Perception Deficit

Planet Earth

I take it all back

Your blue skies are the hope in my blue eyes reflected

When you shine from your sun

I shine

All that I see, you've shown me now, is me


My take on life

Is life

The glow in my lover's eyes is my own need of love reflected

My love of others is that need serviced

Their love of me is only what I perceive it to be, in earnest

My fears are but the pain of being rejected


Planet Earth

You are the canvas onto which I project my map

I am the brush and I stroke out through the inks of my experiences

While I look in the mirror I'll never see what they see

Nor should it be that I can

Embracing life, I accept that


There's a mile between the way I see me and the way I am

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

Lodestone

Quixotic polestar

Far out on the shimmering horizon - yellow white rim

At once my icon and my guide


When I orientate myself to you

The jumble clutter details of my everyman life

Crash like burnout cars


And I am left alone on the parameter of your awe

High and wide

Skirting the sunny side


Dumbstruck

And counting my lucky stars!

You're All Staring at Screens!

A man from 1980 takes a stroll across 2012

Notice how dawn doesn’t rise with daylight ?

Process what you see and ask “Why?”

Try and start a chant on the football terraces

Think about the colour of sky


Pull yourself away from your phones and tablets

Turn from your massive TV

I’m throwing dollar bills on a tramful of commuters

Nobody’s looking at me!


Consider how night rain feels much wetter

When it shows up in the brake-light beams

I’m in awe

All wowed and humbled

You’re all staring at screens


Keep your head down

Don't talk to your neighbors

City life has gotten real mean

You’re techno-fodder in little mini-me tribes

Shades of regression to the mean


What the hell happened to please and thank you ?

Why y’all chatting to yourselves ?

Nothing makes sense

From the nose-tail traffic

To the titles on your magazine shelves


I live mine from the minute I wake up

You need sleep to get dreams

I’m looking out at the world in wonder

You’re all staring at screens!

The Emergence Of Dusk

Summer sewn browns and a slither of canal light

Paint a new colour of quays

Crude arboreta fresh from a lost fight

Swaying in the chattering breeze

In-for-the-night cars lined up all particular

Freezing in the Arctic north

A lonely flock of residents huddled in a dalliance

Arcing down a silhouette wharf


Flooded in a swathe of moon-dust silver

Studded on an indigo sky

Patched and checkered in a quiver of jet-trails

Winter weather systems pass by

Balconies flutter like a million sundays

Echoing a summer long-passed

Neon strips bounce along a circus of media

Making all the ripples pool fast

Steal-away lovers in a whisper-sweet paradise

Longing to be frozen in time

Eights on the water pulling in harmony

Rowing to the far shoreline

Sun-shapes flicker like the slow-dying ditties

Of a blues-funk accordion busk

A melody of houselights tripping off the promenade

Beckons the emergence of dusk