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ROMANCE

Some of these poems date from my teens and early twenties. Contrary perhaps to my normal style, some of them are more hormonally than intellectually driven. Some of them are as much about depression as they are love and are perhaps the closest I came to writing teenage angst poetry. I have changed much since they were written and in a sense they have been written by a completely different person.

My Fine Romance

An eastern dancer’s bell
with red silk to a swishing waist-band caught,
of inlaid brass rang through the temple court
sweet doom and happy knell.
Bare brown feet finely wrought
spun her lithe limbs
and her breasts rose and fell
and alone a fire-eyed seer heard the bell
and knew it hopeless fought.


If you were chaste, I’d offer you
a sprig of honesty.
If you were pure, I’d pluck for you
the lily of the valley.
Instead I’ll send you roses
waxen red with shame,
and a garland of suggestiveness
to set your cheeks aflame.


I thought to stand alone
reed in a high wind or willow wand,
but the straw that is thatched
and threaded, plaited, weft,
woven and wound,
Stands safe in the stack
where love is found.
And when I look at your hair,
a skein of filidor,
then I would be bound,
braided in broad plaits,
trussed in tresses
and no sound.


See the world is full light in your near!
You rose on my horizon, morning,
to evaporate the mists of mourning,
to sunder my shadows with your here.
I fear the darkness of your hence,
the wispy mists of interim,
that gather as the light grows dim
before the night of abstinence.

Attic Love

My mind is my house.
In Scandinavian steel and glass
with a lounge of light and laughter
and a happy ever after.
There’s the nursery with the rocking-horse
I never really had of course.
The bedroom’s red and velvet plush
to make the ceiling mirror blush.
But furthest back beneath a rafter
tucked well away from light and laughter
is the hidden room, the attic,
a chamber both grotesque and gothic,
a lumber room full of dust
and the ever-present smell of must.
a room of memory fetters,
a bundle of yellowed letters
in a girlish hand, a faded rose,
attic soil where nothing grows.
See here the symbols of a mind
loathe to leave its past behind.
Whistler’s mother in a high-backed chair.
“So, you’ve come.” She strokes my hair,
feels my cheek, calls me her little one.
I bolt the attic door and run
down to the Baltic pine and chrome
Of my ultra-modern home.

Full Circle

My eyes like searchlights lit the skies.
My feet trod out the earth.
With my hands I shaped the clay of reality.
I was an infant God!
The world grew full of wonder
As my understanding invented it.
The stallion and the hive of bees
Held no fear for me. I knew.
Then the beams turned inward, on myself.
I felt the stallion in me rise
And saw myself the single bee.
I am a part of man and not apart.
The world I made has now no need of me.
It waits for my children’s hands.
Yet I must play my part, fill the niche,
Run the gamut of states from child to dust.
And why? I have no choice.
The free will of man, the human in being
Is also accounted for.

New Year’s Eve

Tonight your year dies its annual death.
I shall build up its funeral pyre
For the cremation higher and higher.
I shall blow away its ashy breath
And send to heaven its hopes unvoiced.
You must burn your old itchy wrinkled skin,
Slough off your last year’s guise worn and thin,
And like a salamander soft and moist,
Appear in a white unprinted mould.
You have been given yet one more chance
To take a print of sanity, till the sands
Are turned another turn towards your cold
Grave. Choose well the clothes to wear tomorrow.
Sheets of marriage or the shrouds of sorrow.

Lizard Love

Give me leave my love to turn a bend
And find a lizard sunning on the path.
Let me stumble through a meadow blind
And trip upon an orchid in the grass.
Let me see you in the morning
Warm and odorous of sleep
Curled in feline fantasy
Around a hearth of slumber deep.
Let me catch you unsuspecting,
Snare you in the sun of sleep,
While your arms in dew lie rusting
And my arms their due shall reap.

Circle Line

What balm for harm?
What cure for care?
What slave to solve
This continuum of consciousness?
A student in the library
Apprenticed in love and lore,
A journeyman in life,
Traveling on the rails of sense,
Searching for
His innocence.

