Mother's Day

A sequestered love of actions;

in edifying tastebuds on Sundays

with roasts braised, and roasters praised

and crackling smacking crunching ways;

to greyscale threaded oldies passing

the past into the quiet afternoon, punching

past the wall of silence with gunshots banging

from the Wild Wild West to sauntering present;

and frozen meals on wheels steeling

my stomach on my nightly shift of working,

ever-sure my cupboards are never-bare;

this my lifetime – of care ever-present and there,

in this; from childhood to now, each breath,

sought from womb to grave she gave and gives,

through altruistic acts she lives

for others’ sake, deserving nothing but the best

of a son’s love, and in words, paper-born,

I remember and will remember forevermore.

Dark Matter

Between your mass and mine

                                                          space bends

gravity

              pulls our galaxies into each other

              dark matters

in the oceanic space on the curve

somewhere over the

                                      tides of Atlantic

              pushing

                              as we near.

                                                      And soon

our light will dim,

                                 soon it will vanish,

                                  as I watch,

a light too far away to reach our points

the constants of birth death

dialling ever

                        to its face of general theory,

relatively, we are bound to

                                                     collide

and bound to come

                                      apart,

but two galaxies coming into one will brighten,

a billion suns like a billion butterflies,

worlds of you, worlds of me,

a new orbit

                      of new constellations

                                                                 a-glow,

a-breath with temporary nova-light.

                                                                       And life,

for life’s bright sake

                                      in our evolved state;

our speck of introverted Universe

that will die as all others,

                                                  but shine and shine in life.

Arrivals

Here, the hourglass neck contracts the airport arrivals,

around, the glass of bubbles sheen from LCD screens,

bodies of sand stare at landing times then stare

at the bottled-doors that swing with sand-surges;

behind, glints of glass again, the duty free

gleams for the falling crystals; their sunrise to walk

from and into searching arms, glazed eyes

googling faces, finding foreign fissures

they instantly discard, until four arms outspread

lock, four puzzle-prongs inter-fixing, atomic

blending of all their positivity; tears and smiles

arising from the deadpan names held

by chauffeurs, static from their monotony of this,

business-suited, tightly-tied, an immovable circumference

on the cascades of trolleys and feet and shy

pecking lips; more aggressive is the extrovert

– and then me, impatiently rocking, nonchalantly pocketed

hands sweating, a chemical of time burning within,

what future could now begin,

as the hourglass turns and my world turns upside down.

Caerhys Farm B & B

Twin lights arc over the driveway

as we scale their path, swinging right

and stopping before the building, parked

in front of grass, and that in front of sea

an invisible saltiness,

a power greater than its mass out there, lulled,

we are pulled towards the porch, lit

under-hung,

met with smiles and shown through a familial museum

to our room, our board and bed and en-suite set,

Caerhys farm, in twin solitude now,

loses its anonymity;

walls are galleries of ancestry,

a harvest sun and a field reaped,

all things blowing in black and freeze,

and sepia of pre-extended homes,

examples glazed with due farm-sweat

of a history of living this life.

Chairs seating toys, the children

grown perhaps, the earmarks of play

are scuffs of timeless aggressions and cuddles.

Digressions of growing up with a doorstep-beach

catch my guard, off the gently sloping hill

and down this momentary rolls,

and back to bed and board,

                                                      near April,

hard to see through love’s thick veil

the newness of other things;

a kind of television set where cobwebs melt,

a dresser and bedside shelves,

curtains that must be drawn,

a bed to me unmade.

On Walkabout

carries my imagination on its spine,

on walkabout; JMV you dined

on experience, a patron then the chef,

your words cooking melodies even the deaf

would taste, the blind see,

this miasmatic outback, colours weaved

underfoot and overhead; trees of paradise

and the birds in boughs, bowing to sunrise

ascending like the koala in the final section,

her infant crying out through separation

by the innocence of the nudist children,

sweeping free through your land of eden,

apart from Housman’s farms and spires,

what blue remembered hills inspire.

Bones and Tombstones

A curious romance of puriant form, some

purile insediment of lust that massed

our storm over flattened moss, heathen

bracken and needles of pine, caught finely

in the hair of my neck.

Sandwiched;

Victorian graves our bedside sentinels,

the earth and a blanket our co-conspirators

of heat in the cooling darkness.

It was kisses in the dimness,

not pitch in the fade of clouds too

thin to block the moon, too

thick for stars;

it was skin on air, and warming the grateful

wind that sometimes blew, but never

blew too hard or soft;

it was fingers combing sin

from hair, bare hands burying

it in the ground with the conifer as our

headboard;

and hands under shirts

like succubus entrails on wandering

skin;

and the earth working with us,

its steady mattress, unstrung,

just whispering ground and you looking

down;

and bones becoming flesh as blood

roamed through veins,

flesh becoming more than an

incidental science, a true

transcendence amongst those flaccid

tombstones;

and it was loving you,

looking up at the curtains drawn

against the sky,

the rain in our eyes,

a curious romance of firsts.