Faintly Elizabethan

Your brow, my lord, is furrowed

as is the ribbed sea-sand.

Things get to you.

Whatever happened to your

ricochet heart?

• pic courtesy of pinterest

Pod

A Pod of Poems.

A pod of poems

playful as porpoises

swim around in my head

ride the brainwaves

listen ! you can hear them

whoop like surfers;

look, ,some even leap

onto the page

*pic by pinterest

The Good Gardener

The Good Gardener.

The shears go in

trim, trim, trim

I am the good gardener

slim, slim, slim

out with the excess,

the tired, the dissolute,

leaving behind only

the poetic truth

*pic by pinterest

The Hug Poem

The Hug Poem.

Houses hug the coast

The sea hugs the shore

The air hugs the sky

In which the birds soar

The moon hugs the earth

The earth hugs the sun

The planets hug their orbits

Each and every one

Hug someone today.

Better

I know how it’s going to go.

Ben’s going to come up to me and say,

You been speaking in tongues, John?

The Holy Spirit been speaking through you?

And I’ll say, Not lately, Ben

but something better.

Better?

Yes, Jesus came to me in the middle of the day

and drove the demons out.

Exorcism?

Don’t be so dramatic, I say

but, yes, something like that.

Somehow the things that were goading me

weren’t goading me anymore.

They just dissipated, vanished.

I knew a deep and lasting peace.

I wrote a poem about it.

Do you want to read it?

Do I have to?

Yes!

So Ben reads it. It’s only a short poem.

So it was good? he says.

Not good, Ben. Better.

The Fountain and Me

Anyhow

I was into the third paragraph of

‘Bird Life’

by

Anna Smaill

when I came across a description of

the Takenodai Fountain

and its seven tall jets of water

& dozens of smaller jets

all spouting at odd times,

the patterns of eruptions

erratic and playful

and I thought, that’s me ! that’s me!

you never know when you’re going to spout

the next poem.

it’s comforting when you find

the perfect metaphor

for yourself.

What’s yours, do you reckon?

pic courtesy of wiki commons

Scratching like a German Shepherd

Maybe if I keep scratching a little harder

scratching like a German shepherd

I might just shred enough

to get myself out of this dilemma

I’ve boxed myself into

HOPE

Hope.

Where would we be without Hope?

It is the ballast that keeps us afloat.

It’s ‘the thing with feathers’ as Emily

Dickinson wrote.

Where would we be without Hope?

Every answer would come back, NOPE!

Life is a slippery slope.

Where would we be without Hope?

Hope is the beacon, Hope is the light.

Keep Hope in yr saddlebag, you’ll be right,

Hope holds yr hand in the darkest night.

Hope is the beacon. Hope is the light.

So be a tree, grow strong roots.

Always look upwards to the Truth.

Have Faith, Belief. Cry if you must.

Hope is the beacon in which we Trust.

Pounce

Pounce.

You can’t swat it.

Spray it.

Shut it out.

Tell it to sit. Stay.

It’s in yr brain.

It never sleeps.

Waiting. Watching.

Friends. Fellow writers.

That first flicker of success.

The green frog of envy.

*pic courtesy of wiki-commons

Whoosh

the cold nibbles my toes

presses against the accordion

of my lungs

I let out a whoosh, another,

category two whoppers

& I shoot across the room

dishevelled & dented

teeth chattering comedically

on the carpet