WHO DO YOU LOVE?
As the red-gold glow of stormy autumn
fades into winter a leafy-mist lights this late
December dawn recalling me,
incuriously,
to the design hidden in words.
Words whirl like smoke signals
rising from a fire, from a gun, from a life,
tended by an old man in a faded black suit
the front of which is bedecked with medals, time-ridden,
a man missing inaction before the dreadful daylight starts
of unkept promises and broken hearts.
Now, a fleeting meeting with the past casts a shadow
along the line, for a time, these nightmare images
tell of all that hot metal does to human flesh and bone.
Hidden in words: aberrant, obsessed, selfish,
are sorry-wisps of cognition, which coagulate,
fuse into the light of yet another English dawn in his troubled mind of mine.
Still, the old and friendly moon haunts the sky of dawn,
as my deranged mind passes strange lines of time
over me.
The hours fade into a quagmire of the unquiet music of rhyme
and leaves me no time to remember
the unaccompanied boys
stuck, forever-more, in the mud of the western front as leaves cling to winter trees
so, too, do these lost boys cling to me
as I kick through the autumn leaves,
where there is a passing stillness,
a silence, as before a barrage,
a silent reckoning...of what is to come
in this unholy future of ours.