Nenuschka

Her mind is seeking swaddling bands,
A womb to shield it from a world
Of well-meant hypocrisy, hurled
Sincerely from an actor’s hands.
Her face smiles Mona Lisa mild,
Where a lifetime of looking lies
In darkly hieroglyphic eyes.
Her breasts speak woman, her mind child
That was from childhood weaned to woe
And destined hand in hand to go.
Woman with weight of sadness bowed
Walk onwards till you find your shroud
And the cross you bear so truly worth
Will stake your welcome claim in earth.

Parabola

I squeezed from the womb and grew
Like a bullet shot at your eyeball,
Like an arrow aimed at your ear.
The looming express train of self,
The siren shriek of insistence
As I thundered into being,
Billowing out in waves of consciousness
Like an unleashed parachute.
But now the arrow trembles at the point
Of stall.
The surge of youth has lost its impetus
And the bullet begins
The last long slow downward curve
Of its trajectory,
And hanging from the gathering shrouds
I fall in sad dejectory.

Wormwood and Gall

Doris W.doc


And did you think
I did not realize,
had not seen your hunted eyes
long before last night,
had not known
what sorrow in your heart had grown
and held you tight?
If you knew
the half that I’ve lived through,
Then perhaps you’d know
why I never say no,
why I change my mood
with each flickering minute,
why I sit and brood
and revel in it.
He told me once
I should not fence my heart
in stacheldraht.
His advice was wrong.
Life is a smoother song
when no-one feels.
Emotion is grit
that clogs the wheels
and cogs of life
and hinders it.
You said I never showed my hand,
said what I really felt
in words you could understand,
but should I have dealt
the card – I love you,
my highest heart,
to be trumped with – I love you not
on your part?
Do you remember
what I said
that night in bed,
that no two belonged
where a third was wronged?
Together we were most apart.
From the start
I knew
it was perhaps best not to,
so why have I never said no?
Because I am possessed
by a devil in my breast?
Because I must
satisfy my insatiable lust?
No, I assure you, no,
but do not further ask
and complicate my task.
This morning you looked so desperate,
so woebegone.
I knew you’d come,
knew you’d say what you did.
I could have laughed
there was so little hid.
But you were right of course
to accuse me then.
There was cause
enough and reason.
But pity me. I did not want
to come between you both
as poison.
It was dreadful
to call
me the wormwood and the gall
that poisoned all
the innocence between
you and her.
I know what you mean,
know how I hated him
for doing as you have with me
for just three months, just three,
while he did so for five whole years
despite my tears,
and I, as only a woman can
never looked at another man.
There is a difference though.
You hate yourself and me,
while he,
the more he loved another,
the more he loved himself you see.
Thank you for hating me.
And something else,
come sun or rain
I cannot sleep with you again,
not splash in the sparkling brook
and bathe in your look,
nor huddle warm
in the crook of your arm
and wait for the dawn.
But should you want
to drink coffee with me,
or sit and read,
then please, please come
and share the comfort of my room.
Not because it is you who sits there
in my second chair,
but because my radio and my books,
my bric-a-brac, my memory’s stuff
are not enough.
I shall be quite still
and make coffee for you
and not trouble you at all.
And if tomorrow
I do not smile at you,
yet do not show pain,
then you’ll know
the barbed wire
has closed round my heart again.
And something else,
when you say something
and I suddenly grow still,
don’t ask me why.
It is only some bad memory
that will not die.
Good night friend.
You are young
and she will understand.

Storm over Saxony

We are constrained by garments
and the grim-faced watchers of the tenements.
We lie limply in the evening
and feel the perspiration cling.
Dusk growing dark brings no reply
but lightning from a leaden sky.
The sword of Damocles swings on threads,
Twist, untwisting above our heads.
We lie naked at the bottom of a pit
huddled under a single sheet
from loin to breast
in closest contact pressed.
In out own scent we smell our fears
waiting for the cruel spears
to come lancing down. At once
we know only the age of our bones,
the burden of her body, the surge
of his blood, and our common urge.
We could be joined in flesh or fused to glaze,
welded together by a fiercer blaze,
Consumed and consummated in death,
touched by an angel’s breath.
But then the long awaited release,
the dousing tears unleashed,
the splash of heavy pendant drops.
The steady downpour never stops,
and we lie content and ascertain
the heartbeat of the drumming rain.

