Water

River boat
Down besides the flat lands
& the bicycle palaces


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Absence

Little girl, by her mother
Sips Ice Cream Soda
Through a straw

Today her father
Is elsewhere


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Bars

Plums et la tomatoe
Generation through generation

A spotted dress
Drinks from my coffee cup


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Pristine

You took your time
To look so good
You took your time
They said you would

With half a mind
The half that almost misunderstood
More than half unkind
The half that knew I no how should

We danced the line
Swayed yet somehow leaning stood
I said you're mine
Venture here to be deep set in my blood

Time stood still
As if our place was under rainbows hood
Time cared only for the thrill
The rest left scattered in bluebell wood

The days and nights took their toll
Our play turned bad, we'd had it all too good
We parted, and parted the drift began to roll
Our hopelessness ended, as we knew it should

You look so good
I take my time
I dreamt you would
It was sublime


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Flirtatious

Cockatiel & coffee cup
Steal the dreams of able
Sit there by the mirage fair
Cards laid on the table

Ace is high but draw it slow
Takes a while for love to show
Kings and Queens they stand in line
Touch their breath & pray for time

One and one is as could never be
Mismatched over by the stable
All to hope is all can change
By mail or text or telegraph cable


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Visitation

Another teatime supermarket cafe
At the end of a rain filled day in Yorkshire
Should I stay or should I walk away
Who is that sat at the table in the corner

I replay the mind games where she says
Where her movement is there in time
Soft skin wrapped around the sounds of violin
Let me leave you now & go become the loner

Twisted scarf and tied up hair
Arm that moves with thoughts so fair
Should I stay and fill my coffee to the brim
Is that my sweet Rose, or faithless Desdemona


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

It All Adds Up

I feel you in my bones
The whole erasure of you
Unfolds within my body
I smile as you play with my mind

In this there becomes a new entity
An entirety of more than one
Faith enough to move on
Courage gathered to go forwards

I cannot embrace you
In a screen filled photograph
I cannot chase you
Through an unspoken conversation

I no longer expect a special journey
Into the supernatural
Although we did once believe
In the power of transference, didn't we

The pampas grass and blossom
Blows vigorously
In the windswept, rain drenched
Beautiful Northern England

Quite unlike the settled palms
Of your islands waterfront
Where the promenade
Erased me from your arms


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Rich

Lightless windows
At the end of the day
A strength of blue
Purpose made
For lovers at play

Play on the waterfront
Play in the drinkers bar
Play at the all-night discotheque
Before the moonlight arrives
With the morning star

A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Recoil

I stare over my coffee cup
Take care not to mix you up
With someone other than me

I share your arm movement
Bare skin of singular intent
Meant for all to see

There is little now that stirs
I defer to my memory
Despair that she is not to be


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Curvature

Hand placed
Softly upon her bare shoulder
Fingers that stroke breathless along her blade
Palms that ease to cup her firm bosom
A mind that plays awhile with previous nights


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

3G’s in Low Trough Lands

Poets don't believe in God
Their search for life otherwise endless
From the Lake Isle
To the flight of the White Egret

Poets don't believe in God
Their quest for faith otherwise infinite
From the diary pages of fallen soldiers
To the sounds of the blackest seas

God doesn't believe in poets
Do you see me wavering
Stood here shaking my fist
Shouting about The Wastelands



A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

A6 in High Peak Lands

The road leads out to the dales
To look down on a patchwork of fields
Divided up by dry stone walls

The road twists out into open country
From the market town
Halfway between the workplace and the seaside sea

The road climbs the limestone hill
How not to remember her name
How not to be moved by her fabulous smile

The road rambles down the valley
Carved out by glaciers
Quarried by ancient & modern men

The road took me away
Took me away always
From those that I loved and the others

The road goes on
On the road as with Kerouac
On the road as with the way of writing


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Storm Psychology

Woken
By the tearing wind
& the driving rain

As if unspoken
The mid of night truths
Race around to stain

Stain this once youth
Whose three score years
No more remain

His image left
On the tails of winds
Amidst the thrusts of rain

He’ll restrain
From being uncouth
If it's all the same

Yet the stories
Of his tainted fruits
Still surely lead the shame

If only to explain
Of himself
Who was he to blame

Lying here unrestrained
In the tearing wind
& the driving rain



A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Sugar Rush of Doubt

He looks out upon his woods
A clear view
From her cottage bedroom window
He tiptoes barefoot
Over the newly fitted carpets

I drive a little faster
In a mood of dark suspense
I hold a tight grip
On my gathering nervous self
I cross the vast suspension bridge

The boy surely meant no harm
His was a simple innocent response
To one well experienced
In the use
Of well chosen yet ambiguous words

Why should I second guess
What's only vaguely true
How could I end up
Such a mess
As often, be so far askew


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Day & Light

The forecasted storms did not materialize
Instead a morning of wild, phenomenal skies
Turner himself could not have painted such colours
Diaghilev himself could not have elucidated such movements

