If sleep were to come here

I would turn my back on the sun of tomorrow

As on it’s side it lies

And closes it’s eyes

To light shadow faces

Tracing sunken trunks and moss covered fissures

In this forest of the night.

Where the depths of the canopy drown decades of decayed wood

and we walk in the darkness, towards the light.

This forest of the night we must pass through

This surround of light, drenching us with darkness

Sleep green in the forest

We’ll wake with the same sun

and take leave this evening

Wherever we’ve dreamed

With soft sinking steps

Friction froze slopes move to equilibrium

My shoes in litho-mineral liquid

I would happily sink in to it’s cold embrace

but I must select the stones

uniform and roundish, flat with an edge to grip

and throw down from the sloping tide peak

My fleeting contact

A rolling surge overtopped by a smooth constant rush of moon drawn peaks

Drawing clinker from the breathing beach

In hot luxury lie palatial plazas

And football pitch pools

Placing garden cut vistas

through the forest.

The forest of deer and martens

Now fenced in by traffic or death

Traffic that lives through the rain and the smell of freshly cut corn

Wet and dusty evaporating

in the sun like a grill iron

glowing with the wind.

Ruffling birches

take the rain away and sweet sounding Melun surprises

with high rise and low flow.

The wheat is still ripening

This July

While everlasting sweet peas still

spill down the railway embankment

The sun still warms

through breaks in the cloud

While my father waits

On a cold shelf

To be transformed

Taking some of this world with him

Power assisted doors enclose

And envelope musty sweet artichoke aromas.

Damp jurassic greens climb titanic stems

like trees, under glass

A slow prehistoric blanket

of mountaineering moss floods fibre haired stems

Ringed and ridged

To protect from giant tortoise teeth

Weak black tea

Brown and bronze

Stones rounded

Flood dry debris mounded

Flitted and perched by yellow wagtail

Fledgelings and wrens

It balances me

The one sided weight that carries me

A curvaceous case with waist contained

Taught with strings and horsehair

Pads and powder in secret pockets

and velvet black vibrations like memories held in amber

A black box of perfect proportion

Closed not opened

Held in

A disc of dawn from my eastern eye

I stand before

The grey front at dusk

On rarely seen plain ivy vein

Dark scattered steps of green weave down

To the sleeping screen of dark water.

Brambles scramble over ancient ditches

and the fox tracks under forgotten fences

wend dry dens under long dead elder,

leaning and cracking with the weight of others.

Who knows here?

Not the screeching parakeet fleet

Not the siren bumbling through crowded cars

nor the silent roar of the London bound.

The little oak river runs rapid beyond the bank of flint and earth

Shrouding in dusk,

Receding from versimilltude

Cinnamon and cinnabar and giant marzipan

Melting mango fibered flesh oozing

syrup above scatterings of scuttling sail chinned dinosaurs.

Swarming stripes of black and yellow

ripple on frangipani – a name I don’t remember

except for tropical Plumeria smells of heat and rich sun on pale skin.

The streamlined horns and bulbs of red escape,

then eat their elegant umbrellas.

Hornet warnings flash for the birds

and coqui frogs, in the night, chirping beyond their bounds.

A cacophony of pings and sings

summoning shooting stars from the Pleiades

to scratch the darkness

To scratch the reflection in mosquito waters

The swirls of stars and galaxies in paddles wake

Chunks of light tumble from my hand

as drip trails fish follow shooting in the shallows

like a splash of silent light

Quiet in the mangrove night