Wild Love

I yearn.
As water drips downward in dark caves
I drop further,
I run to earth
As the dog-fox hunted.
Pounds my heart,
I hurt.
The vixen howls in the night.
As a drowning man seeks the surface
I see her face,
I gasp for air,
I choke in smoke that rises from fire.
Lungs are sore.
I yearn higher.
I soar as the harrier
And she the hare
True to form she crouches
And my talons tear her.
As a lost sun in a black void
I look farther.
I stare and stand on the hilltop
Watching the bright stars
Waiting for her,
My roaming love,
A homing dove on a windy night
Tumbling from the wild sky
To fly hither.
As lightning finds the highest tree
Pine for me, perch on me,
My arms in rainbow arch for thee,
The soft green boughs of larch for thee.
But left in lurch I fall to winter.
Without her I wither.
Stormy weather
May the wind whip her
Forty lash her.
Hail flail and gash her.
Should she flee the wild heath
For my warm hearth.
To stoke my fire
To fuel desire,
All will be cold ashes.
Yet still I burn.
I yearn.

A Promised Rose

There is a rose in promise
And promise in a rose.
The pink and pouted petals
Of a rosebud tightly furled
Will in lascivious summer
Be the portal to a world
Whereof mere mortals dream.
But in your amber fall
When laden boughs droop
And russet spots the apple’s skin
And fil d’or transmutes to filigree,
Keep this pressed between your breasts
And think of me.

To My Valentine

I love you in the morning
when we warm awake from sleep.
I shall love you in the mourning
weeds you’ll wear for me and weep.
I love you in the evening,
a love crepuscular.
I love you as once you were.
I love you just as you are.
I have loved you through life’s long day,
and in the coming night
this love will be a candle flame
to bring you safe home to light.

Return of the Native

A gingham girl from Astley High,
a blazered boy from Hyde.
We walked a head above the crowd.
We laughed, we sang, we cried
aloud, did the things we were allowed
and those we were denied.
She led me in a narrow lane
With houses rubbing shoulders sore,
but boundless realms of loving lay
behind the brass beknockered door
and supple Hindu de-
-ities upon the temple floor.
Afterwards through drizzly streets
along the dirty flags we’d go,
Climb hand in hand the local hill,
The paradox of Werneth Low.
Ten years gone by at twenty seven
I walked the streets of Hyde again
To find if any trace of heaven
Should possibly remain,
but the temple walls had crumbled
in the intervening rain
and the wallpaper hung in tatters
in the houses of Lumn Lane.

Sperm Whale

The waters break.
The Leviathan of my dreams
Cast up on the beach,
Lies out of reach
Of the arms of the sucking sea.
No course of life, no foetal beat,
No murmur heard
Above the raucous skua’s screech,
The scream of the carrion bird.
The Whale’s moist skin
Dries under the theatre light.
The shingle rattles in the backwash of the waves.
The glaucous gulls wheel and fight.
To each distant horizon
Streams off the thin white strand.
Many tide-beats later
Kelp flies cluster on the white ribs.
Crabs scuttle over the bleached bones.
Children come to the spermicidal sand,
Stand wide-eyed on the shifting stones,
And wonder what flesh they wore
These aspiring arches, this pegged jaw.
The womb of the sea convulses
And the waves crash on the shore.
Under the Southern Cross I stand,
Watch the white albatross fly far from land
And mourn my loss.

Heartstone

She sowed a Trojan in my heart,
A seed encysted, encrypted note.
"I sought to forget you,
But you stay unforgotten,"
She in gentle sadness wrote.
For me you became simply
A fly in the amber of fossil tears,
A geode of rock encrusted
With accretions of forty years,
My calcified heartstone.
Yet, deep within lies tenderness,
The beauty of romancece
In the core of sparkling amethyst.
Like the seed of the lotus flower,
Dormant in the mud for millenia,
You burst now into pink bloom
And the fragrance of remembrance.

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