Melancholy’s lack of zest
written all over his palimpsest:
to die at twenty-five to some
will hardly seem to have been alive,
but for Johnny Keats and the footloose Cavaliers
poetry, music, art, tears were eternal.
They eschewed self-pity, untold fears.

They tried their best to stay alive
In a world without antibiotics.
no easy crossing of the river Lethe
no seeking out of empty-headed
oblivion.They preferred to breathe
in the clear air of Hampstead heath.
for Johnny Keats and the loose Cavaliers
did not, and could not,. measure out life in years
but sought to rise to the attainment of that rarest
of rare orchids, love. What will…

Moon came to an old Cheshire mere,
This boy cannot stop looking
And looking at pretty Missy Moon.
Thunder growls on this high summer eve
Missy Moon shows off her talents
Her rounded suppleness of form.
She shows all her shades and shadows
Toing-and-froing the moon swings like a nursery rhyme.
Moonlight flows so that boy is now an old man
sleeping in a hammock made of shades and tears.
In her gypsy skirt Miss Moon bends and rises,
She kisses him, lost and white, in his heart of hearts.
And so-fully herself is she that
Shadows stand in strident awe
At this silent roaring on the other-side-of-silence.
This boy wants to hold her…

(for E Scott Alighieri)

But in my opinion it was not an honourable
injury that I sustained when I fell in love
With this slip of a girl. Lightning cannot fathom
Her and neither can I.
Monsieur, if you are armed, do not show your weapon
I find love completely unarmed.
Feeling opened the way for my eyes to reach to the core of her,
her tears ushered in a passage of events that elude me now and forever.
It was the day that the sun discoloured me,
pity became a factum of inaction,
life was taken and returned, I did not look at myself,
my eyes bind me to…

Oh! the lack of light, the all-day twilight!
How can a body live through this visual misery?
Even the trees have no leaves.
And the clinging cold!

We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts,
this shadow and I squeeze
Into the thick silences of trees.

Now the dark lights
of Christmastide, drift, flux and flicker
in this breeze of time,

Penumbra-beginning hologram-end,
my friend.
Such pungent affirmations
steer us into that which will not last.

Generations of suffering:
eyes lifted to across, a crescent, a menorah,
such yearnings spilled
onto the page of history:
promises made and never kept…

When you came to me, through an open window,
All the cracked envelopes of my life descended into your hands,
There was nothing in them — just invisible love that you can throw away if you choose to.
You chose to throw it straight back at me, I caught it, we had begun.

You gave me a lot of praise with your eyes
For being alive
I, too, thought you desired reciprocation, but you were just a girl and was just a boy
We felt a world of difference: of mood, of shape, of tone. Home was no longer home.

I was no…