(“Tipi Sky”, 2007, original oil)
Day turns to night and night to day
Each one handing its baton to the other
In a race to a finish line, we are compelled to cross,
Two sides of a whole, the surface and the deep,
Dancing with and around each other
Moon in all its moody phases
Sun in all its brilliant glory
Incessantly we dream day and night
Sometimes clothed, sometimes nakedly
Consciously or not.
And when we cross that line, what then
And what next?
Consciously or not
We pass the baton.
(5/16/26)
I could not bear to see that nothing had changed,
that the world still rolled along its trivial round
and day rose up and yielded to the stars
and all the trees just stood there. If the earth
had swallowed me or demon visions claimed
my mind’s clear understanding for their own,
I might have veiled the truth behind the horror
and kept the blindness other men call sight.
But I have looked too nakedly upon
the sun and know the light for what it is.
Yet neither may I pierce again that pit
from which so long ago I fell unwilling,
and into which I later fell unknowing,
by entering the void through my own choosing.
Action itself is foul: I must accept.
Thus I indeed am fortune’s child and toy,
my helplessness once more my sole protection.
Now neither life nor death is what I need,
but only to be of use. I may yet know
where I belong and learn what I am for.
----------------------------------------
Another day, a sunrise in an open sky
And so let the judgements begin!
Everyone we meet, everything we do
We silently judge
Weighing them and us against
Some standards we hold
No matter how shaky.
Each of us rising and falling thus
In a great equation
Stretching across lifetimes
From genetic pasts
To ideological futures.
An action or attribute added here
An inconsistency or moral failing
Subtracted there
In real-time cancelling each other out
To leave us with some core value.
And so we have our Judgement Day
Whenever it comes,
In a distant future
Or in the moment of now, nakedly, mirror-like
Revealing what it is we stand on and for.
(10/11/25)
You sound like a fingernail
dragged over a blackboard.
Every word cast as blackmail
from a forked tongue in cheek.
Bathed in the vile, bile of diatribe,
masticated to be flung as dung expelled.
Your snarled words reek with
the dissonant cadence of discordance.
As your eyes flicker
from side to side with lies,
you look away, unable
to face me, eye to eye,
unmasked,
unshielded,
nakedly exposed,
in tune tonality,
truthful.
There's sadness in falling leaves, but beauty
in the carpet they lay at our feet.
~ by poet
I walked across a trestle bridge cloaked in scarlet leaves
They had whirled and pirouetted as if little ballerinas
dancing in Autumn's wind at the end of their season
How bravely they continued until bowing on the bridge
Not a sound did they make, weaving around each other
Looking on were their bare branches, nakedly chagrinned
your footsteps beat with lightning and thunder
inching closer with each bolt
as i feel your figure at my feet
i don’t dare turn my shoulder
for you might be there
with black soulless eyes
a clever grin
your hands by your sides
so i rush with caution
as the streets start to desert throughout the town
the clicks of your footsteps seem to fade
my shoulders exhale with ease
as my grip loosens around my keys
i breathe out in release
before firm fingers hold me close
i turn to ice
as clocks stop their tick
my feet stay planted
there i am staring
frozen wide eyed towards you
my heart pumping in my ears
i pull
i twist
i shout
i scream
until all that as left is my voice
you tug towards me
as my pride leaves
inch by inch
fabric and cloth
bare and broken
wet drops move down my aching limbs
i am left glued to the floor
then all time continues once more
left behind me is you
who has taken what i never knew.
Like a gecko, that one changes their colours
speaks in tongues long then short blue
climbing up and down walls clicking
translating the draconians’ poetic profusions
all are night creatures in the absence of light fluctuations
they scurry along the cracks over the white and the black
5 fingers 5 toes, quite quite reptilian,
efficient in the chosen environment, useful,
amusing a muse, then, when the mourning sun rises,
contradictory, scurrilous, misplaced, undeniably ugly,
yet cute
Night creatures, light framed
lone vigils, velvet skinned strict vigilantes
on all fours preying Carthusian monks
nakedly bathed in absinthe chartreuse
through their clicking chants, looking for true
through the glass onion
peeling back layers
shedding skin
on a wall
5 fingers, 5 toes
amusing a muse
Candide Diderot. ‘24
sadeness.
enigma.
Under the hedgerow,
nothing will fall apart, nor hold,
until a first milky dribble
is squeezed into the
mewing mouths of the newborn.
Small forms roll in their dim pelts,
nightjars swoop from branch to tree trunk,
bat calls return to receiving ears.
A child's dream grows a face-masked cloud,
small eyes appear behind a mattress of foliage,
clairvoyant glimmers of the yet to come.
Every dawn is a stranger, a nakedly visual light.
