Blood and Flowers

Blood and flowers
Are all that I could offer you
Blood and flowers
Strewn upon your wedding hearse
Stuck here together
Since love departed
Stuck here forever
In sickness, death and something worse

Blood and flowers
Not for the feigning hearted
Blood and flowers
Did we realise what we had started?
Stuck here together
Since love departed
Stuck here forever
In sickness, death and something worse

Blood and flowers
What were you really waiting for?
A little more than a coy virgin
A little less than a gushing whore
A game or four of let's pretend
To while away the  hours
I'll be your faithless sixth best friend

Blood and flowers
The photographer brought us more than showers
With a sharp eye for the money shot
I'll dust the album for his prints
Stuck here together
Since love departed
Stuck here forever
In sickness, death and something worse

Waiting at the altered side
A maid dishonored  and a flushing bride
A king to turn away the tide
And a Queen of clubbing by his side
What have we done since love departed
What  have we done?
We reached the finish line before we started.

Blood and flowers
Our presents lying by the trash
A toaster for the clichéd toasts
A bandage for the broken oaths
A plasterer for a broken heart
A beginning that could never start
Something
Borrowed blew and sold
A blistered finger cold as gold
A redeemed dream that couldn't last
A lover's name screams from my past

Blood and flowers
All that I could  have given you
An OK honeymoon weekend
A token from a magazine
From the safety of our marriage bed
He sat and watched your centre spread

Blood and flowers
Did we realise what we have started?
Stuck here together
Since love departed
Stuck here forever
In sickness, death and something worse

Poem 223

You have reached the time in your life for reflection
Each day dies
Slouched beside you
In your living room

Where the ticking of the clock tuts tuts
Away the fleeting tears
All hope
Has gone
Traces down my cheeks this tired tributary
Of years
All spemt
Where Once roared a raging sea

POEM 214

Children!
Your eyes lend I
The vision dispossessed of me
See past
The pixilated frontages of people's best intentions
And steer by  their lust for an instant's gratification
The emperor is impatient yet
My coliseum is nowhere near completion

You must wait patiently for your  entertainment
When every second column I type
Receives the thumbs down of deletion
For I  have drunk in the desert's  darkness
Parched by prayer
Ground my teeth
Upon this  brittle dirt and sand
Kissed the  Tempter's hand
Sacrificed His own son for
Immortality
Blinded in Gaza
Scorned by even the serpent
Too tired to repent
My sins breed beneath this scarred sky
Children your eyes lend I
For my time and the light are spent

FIVE YEARS AGO

FIVE YEARS AGO

Part I

That glorious summer

Owned only by we and

To wend down the winding

High-thicketed  lanes

Past clattering mills  and

The honey bee droning

We would lay under shade of willow and

Thorn as the sad sweet of

Rosemary caressed the air...


At shy ancient inns we boasted our love

And explored every castle and village nearby and

We found Roman roads barely  traced on the map

And museums as small as grocers' shop fronts

We braved every nettle and every wasp sting

And every flash shower that summer did bring

Embrace we in rain

And shelter in we

Far firmer far stronger than any oak tree

The signs we divined

Across ancient lay lines

And slept us content under their spell

And found long-lost henges exiled at chart's edges

Concealed within creeper and silent warped shade

And gazed we to heaven in parallel union

To stare at the ceaseless

Blue crease-less of skies

And chart the sun's apex high-nooned in the shimmer

Of honeycombed days dripping slowly with ease.

Part II

LATE in the autumn

At Tintagel most fitting

Like Isolde and Tristan

Upon the high cliff top

The sun's slow decline  to

A scarred charcoal line

Its terminal rays sad setting the distance

Drawing an end to the day and our time.

The warmth of the summer left too far behind us

The weakness of will and the skin's soft corruption

Worn down to the bone and then turning to stone

Holding the fossil that had once been your hand

To the churn of the shingle and the waves' wanton crashing

Crushing the tired last trace of the day

The chill of the sea-mist

All ceasing of colour

Replaced by a shroud of a permanent grey.

S. Evans