Poems by Pete

Reflections

We’ll have to arrange a clandestine meeting
Among the nettles and dandelions,
Behind some vacant
Allotment plot.

As the Autumn twilight closes in,
We could sit on damp sacking
And murmur, softly, into the wet misty air.
Watching the blasted stalks of the summer’s sprouts

And the skeletal canes, the frames which once
Supported swift, green, runner beans.
I could learn to play the pan-pipes and serenade
The cold, clear streams of some Northern moor,

Leaving the world to muse.
While my streams chuckle, bell-like and clear
In a reverberating silence.
A silence, which will liquefy a curlew’s cry.

And I could smoke a long, thin, white, china-clay pipe
And think of the soul in empty places
And of the soul of the empty spaces,
That this world of man left, a long time ago.

The Cockeral

Eric is a cockerel,
Eric is a king.
A ranting, red-eyed psychopath,
Lust crazed and threatening.

A white-feathered, morning boaster,
Running from the fox,
This restoration rapist with his foppish locks.
Old Eric, hen head batterer and corn-thief
Committed bully and yet chicken chief.

He is cock-sure, cock of the rock,
Strutting, hen stalking,
Stark staring in the Suffolk sunlight.

Or, huddled thoughtful, rain-soaked in a doorway,
Head cocked and beetling with his glassy eye
Eric is my cockerel, he is to do or die,

Punk, red-headed, puffing, buff ruff
Cocky as crimson
Eric knows his stuff.

Knows when to rape and when to run,
When to peck and when to stun.
Ripping sharp-spurred,
Worm-murdering
Pecking and plundering,
Eric is all life, right up until the minute
We will spill it with a knife.

Greed’s Pitch Pit

The sky is black, 
Thick poisonous clouds of smoke roll from oil fires,
A grotesque, vision of an awful end – a flame asylum – 
With dirty fires, winking crazily on all horizons.

Hot like Hell close up, the flames tear the air, 
Shrieking like jet engines, their insane lights play, 
Upon a lake of oil which caught a car for an island.
At its cursed edge dances a little oil spout.

Hell hurts and shuts the Sun out.
Settling like a shroud, closing all eyes in the sand.
It does the unthinkable: makes barren a desert,
And creates pools, and gently moving streams with the undrinkable.

Only falcons trapped by their territories, watch this horrid, burning beauty,
From fence posts and broken battle tanks.
Hunching their oiled shoulders, they fiercely face their end,
Or fatefully skim through the corrupting air.

Car tyres, lay tar roads across the sand,
And desert larks skip from bushes dripping oil onto the land,
The crushed bodies of a prehistoric dead  bring all to nought,
Somewhere a lunatic is laughing at the thought.

The end of something

The day our relationship finally died,
I felt some little, voice crack, inside.
By now it was a miserable, little thing,
A scared, small abortion of the brave promise
It once had been.

But I had grown attached to it,
And hated delivering blows on its helpless head
To make sure it was completely dead.
For 20 years it had faced countless storms, more
Than any other and I loved it more than father. mother, sister or brother.

It had bravely stood up to buffets, curses and blows,
But in the end it just cowered, snivelling,
And could not wipe its nose.

It had once been arrow proud, tall and strong
Confident both in purpose and in song.
Dressed gaily, in bright silver and golden cloths
And lit with stars.

But now
It shivered there inside and knew that finally, it had reached the end
I looked at it. I could have lied.
I could have said no, pull yourself together, dress yourself down,
There is one more chance for life.

But I did not have the heart
To give it, yet one more false-start
There was no life-support from you, or I
This bloody, little thing, had to die.

Though it was dying of thirst, not one more sup,
Of love could come from our empty cup,
I did it cleanly, decapitated it, as it looked up.

One quick blow from a spade,
In its eyes the tears of the promise we once made.
Now there is no more unhappiness for it to seek
I am burying it now, as I speak.

Silence

In the sound and fury by the muscled sea,
Where the clouds race and run in the open
Pastures of the sky.
And life lives like new blood, splashed on a face from a cut,
Where the wind-lashed waves have dashed salt water tears
More than any that can fall from my face.

Where my grief is smaller than mist droplets
In the great silence of the endless, empty, mindless, never resting sea.
There you will hear my heart mewling
Like a gull, looking for its lost loves
As little silver fish under the covers of the crashing waves.

Lost forever, as my mind
Rushes into the enormity of time
And time scrubs my life of man
Into its uncomprehending plan.

At the ebb of each receding wave,
As bubbling through pebbles, the sea gathers strength,
And draws back its grappling arm,
For yet another roiling hammer blow on the castle of the shore.
The silence hangs,
In the wind shriek of the storm.

And all around still  there are sounds of men,
Of trees falling in empty forests and one hand clapping
But I do not hear them,
And none shall know of my life and loves.
As the crows take to the sky
From the bones of a sheep
Drowned in a drainage ditch.

The sky is dark against the setting sun,
An angry red glow, behind the clouds.
And dark, the trees beseeching the winter sky
Like widows at an Arab funeral.
The path too is dark and wet and cold
Towards the ending and the beginning of the light.

Still we push, certain in our childishness that our life involves our Sun
And this world: where we dub nature perfect
And brag ourselves inspired.
But it is really just the rattle of bones and bits and rags 
A child’s collection of prized scraps made significant by our lives,
Creating atmosphere in a vacuum,
That is a birthplace and a tomb.