Write Night

Building worlds is a bleak compulsion

Many a sleepless night

Novelists grovel in black revulsion

Poets chisel in white


No one finishes what they started

Nobody smiles and types

Write Night beckons the broken-hearted

Neck-deep in demons and gripes


Midnight oil is a fuel tormented

Scriveners walk alone

None of us win

We’re all demented

None of us ever got shown


Couldn't care less what rubbish you're dumping

Literary circus clown

Colours arrive and the beat starts thumping

Better start getting this down


Paper or iPad

Makes no difference

Slip on the idiot chain

Lock yourself into your deliverance

Write Night’s here again

The Amber Road

or; The Fruits of Abrene


Follow me south from Kaup and Truso

Travel the treasure-trove spate

Weave like a snake through Baltic Peoples

Jump the Moravian Gate


Tree-tears flow like sun-flecked lava

Lighting up the Rhone and Rhine

Branch off west into France and Belgium

Follow the Amber Road spine


Saunter by sail on the silent Dnieper

Men with medicinal things

Climb from Bern on the Alpine creeper

Beckon the Egyptian Kings


Traders running through the heart of Riga

Fortunes bought and sold

Cultural blessings on the wings of a diva

Rainstorms of Latvian gold


Onward now to Venetian palaces

Mediterranean muse

The old Amber Road is diminishing Europe

Fresh-laced immigrant shoes


Spreading like fire from iced north beaches

Jewels in the crowns of Tsars

Time-spun milk of the Baltic reaches

Reminiscing Soviet scars


Blaze a trail on the decadent camber

European unity style

Follow the yellow-brick road of amber

Paved with a Latvian smile

The Bells of the Old North Wind

Stroll through the church of the Pennine foothills

All ye who hath sinned

Dance to the chimes of the Devil’s music

The bells of the old north wind


Knife your heart in the icicle chamber

All your prayers got binned

Each dead toll will slice you through

The bells of the old north wind


Rest ye a while at the upland altar

Keep your neck scarf pinned

Nowhere to run when they ring out

The bells of the old north wind


Hardened men of Lancastrian backbone

Campanile mischief skinned

They’re rolling over the moors again

The bells of the old north wind


Southerners scarper whence ye came

Your spirits kicked and shinned

Our winter nights be your last rites

The bells of the old north wind