Juvenilia
These poems were written when I was in the 6th Form of South Shields Grammar Technical School for Boys from 1963 to 1966
My Venus
Her fragile beauty is unsurpassable,
Her form enough a Catonian ascetic to bewray.
This dulcet Dulcinea, apparent dulcamara.
At sight - though beauty - quite frigid, she
would make through charm a lugubrious lover
The fisk to thieve, the sacrosanct fisc.
She inspires me, induces my cathexis.
God's principal idyll, she.
Her breath is warm, like a khamsin. O!
Would that it were as long on my cheek.
Were I a bee, would that she be Merops.
No epideictic tawpie this, my Venus divine.
Into the Night
Even the black cat had been frightened.
The road was long and I tired slightly.
A white, continuous line was my guide. The
Negative picture before me was fascination:
In the hedges I saw hidden black lions - or
Black maniacs - nevertheless black dangers;
Though invitation to solitude, privacy of a sort,
Was a paradoxically inherent quality.
I sensed the infinity of the universe, looking over the trees
Into the night, beyond the distant horizon,
Further, further, I touched a star….
Thought came easily, there was little distraction.
I became enveloped to the degree of attachment .
I was the countryside, I the late night,
I the darkness.
What sprang to mind was immediately relative
To my surrounds. I was my surrounds.
I thought, I accepted, I rejected.
The darkness was darker - my fear was terror.
Night holds unknown dangers - unknown reliefs:
In the black loomed my shape, my refuge, my home.
If We Can
When life is left and all that is
Is skin and bone and hair and rot
And foreign creatures enjoy our misery
And eat our empty stomachs;
And soil our robe, wood our bed
And rock our roof, stone our sky,
Perhaps then we will deny
Our life-long illusion of purple and gold
And rays of light and silvery existence,
A shining personage seated, accompanied,
A wooden cross behind to remind us
That once someone did give his son,
Perhaps then we will repent….
If we ought….
If we can!
The Bell
When day is done, the bell rings loud and clear,
The place of our travail is left behind.
We leave to find more work, an aftermath,
A vestige of left-overs there to remind us of life's great tax!
When life is done, the bell tolls loud and clear,
The place of our travail is left behind.
We leave to find no work, no after life,
No vestige of souvenirs there; but we have tasted life's e'en greater tax!
I died
They said I would
Die!
I laughed at them
Then!
I said I believed
So
I should live on
But
They said I would
Die
And I
Died!
The error of their ways
The power of things present
Has led us far away
To goals we sought
And ones we didn't
Through woeful misdirection
Uncontrolled - too powerful!
Power received by some
To sleep well and remember.
Soon they will see
The error of their ways
When they are refused
The wish they wished
Through fear and hope
Of human minds
Which live their lives
And are conceited enough
To want, to demand
An extra quota.
Loathing
Ages past were dull and blind; few lights shone.
Now my light burns far too bright; I see too much.
Melancholy and pessimism are of the past
When Chateaubriand and others pined away.
My heart too is heavy and large. My head is lost.
My light has led me far away and lost me now.Oh God, where are you? Who? I don't know.
What is this life if, full of love, we have no lover, no beloved;
No reason for loving, no reason for not;
Much reason for pleasure! Much hope for death!
A lost man found is worth a dozen others.
A lost man left is worth nothing on earth.
Not any worth can I find that is constituted of men.
No! Because I'm lost to all
Who live a free life and all who love their living.
I loathe my my life, myself, all me, all mine!
Unhappy me! Why should I live and loathe,
Why can't I love?
The bonds of humans, weak humans, are strong.!
Bars of diamond and gold!
People, and their thoughts and whims!
Dead
When the sun's ceasing embers
Grace the great structures of our
Society, with their diminished glow,
I die again
When the shallow horror of the night
Creeps into my wearied brain
And stirs my heart to wonder,
I die again.
When the cat's prowls I avoid
To maintain my sanity amid
A world of green and yellow,
I die again.
When alas the sky has fallen to
The depths of my race, and crushed us
Flat beneath its bespangled shield,
I'm dead.
A mountain and an apple
By the green pastures
the slime of the soot of the chimneys and the
smoke and the dirt and the grit and the
hate and the hurt and life and the
rain destroy the sun.
