She in her house

 

She in her house

converses a lot:

asks questions, answers;

debates, argues;

always wins

an argument.

Decor ‒ spare;

has a tidy mind,

all matters carved to her liking,

stored pat;

she keeps a tidy house.

Comes and goes from her door

with the working hours;

has some friends,

keeps them separate;

they disappear eventually.

She might be seen

passing a window,

then passing another;

always seems she’s looking

for something.

Early morning

sun in the front window,

late evening round the back;

she in her house:

a stone in a box.

No One Knows

 

No one knows

what wars were waged in your head.

That you were bruising on the inside was clear,

but locked up in silence ‒ a human safe ‒

only your eyes spoke and they of pain.

And hands shaking, cigar burning

precariously close to your fingers; a storm warning.

You, sat in our company; in your own private weather,

your own private sea.

Love

Let’s pare away what’s not needed;

carve it back

to the vein

running rich through the stone.

Not the media noise:

lazy visuals,

pulp pop.

Let’s remove, cut and cut

till we have it massive:

the elation we feel

lying side by side.

The Arrival of Civilisation

 

The mangled corpse: bludgeoned; skull gaping,

gore-spattered, blood-soaked. That intimacy with

slaughter, we call it savagery; their basic weaponry,

rock and branch; that engagement with violence.

And later, with the wielding of swords, the blood-bath

battles; that crush of thrashing bodies, flailing armies,

harvesting death; we call it barbarism, that intimacy

with carnage: the hacking, slitting, piercing of bodies.

To the release of rockets that kill, maim and demolish from

distance; no blood-stained tunics nor eyeballing death;

we call it civilisation: that delivery of devastation and death

with corporate efficiency, distribution worthy of the 21^st century.