Gaps in the shrubbery coalesce,
to reveal a small industrial unit,
cogs and wheels run deep,
as they turn something into something.
Further back,
the goose-necked end of a small pond
curls morning mist into unworldly shapes,
will-of-the-whisps,
that drift in and out of an opening sky.
A yearning awakens,
one warm breath starts a dew-cold engine,
soon the seen, will be accelerating,
emerging once more into something else.
That one lost their tongue
somewhere along the way
long ago, the sound,
doesn’t come out the same
anymore, so they roll it up
like a carpet containing
a nakedly dead body
of blunt words
like unplucked violins
untuned to how it all
really works
begging to be heard,
and the flowery prose,
purple and bruised
like over-ripe fruit
teeth rottingly sugary sweet,
is now seen
day-in-and-night-out,
struggling with ease
way too much
like madness overgrown,
the dense overgrowth
of language unspoke
hides glittering gems
blushing shamefully
more exquisite than
the now daily averies
all penned in babel
that flow in glass jarring
anticipated patterns
of suffocating
paisley prose,
the simple beauty
in the plainly spoke,
never again
to be seen nor heard,
the mercurial metaphors
birdfeed scattered
to the begging migrations
of petulant bluebirds
naughty nightingales
honey trapping
wet-beaked hummingbirds
all beating hearts
with their wild wind flapping,
tossing sticks and stones
to those tongue thirsty
kiss lapping, lap dancing
love parched, gargling
swallows
Candide Diderot. ‘24
A living poem, not yet written,
not yet visible, haunts the periphery
of the inner eye.
She is as light as a feather,
though she has a deep-set gravity,
her presence impels my mind toward her.
Which way to seek?
The poem that is not yet created
is a womb both empty and full,
its potential
demands subservience.
A dark machinery makes love,
to the unsubstantial,
and one single insight is born,
from that seed within a seed,
she nakedly comes,
now you must dress her.
Watch out,
the corners of our eyes are in danger
of being nakedly exposed.
Evening dropped out of the sky
a lot quicker today.
A slap-dashing gush of last minutes,
as shoppers charged around each other.
The season demands good cheer and
a tightly wrapped hysertia.
The shop lights pull us in,
but out here where the cars
are edging in and out,
rear mirrors
and on-board computers
are our only life rafts.
We dodge the rushing shadows,
still wincing from the too happy laughter,
backing away ever so carefully
and as hurriedly as we dare,
into the electronically
flickering night.
Some claimed that Camelot was noble,
a place built upon the stony ground
of good-intentions,
it was new and fangled,
it was progressive
in a time of little progress.
I have seen it, I was there,
always there was the choking fog
of intrigue,
even the unintrigued grabbed their throats
least subversive thoughts escaped them.
Old King Arthur was deliriously inane,
the people pitied him and did not love him,
some said he was an alien lizard being,
some claimed that he was soulless,
or so it seemed,
and yet he was forever babbling
about restoring the soul of the Kingdom.
Corruption grew like a malignant Ivy.
The women of Camelot were constantly angry,
their anger made them fat with a wishful bile.
Many females wanted to be men,
yet strangely enough they hated the menfolk.
The men were fragile and sensitive,
Merlin had cursed them
with the fey magic of 'Low T'.
Trust me, it was a great day
when the kingdom fell
to the massed hordes of disaffected
and disgruntled Goths.
Fresh blood was drunk from royal goblets,
children with wooden swords
chased the pork out of feral gangs
of squealing hogs
until they were as nakedly pink
as plucked chickens.
A hot day in July
He stood in the shade of the awnings of a shop
closed for lunch, the street was nakedly empty
no breeze disturbed the fine sand of time.
A cat under a car was watching him intently
perhaps the cat’s owner was the shopkeeper
then a moggy doesn’t think it is.
Only two living things in the side street existed
he beckoned towards the feline that got up
jumped over a fence, disappeared from view.
The man sensed a scary chasm of loneliness
the sun shifted and took, the shade away, nothing
for it, he needed a drink.
Some poems
don't need
to be said.
They're shared
between eyes
and thought
caressing
body's telepathy
Pupils dilate
from her elation.
God I love
my own creation.
How it flows
from a muse
and forms
symbiotic energy.
It's like
wearing words
and my vocabulary
is hers for devouring.
The pen leaves
me naked
but she's the one
shaking from every
truth shared
children of an emerald isle
inhabiting a pause
in brutish wars
dulcet notes
of tenderest voices
raining as leaves
from autumn's branches
rivulets of caramel warmth
energizing oft rejected
lovers' embraces
as he loosens her plaits
of cinnamon and wildfire
she raises piquant lips
to his nakedly innocent
adoration
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