The joy of the green pastures!
The joy of those one-sided, moss covered
grass-eating poets who looked at a mountain
and said, "Look, a mountain!"
So, a mountain.
I look at a mountain and, if I
like the look of that mountain,
I gasp or smile
and I pluck the apple and I eat it.
Tomorrow
When the dark of the night
Has splashed the coarse features of human dwellings;
And the moon's sharpened rays
Have pierced the strange solitude of nature's repose;
When the lights in the sky
Shatter the harmony of the night;
Or the street lamp glows
Or the lighted candle shows
The way to our dwellings,
We humans sense an end so infinite
that a new day must come
And we see in our death a life for tomorrow!
Starling
Sing, sweet starling
Of the time
I lived near you and
In my world
Were ways to
Love your singing.
For your sweet shrill
All day long
Has forced my hand
Many times to
Grasp at life
For ever more.
Chance
Hard hitting racket 'against the
Bold brick wall in the
Vast void earth which is
Soon so cold to the
Million mass standing
Near no help or too
Close to death even
Nine knurled men who were
Caught alive then were
Soon stampede out by the
Cold King Chance who had
Forced their hand in the
Nicest possible way!
Climb Down Now
"Son, climb down now;
The dogs are away;
The man is gone.
Son, please climb down now;
The storm is nigh
And the wind is wicked.
Son, I beg you, please climb down now.
I see afar the rent man coming
Our faults to detect while I pay.
Oh son, mercy, climb down now;
The earth is all shaking
And soon your fortress will crumble.
Get down son!
The branches are swaying,
The breezes are growing,
Climb down now you must."
"I told you to climb down didn't I?"
Said he would
He finished and didn't return. The man said he would.
He came in the morning worked in the afternoon
And left in the evening.
Three days the same
Would come, work and go.
He finished and didn't return. The man said he would.
Earth
When the man is in charge of the green sheets
Obey only him when he offers a bed
For your wearied wife in the warmth of a coal fire
Lit for your comfort, calling you to rest
In the furrows hewn in the cliffs of mortal men
By a force so eternal that God bows before it
Lest vengeance it seeks full well knowing
That sounds and shapes shall shave off full sloth
Of the gods all around in the gloom of the toil
Which is earth.
Kings
Kings should give up their crowns!
Falling in the distant mists
Of the fiery agile winter.
Above and below me,
I see, sense, desire the loves.
Beneath, marked out, is
Every pattern of my brain.
Flowers and rocks and gates
Shut them out of my sanctuary.
Landing so slowly, so softly on
Feathers, on feathers; so slender, so solemn,
Motionless, life hurries by me, swelling its veins,
And I own my desired in that hut
Where I soon shall meet my dreams
And cry for a death after life
In the cold, claiming
Kings should give up their crowns!
The Soil of my Land
Sighing since the soil of my land
Eroded. The rivers flowing down the mountain,
Hillocks' tears profuse and so salty
Caused by a sadness so grievous
That the earth has decayed in my time.
For the birds in the sky crawl
The ants look for new homes.
"Send the bread to another land!" You'd better
Or your bellies won't be fed. You cannot
Live in a land that is not there,
Else the seas engulf you
Or the winds will thrash you
Or the fires scorch the features
Into a grim grind on your face.
Sleep
I sleep in the night time and grasp at those images
Of torrents and maidens
Of rainbows and gold
Even darkness and sweetness
Yes, happiness;
Crying out in the night,
"Call off your fiendish watchdogs!"
Sulk
Sulk far in courtships lost to find
A lover ever so loved as you are now.
Your tenderest dreams, have they ever before
By any mind less rich been hoped?
Your breast's commotions, heart its pulse,
Have they ever in life's story been repeated?
Cries of ecstatic love, solitary, singular,
Did they ever fill this bay North-East
In a star-lit sky-covered moon-mist?
Even falls of the salt in the waves and the tears,
Sultry happiness, did they resist
Them in another year before you?
If you believe it, then you do not love,
You are not loved, you have not dreamt
Nor stirred your heart unconscious: your cries
Are insincere, mere engagement: and
Your tears are false glass, cut from
A vacant eye!