Remembering Midnight
Midnight strikes with pixy breath pervading
Across starlit doors once wide, slowly closed
With the sound of chiming, butter melting,
With the dawn approaching for sunset I end
On an island with cruel Calypso.
She trades passion for rotten apples, sweet
The taste of freedom, a dream to be lost
Foolishly remembered, penny dreadful,
The coming of age, the apple of our lust
Found in the journey to doom.
Memories in the cupboard forgotten
When stiches unravel, the golden fleece
Stampeded by elephants cheering for the match
McCarthy rises in a red jungle
Across starlit doors once wide, slowly closed,
The taste of freedom, a dream to be lost,
Where red and blue poles freeze you just the same,
Where Philosophy Kings have the last laugh,
‘Politics,’ they say, ‘our favourite joke.’
Worn fingers are mocked by soft lilies – touch
Breaks through the castle walls of logic,
The revolution inverts what is known,
Sunray’s gentle caress on a spring day
Whose beauty beguiles the abstract and real.
Chivalrous gardeners tend to the roots,
Stooped and gruff, watching youth take their petals,
Desires they hadn’t realised until lost,
Truth, a pillow pricked by pins that don’t hurt,
Hurry for the touch of spiring when it’s gone.
A twist of fate at first hard to accept
In a crib with your toys, hollow morals
Painted with care by assumptions too grave,
Painted with the hope you might behave.
God has no heart nor bones or flesh for us,
Yet he is kinder than small Cronus,
Who died squealing in his crib when Big Bang,
Like an orchestra conducted by God, sang.
Pixelated prayer coming from a phone,
Merely the old apple with a new face.
Churches in our pockets, prayer for the rich
Lining streets with messages, not leaves,
Those bullets are freeing and destroying
Middle ground – belongs in Aesop’s Fables.
High and Low ground, polar ice caps melting
A twist of fate at first hard to accept
Pitiful are we like rats we feed.
Vanity a paperweight holding us
On an island with cruel Calypso
Captivating, on the outside a dream.
We are fond of claiming things we don’t think,
Evolving answers become more questions
The land becomes a shifting abstraction.
Originality dwindles away
Like wisdom we find it through reflection
Beckoning in the wings of life’s theatre,
A castle secured with dust from the dawn,
Whose touch is forgotten until the night
Bellowing through the hills is sadly torn.
Mathematicians squabble over dust,
While our dreams shrivel and are lost,
A solitary voyage to be cherished
For our hidden monsters must be fed,
Captivating, on the outside, a dream.
We tame our pet dogs not our wild selves,
Loose in the tundra, freezing in the sun
Dust tightens our grip on our righteous gun.
Truth - a word that’s pervading on your breath
It is thirteen and now the clock is through,
In Bermuda where all sailors are true.
Temptations of the flesh are made with care
Till infected by greed they’re made fair
In Bermuda where all hearts are blue.
Sunk to the bottom, in the deep it dies,
Trapped in a bottle, no nobler than flies.
An asp for us to watch with awe – a gasp.
Midnight, I gargle water for the day,
Morning, I dearly wish and pray,
For a thousand ships and a thousand swords,
For a piano, to play a minor chord
Loathed by the bishop with the crooked nose,
Buttering niceties around his foes.
What is night and day without prayer, I ask
Is the secular world another mask?
Help me. The soul of your innocence grows
Where the bathers are singing, dipping toes,
Cradle our past in lantern shattered
For Medusa, who is quite flattered.
The hissing shadows of my past are warm,
They are hard to explain as they are torn.
Wraiths skate around the life we could have had,
Only you can know my words are not mad -
Flitting like a lost robin, please,
The cure to this sanity must be you.
Dust and words wait at the end of time,
When even death has a morbid last rhyme,
That tastes to the ear like a slice of lime,
The words are simple and unrefined,
O sweet promise, O sweet debt you were mine.