into the lift he is with me once again.
He is fat and short and jowly and depressed,
And he’s trying to look jaunty and the jolliest of men,
That’s the truth of my infinity of jest.

Coda

Let’s give three hearty cheers for that good, saintly man
Who cared; and invented the ‘active waist-band’ …..
And that Mother Teresa, that empress, that queen,
Who invented the fabric they call ‘E-Las-Tine’.

The girls with posterior wiggles,
Are confident, youthful and proud,
Their fluttering eyes and their giggles,
Induce passions but-rarely avowed,
But eschewing base sexual harassment,
Our lust must be furtive and cowed,
The feminist gains have alas meant,
We roosters may not crow out loud!

But Don Juan need not worry unduly,
The species must still reproduce,
But the rule of the unruly gooly's,
Been replaced due to years of abuse;
Like the reign of the oestrus before it,
It's redundant, we new men must now,
Hunt by stealth, beguilement and more wit,
If those furrows we still wish to plough!

An early Autumn cooling, sinking sun,
In beauty gilds the stubbled field without.
I sit and watch, my daily chores all done,
And dwell on pleasant things, I think about:
A well-earned pint, relaxing in my chair.
The meal to come, my wife returning home …..
Yet now there steals a melancholy air,
A wistful sigh, and fleeting half-heard moan,
Invades my silent thoughts, to bind and clasp.
Elusive, yet persuasive, with a will,
Which overwhelms my solace at the last,
Reminding me that winters sometimes kill;

And early, golden Autumn’s beauteous days
Are farewell gifts, life’s embers dying rays.

High on the hill, above the winding stream,
A dark green tree, death berried, blood-red sapped.
Beneath its spreading arms we’d sleep and dream.
Family, clan tribe ….. and aeons elapsed.
Our place, so steeped in life and death became
A place of myth, our past, our future too.
And thoughts of who we were and whence we came
Assisted by narcotics in the Yew;
A place to worship Gods, then God we found.
We made a shrine, a shelter for the flock.
And with our yearnings, consecrated ground;
We built on sand at first, but then on rock.

We've ever hung our Gods upon the tree,
Faith often flows from trees, it seems to me.

If I were in possession
of an important sooth,
I hardly think suppression
Of it, served that vital truth.

So, when I write my poems,
I write with open hand;
I write them in a language
That all can understand.

The clever men at Oxford
Know all that can be knowed.
But like to hoard their knowledge
So write in secret code.

Perhaps that’s why the feeling,
Currently abroad,
Is that poets aren’t appealing
And make most people bored.

I relish derogation,
By scholars, pundits, peers.
Their snooty castigation
Is music to my ears.

My public like my poems,
I have but little doubt.
I might be wrong, but most I feel
Know what I’m on about.

Fertilised by flesh and bone,
Bombs' nitrogen-rich tilling,
And lime from shattered house and home,
The fields of France are filling
With blood-red poppies, gay and bright;
Oh! Rich celestial irony …..
To scatter poppies, when He might
Have scattered deadly bryony.

Once, there were answers for all questions.
We had our shamans, witch-doctors, our priests,
Of myth and magic; oracles, even our kings.
These knew all we'd ever need to know,
And what they didn't, they told us they did.
And we believed, so in those things at least,
We were content.

Then came knowledge, and now the questions,
We asked of ourselves.  We knew so much more,
Than our guides had ever know, each man his own priest,
And with our wisdom came paradox,
And doubt, the knowledge that the more we knew,
The less we understood, of what we were.
Are we content?

Now, I need help with my own questions.
I envy you, you happy band at ease,
In your old dispensations.  But for all your faith,
I know that your answers are not those,
I seek.  My guides must be those like myself,
Who still ask the questions without answers.
Never content.

Before the Spanish ‘Flu had stay’d its cruel scourge,
The War, just done; and peace and hope, a century begun.
A century of change, cruel evils trounced ….. and re-emerged …..
And truth estranged; the same deceits, just re-arranged.

We still remember them, each passing year.
Those fallen men, each year, one day, and then forget again.
What? Though we wail and cry and keen, what use the tears
Each year has seen? We slaughter still, as if they’d never been.

What use is our remembrance then, this day?
Each year? For though we still remember gallant, fallen men,
Nothing changes; the same grim warlords still hold sway
Today, dark angels dancing still on graves of countless strangers.

But, this collective memory, each year’s the tiny spark,
Denying Baal his victory, defying lies and evil and the dark.

