Absences

Your candles

flickering low,

families gathering

whispering

 in back rooms,

tuning out, you are like

an old analogue radio.

Words drowned in the

howling gale,

 jigsaw pieces

no longer fitting,

memories mix with reality

frustrations turn together,

at the interface

love and anger collide,

showering rainfalls

of tears,

for what you once was.

Bone and dust

Bone and dust

Talacre

Where the sky sits so low,

pressing down on my

emotions, allowing the slow

waves to break beyond my

eyeline

A cliff edge of vertigo

where the sky sits so low

my eyes burning into

the lighthouse, below

everything

crumples into sand,

 a cliff edge of vertigo

spins my senses, and

i see only yellow,

everywhere.

Christmas

Like so many fallen needles from the pine,
each year, a little less spirit remains
on the now sparse branches.
Children grow away, and old uns wither and die,
and with them a small piece of me, still
longing for that first festive special tree,
and those feelings inside.

Mytholmroyd

In The room, sat The man, alone,
with the glow of dying embers,
painting patterns on plaster walls.
A strong moon lit a frosty pane
in a window on the world,
this winters night
frozen within an icy tomb.
The man sat staring, not moving
outwardly,as candle flames flickered
haunting shadows from his past.
In his hands,his life,
the pen and the spirit,
on the table, the demons lie
in an empty page.
Neither moves, forward nor back,
only time shifts onward.
Outside,footprints,something
stirs, more alive than anything
here,more real, earthly savage.
But the man sits,unmoved
by such vibrancy.
Closer in,his eyes reddened
by the flame,something
flickers and distills,the spirit
revived,uplifted and downed,
the pen moves fast,manically
tracing acres of open page,
two lives now,inside and out
as yet un-met, as one,
both earthly savage.
His face expressionless,
the clock ticks on,
the page is written,
his job is done.

Loneliness

Loneliness

It sits stale,hanging there

as dust,picked on shafts

of a late afternoon sun,

in sticky syrup-thick air,

muffling the sound

of the clocks slow tick.

It seeps around the frames

of the loved and departed,

staring back,mournful

still,from the memories

of a once living place,

where now only dust sits.

Lights

The lights are coming on

at number twenty one,

the sun, long gone,

darkness,where once it'd shone,

the street,bathed in neon,

less clear,more wanton,

as if painted for passion,

knowing looks,

a flash of nylon,

a suggestive situation,

at number twenty one.

Poppy

Poppy

Why is my poppy plastic

with papery petals,so small

against the vastness of history?

its redness dulled,not by

blood of forgotten armies,

only the marching of time.

Like memories of those

Flanders fields,where

lives fertilise the ground.

To Fallowfield and Urmston,

a neat row of poppies

silent in their November boxes