Stable society
the horses have bolted The one door’s been locked The flood can’t get out The greasy bilge swills Up the walls to the roof Hercules is hopeless The manger is mangy Fresh myths and
To the seaside
to the seaside To the seaside To the change and peace of mind To the easy la- Zy holiday The leave-it-all-behind To the seaside To the sunshine To the body-littered sands To the deckchairs
That precise moment
however foul the times or difficult the ways are Through those personal morasses this change of age Won’t let a single being (rich or poor) be free from Come spring the trees get on
After the parties
let’s all go to the party friends Where left over bottles and stale fag-ends Are proudly on offer from the last time round And our hosts believe by a ritual sound Fine spirits will
Owl power
they say in the local sanctuary Owls are the stupidest creatures All this wisdom business is The mythological media at work But the shortest nosing into books Tells you even the mythic world Is
The ordinary again
(1) the ordinary You are not interested in me A receiver of food and a giver of shit My brain knuckled under I have rendered the skills of my Limbs to generations of caesars
Welsh experience
called out by the sun This easter saturday morning I’m sitting on a bank In pistyllgwyn (house of the sacred spring) Against a tall oak (close to a daffodil-clump) Overlooking the road Between brechfa
Two spanish poems
(a) orihuela-time The sun in orihuela calms the dust And people glide about the streets at ease (problems left indoors to cool themselves) Time has grown fat and no one cares To pin each
Netley 47
army hospital Rheumatic fever Bed-tied many weeks Too embarrassed to ask for bedpan The rigmarole of screens and knowing attention – for my pains Severe constipation And bleeding piles Am led away to be
The moon
when the body of a woman dissolves Within are the three feared faces The man who dares to trace them comes To grief – but nothing personal is meant Waves and particles transvest –
Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity (blake proverb)
prudence my love Each time you invite me to tea I wonder do i have the appetite For what i Hope you are requiring of me Prudence my love Are you really trying to
We say
we say blame the teachers Don’t we send our young to school To be taught the simple rules For decent public-spirited behaviour Do we pay such crushing rates To have our children turned to
Avalanche
all is still on this starless night The mountain waits Quiescent as a cat Smoothing crag and chasm To a white fur Then against the black sky Puffs of snow Flutter from a jutting
Gentlemen lift the sea
on a deformed request in a train lavatory Gentlemen lift the sea Be all of you the modern Muscular mountains Who with a scoop of biceptual crags Swoop down for an armful of ocean
However grown up
six…six…why only yesterday It seems that fist shot out That one eye winked…and yet Now that this day’s arrived It really is as if six years Have blinked – and you’ve sprung Through a