In her mutinous retreat

Perfected unimpressed
Her skin is white heat

With apple fresh perfume

She's in mutinous retreat.

He doesn't get the chicks

And always looks like shit

But his fingers are like bullets

In arpeggios and licks.

Joy it fell like rain

On the St. Martin's steps

And the camera like a gun

Caught the traffic and the stress.

Now the slabs echo in their glamour

With halogen silhouettes

and the river's like a cinema

As the floodlights pirouette.

Now the wind it carries laughter.

The sting, the spice of tears.

A resonant nostalgia

Of when hours felt like years.

Each rhythm builds up harder

Each pierces and each rusts,

The furious tuneless player

Busking for love's trust. 

And the sick are painted lovely

The lovely lose their bloom,

While the poet's headless poetry

Is the panic of the doomed. 

He plays on despite it

He plays as if at war

She is out there in the onslaught

Cursing as before.  

And he still can't get the chicks

And he still feels incomplete. 

While she is sicker than the sick

In her mutinous retreat. 

Two opposing suns

Let's face it, holding it together's hard.

You have to cook the books to make it work.

Swallow a paradox of battling facts,

Mix metaphors, confuse your death with birth.

A woman's belly's built to hold the moon;

Make light from stone. Life's chemicals unwon,

Between the heart and rituals of her womb.

Priestesses born from Psyche's war with form.

A man's the child of two opposing suns.

Two hot infinities that burn as strong,

But can't outscorch the other. From them come

Live shots of flame between the hips and lungs.

From jugular to coccyx's spinal roots,

Two buds of heat make life from lightning's fruit.

'Hit back': a sonnet for Andreas

A pink conflicted skin of storm,

Gentle, pent thick, with melting dyes;

Refracting daylight's soft fragmenting warmth,

Breaks up night's blooming, petalled, half-disguise.

London. The dizzy, drizzled Soho lights,

Spread wet, chaotic child-like over streets

Vinigared black. The city's pressure bites

You - pincered by the flash and shrieks.

Your battle plan begins from where you stand.

Bare-fisted, young, transfixed by midnight sun.

Appraised of facts, like sand between your hands.

Apologies get banished on the run.

The city's polystyrene tongue attacks.

With language made to scar and crack. Hit back.

Ode to Spring

October's flourishes are dried to must,

And ice comes carried sharp by wind. The sun,

Strikes ground refreshed and brisk with dust,

Before maturing grasses from the mud.

Broken capricious watercolour clouds

Let evening's palette-melted warmth unfold,

Turning the fingertips of branches brown,

Bruising the naked sky with blue and gold.

The time-cut trunks round shadowed churches crack ,

And moss and holly strangle bricks and creep

Around Victorian cobwebbed, sugar-glass.

Cement and polythene entrap the weeds.

You ask me what a man is – I say he's heat.

And you know it. And his heart billows like

Powdered cirrus, or wind weaved through the wheat

Drowning the sensual afternoons of light.

Ask me what a man is – I say he's earth.

Dense generations hot in buried dirt,

Where darkness moistens roots in fertile filth

Before awakened shoots are born and burnt. 

Saffron's Sonnet

The language of apologies is cheap

And quick convenient in its rhetoric.

Actions toil and we must close our lips,

Love is not love but troubled doublespeak.

That said, dreamed dreams can choke the day-to-day,

As hearts shift justice through the oil and heat,

Driving fast lanes between the cash and play,

With fragile metals you cannot cheat for speed.

Sometimes its all we have – our words, our dreams,

The body's petrol powered ambitions dry.

Inspiration like premium gasoline,

A hope-black engine in your chassis cries.

Concrete and rubber meet and trouble burns,

Keep steady, tight ahead, and take the turns.