the silver sea

taken in full colour

The Way of all Flesh

a sight i'd imagine very few people will recognise. (though you can probably work it out)

England

England is sleeping.
The rows of tiny towns,
Swollen expanses of London,
Empty patchworks of fields
Cannot yet see the sun
But slumber in a dark blue repose.

Only we, aliens, privileged visitors
Descending from foreign skies
Can see it gilding the clouds
First pink, then orange, gold;
First the high icy waves
Then the great tumbled heaps
The wisps of baseless colour
The highest church spires;
The great land bellow.

England is sleeping.
She is waking, slowly;
The sun is gilding her skin bronze
Her hair white-gold;
It is touching her eyelids with the first rays of day.
And though she does not see
A plane nine-thousand feet above her
My beautiful England is waiting for me
And I return at last.

for someone.
written on a plane about to land.

H ton

Japan 2004

Swimming in a Stormy Ocean

Walking home with the rain on my back
Pattering the puddles that I wade through
I think of the singular pleasure of the stormy sea.

A black mass of storm swims in from the south:
The sky is leaden and foreboding.
Dive into the shallow sea.
There are no waves; only mountains of froth
Colliding and separating and whirling
Diving horizontally with no regard of what a wave should be
And you are jumping, twisting to keep your head above
But laughing with mania at the great sea-gods
Whose winds rake grooves in the water.

And the energy you feel, even before the rain begins
Before it comes spitting harshly down on your shoulders
But when it does you feel you can leap over the waves
The highest foam flecked towers
Raked with the wind and pummelled by the rain, like you.

And standing on shore at the end
To look on the seething animal you were part of;
White glimpses of mountaintops receding to the horizon
A lonely bird struggles so elegantly with the sky
The wind stings your naked chest and raindrops fly in your eyes
But you know, as Calvin said, what it is to feel alive,
Gloriously alive, however temporarily.

true story.
North Carolina, Afternoon 11th August 2006

don't go in there

'I was attempting to write a poem for you'

I was attempting to write a poem for you
So I read all my other love poets
And it occurred to me that love poetry
Is just emotional blackmail
Filled with masturbatory guilt
And self-indulgent melancholy
And so I did not write you a poem
Instead I wrote this:
An excuse.

North Carolina August 2006