Reds as true
As the blood drawn by Spanish bullfighters
Blues as sure
As Yves Klein himself would have ground
Silvers and whites as clear and bright
As the most majestic of imagined miraculous visitations
Pinks and greys; flamboyant, calm, an immense sense of tranquility
As stillness amongst the highest of transformative energies

A sky formed from infinite layers
As if a thousand deep stage curtains
Each one rolled slightly back
To bring the one in front in view
Repeated ad infinitum
Until there, at the point of disappearance
A light, a light with all the joys of life in its luminosity
A weightless shining, an emissive source of brilliance
At the very source of brilliance

In the afternoon
On the journey home
Heading south east, looking due west
A length of cloud beyond the grasp of straight on vision
As if a carpet of crumpled white felt was hanging from the stars
An impression of damp svelte
With a shower of iridescent droplets falling
From our sky towards the mist covered ground

For those on the terra-firma
Immediately beneath
The shimmer fine lines of water
They might be heard to say
"It is no more than a shower"
Yet to me, these few miles away
It is as it may have been at the very beginning
A deliriously spectacular show
An upstaged curtain raiser to Jean Michel Jarre
With all his wondrous visual projections


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Pure Oxygen

Other breaths are drawn
Where once we drew breath
Other favours fawned
Where once we made nests

Storm clouds at dawn
Tinged by the sunrise
Our paths, shaved forlorn
Never to smile again he cries

Out into the pink and blue
Shears of brilliant hue
Heightened illumination
Foils of a storms formation

Such wild torrid heavens
As once rampant our love
Glows of favoured brethren
Giants from lost worlds above

Our flames from the forges
Steps to furnaces of hell below
Fall back to say you're gorgeous
To part was a magnificent sad blow



A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Offspring

He is a part of you
A part of you
That I hold
That I hold on to

Unusually it’s a pleasure
Occasionally he’s mildly combative
Always more personable
Than I could ever be

That he is such a treasure
I, at my age
Can see it could well last
Beyond all of my forevers

& because he still loves you
(I assume so)
I might still touch your love
Better that than never


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

TV Movie

Snowflakes, bamboo leaves; raked flames
Set to burn the big house down

The stakes are risen higher
With pyre of unfamiliar faces
Races on the intoxicated flyer
Shy times in the distant colony

Stop it, stop it; stop this nonsense
Did you not feel it in those moody eyes
Did you not see it in those smiling eyes
Did you not catch it in those guilty eyes

He takes her, she drives the liar
His twitch begets the stuttered paces
Laces of rum for your ever evil sire
Cries of madness, instant felony

Ashes; floats of paper debris; flaked
Unsound frames of reference decoupled

A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

In a book

Eight days ago
Butterflies in profusion
A warm calm
The end of an Indian summer

Today the gulls battle the wind
As maniacs in flight
Who knows their destination
Who understands there sense of reason

Yesterday fire and snow
Love, infatuation
& snippets
Of vagrant poets words

Before that there was long ago
Humans still told spoken stories
A cold struggle
As if the beginning of civilization



A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Pull Off

Stainless steel table top
Spots of rain turn to mottled motifs
As one might find on oil slicks or lava lamps

Prickled points of container plants
Dead in their autumn shade
As one might find in Nash's paintings of lost hope

For the last time, for the last chase of words
Somewhere, on the way to somewhere else
A service station, for those in need of a service


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Café Days

The congestion
More congested

Would a breath
Of oxygen

Ease
The conveyor belt


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Bar Days

Just beneath the Jameson
Down the road
From the crocodile skin shoes
Watching the video
Streets of Philadelphia


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Store Days

Holy Moses
How much fun

To be with Children
No, no, no
Yah, yah, yah


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

The difference

See
Close up

See
Far away

See
All the flaws
The brushstrokes

See
How it glistens
The composite whole

Enter the storyteller
All turquoise & jewels

Towing a casket
& a cast of a thousand children


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Pieter

Contrived
Always in thought
Scarred
He came home

To decorate the tree


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Hist

Words in Amsterdam far from the quietness of Zen
This land of smoke and mirrors with houses that stand, or lean
Front to back, side to side; five, six, even seven floors high

There goes another tram, Judaism thus crossed by fen
In this hall of talk and jitters, tales that demand, or mean
Leave some slack, take a ride; thrive, fix, why heavens nearby


A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Vittles

Less clear the beer in the restaurant
No fear
We have had our photographs taken already



A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

On Landing

Is there phlegm when you cough the doctor asked
Are there bicycles in Amsterdam I should have said

Is the warm head another sign of my illness
Do the busy places always burn so brightly

A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text

Let Vacation Begin

Talk is of snowboards

Skateboards without wheels offers the grey haired older man

Father of the middle aged son who is doing most of the talking

Utah apparently is a good place

I therefore presume that these folks are related to the founding fathers

Descendants of those Boston pilgrims; why else would they be in Humberside Airport 

A Poem from Outline Sketches and Vague Reasoning - Love Within a Drifting Mind available from Booktango by cliking anywhere on this text