When I with furtive gesture,
Shyly slip my heart upon my sleeve
(of carefully chosen, slimming shirt or top)
For you alone (so many yous) to see.
To see or glimpse, so surreptitious, fleeting
Is my offering to you.

You (so many yous) will smile
Condescending kindly,
Then bruise or brush it, broken to the floor
and step on it .....
(or over it, passing on, avoiding it,
like a dog turd on a pavement).

Today the pain was worse than yesterday's,
(though all of ours were not so sad as these);
But I know prouder roles in other plays,
So could you find an understudy please?
I love you but no further time can waste,
And pray my patience was not misconstrued,
I'll wait no more for failure's bitter taste,
My chase is o'er, now shall I be pursued?
We ne'er can lose which things are truly ours,
And you could always own my faithful heart,
But I have tried the limit of my powers,
Yet in your new-found strength have lost my part.

One word from you will bring me bounding back,
Strength in conviction did I ever lack.

Over-washed, the pale, flat sky threatens an imprisoned land,
Trembling like a straight razor on the edge of life;
The desperate bile yellows of a bulging, pregnant spring,
Hurl up the fevered, frantic, screaming larks:
Spring bursts with death and misunderstanding.

Like maggots swarming, writhing from a wound,
Life bubbles from the dead, cold land
Into the cruellest, most vicious of times:
The madness of this forlorn hope waking
Shrieks and moans: thus the eternal cycle binds.

Winter whittles and wastes, but waits for spring
To wield its scythe, cut down an earlier harvest;
The Pale Deceiver winnows the weak, to pay for all that comes.
She wears her false smile of life and hope renewed
And hides from all, the assassin's secret blade.

What you said this morning, about a hunter's love,
Ending with a tender kill, a falcon on a dove,
Reminded me of older loves, of prey that fell before,
Who in the brief and fiery fall sustained my love no more.

But now, as once or twice before, the scent is different, strange,
And I am not the hunter.  The roles are subtly changed,
And though I'm bound to follow your fresh, alluring spoor,
My vision sees you swiftly turn with dripping, lupine jaws.

If I say it's forever, I mean it whoever
Thou art,
But things change so fast, you may not be the last
In my heart.

I'd like to be constant
And free from the hot scent
Assailing my senses all round,
But always those eyes,
Those lips and those thighs,
Have me baying and pawing the ground.

This fire in my loins
For those feminine groins
Holds me captive, will not set me free,
From testosterone's course
On this wild, bucking horse,
Let me off!  Let me rest!  Let me be!

All fragrant, fragile beauty you,
Dazzling and alluring.
Trembling in springtime's breezes who,
Come first to court, pay suit.
Adorning you,
Adoring you,
Preparing you for what will come,
The Dance beneath the summer sun.

As flexing, tensile steel am I,
Under and behind you.
Beneath your soft, scented grace I lie,
Wax-green, well-knit and strong.
Cupping you,
Presenting you,
Holding you to feel the sun,
As hordes of wing'ed lovers come.

And when the summer's race is run,
Your bloom retires, demurring.
When all your fecund duty's done,
There shall I be, enduring:
Your parchment husk I'll cosset yet,
Until we droop to earth's rich bed.
This love of ours, all will forget,
But we shall nourish lives ahead.

You both know why I'm not,
But I so wish I was,
There.
But I had to give way,
As before I was not,
There.
But if you knew the truth,
You'd insist that I was,
There.
And if you knew the truth,
You'd prefer she was not,
There.
But you can't know the truth,
As back when I was not
There...
She was.

Things not clearly understood,
Observed from cave-mouth, veldt or wood,
Gave rise to futile speculation,
Then wicked, specious explanation,
From frauds desiring power within
Their tribe or clan or kith and kin.

Ever more sophisticated
Became the creeds they propagated.
Their snake-oil, nostrum, brew or jollop,
Transformed from bogus old codswallop
To glorious truth and sacred writ,
But still the same unholy shit.

Then holy savagery began.
Man’s inhumanity to man,
And death and fire rained from the skies
To proselytise conflicting lies.
All in the names of gods above,
Killing in the name of love.

So, plagued by things we cannot know,
We make up nonsense ‘here below’.
Then maim and kill and rage and fight,
Protecting ours from other’s shite …..
In some forgotten time and land,
An Ape just didn’t understand.

When you froth and you bluster,
Getting all of a fluster,
Over immigrants trying to get in,
Ask yourself what you'd do
If it happened that you
Were unable to feed kids and kin.

If the region that spawned you,
The country that borned you,
Was dying from famine or slaughter,
Don't you think you'd do too
What these desperate folk do?
I believe you'd believe that you'd oughter!