poetry online

What properly are losses
Of people whose love left
Us in positions and stages,
Where looking at us in wonder
We just take time to ask and count
If their love in that clear abundance
Had not been freely then ours when
We needed it the most, though now
From a distance in time and space
As we think the same in some ways,
We should tell them to be returning
With care and honour and pride, we
Are at a loss since they have made us
Wonder and dream about whether,
Once again in life, that same grand time
Would repeat itself to make them feel
How much we do miss them and the fact
That they are never more in our midst to be
Makes us realise what losses really in life are.

winter moonlight
a spider silently spins
catching the frost

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Much does it hurt
People who find to them close
Those whose clean intimacies,
In their live ways enliven sites
Where dullness reigns for long,
Leaving personal powerful touches
Memorable and much-missed when
Even chance appearances tend to
Grant joys absent for long might
Have seemed to have snatched away.

Grandmother’s house
now there are no cows
only bricks narrate
relics of history
as the house spins
spiders into cobwebs.

Centuries of wheels
over water, child’s footsteps
across the footbridge
echo mine.

Blennerville and Percy Place,
the harbour, ships
loaded
and unloaded,

gunshot and rebellion
beside the canal,
ricochet defacing
Georgian glass and stone.

Winter-fat river in Brecon Beacons
struts through
tavern doors, drowning
these once dancing floors

though it is
St. David’s Day
and the bar hums
with a Welsh lilt

and the whiskey
is so close to the flood,
while the prize sits there,
for the largest leek.

Led closed-eyed
to my ‘wee surprise’,
he offers
blood-red geometry

over the mice-grey waters
of the North Sea, steel
braced against
angles of tide and sky,

and our eyes stall
between
the fragile worlds
of grief and joy,

the high wide
wonder of it all,
buoyant blue spaces
between clouds.

I want to leave
and say I left not out
of any hate or malice
because too many tired
souls have entered your
heart and chalice
and their dead bodies
ripple in waves of the sea
you understand
you, me, the way of loving
is no longer the same
your bones crackle in a funeral pyre
you are no longer the living
lyre, your body is fatigued
by your mountain, blue
shades of black have entered your hue.
I want to leave you,
leave me.

You baked for me the world
smelling of bread
of childhood
still warm
from words and emotions
your hands full of memories
stopped time for me
run out from my poems
I will hide you in dreams.

Caught between dreams and nightmares,
somewhere along the hazy, swirly bridge
across from consciousness to sleep,
dwells The Melting Void.
Repeating past cinematic images,
distorted by reality and nonsense
adorn the moving walls within.
That long corridor from your old school
opens to a shopping centre miles away.
Dead people still walk the limbo lands
interacting with you slightly, once more.
Mothers long gone still scowl aloud
as babies with butterfly wings fly on by.
There’s a distant drumming inside your heart
whilst an adrenalin train choo-choos
through your inside falling parachute veins.
A snippet of the movie ‘Cold Mountain’
a sentence from Rimbaud’s ‘A Season In Hell’
That seashell glistening in your eight year old hand
Feeling the notes from John Martyn’s guitar
curl around you like a fern in the spring.
Treacle, bacon, yin yang moon’s, beer-slops,
the smell of wood carvings and the taste
of dirty old pennies and shillings.
And fluffy forgetfulness… gently now…
forgetfulness… rest… and… sleep… deep.

More at http://paultristram.blogspot.co.uk/.

This evening should never
have happened, the die had
been cast, the road ended
and things let loose
in mayhem of sadness
which overcame the reticent
looseness, the mind pondered, the road ended
swashbuckling traffic mended, all in hush,
all in spate of rush
the mind’s strange phenomena, no acid test
noumena, I wondered at this lacklustre road which
could end so suddenly
so strangely leaving me
in a forest I never saw.