Life is love

What value does life have?
The discourse of men in suits
The sound of footsteps as they pass
The chirping of sparrows
The busker in the underpass

All have a transient lease
Of what relevance are they?
A few moments of beauty and strife
The echoing footsteps fall
Is life merely life?

We are microbes on a ball
Or, to put it another way
We are united as one
Our path is universal
We are light, love, the sun

The beach at Deia

It is a house inhabited by ghosts
Your totems, your carefully folded shirts
Shaped terraces of lavender and thyme
Tall carobs and orange and lemon trees.

There must have been enough of England in Deia
In the grey cliffs that walled your domain
In the sycamores by the rushing brook
And the white hawthorns frothing by the road

There is a different poetry here
Where stepped mountains climb to the sky
Of tumbling orchards of olive and fig
Of jigsaw boulders and the super-charged stream

Slicing though tortured cliffs like an ogre's house
Today, there is a world you never knew
The parked hatchbacks are like silverfish
There is a barrier across the sacred grove


We walked down the road to your beach
To your crystal pool, somehow defiled
By a driftwood bar, the colours of Europe laid out
Flakes of plastic, like shells, on the grey stones.

Water does not change – the sigh of the spinning brook
The glowing of flesh opened to the sun
I sat on the beach with a black goddess
Your lemon in our wine. Thank you Mr Graves

The world does not have hospitals

With reference to William Wordsworth

The world does not have hospitals, or schools,
Or museums, except those built by us.
It is a place of ignorance and sloth.
Its beauties are over-rated, by fools.
The world, in fact, is esteemed far too much
For its ants, pipits, tigers and flowers,
Killing and eating each other for hours.
Nature's a hostile universe; it sucks.
Great God, I would rather be in London
With its escalators and shopping malls
Wrapped in the city’s vast, murmuring hum
Than looking at heaths or waterfalls.
London’s glories are far more startling ones
The smeared orange sky, the dome of St. Pauls

Overload - to my father

Removed, in a vague amniotic dream
I forgot who I was, who I could be

I could not stand it, the divine comedy
The beauty and pathos of life itself

A sagging settee was my continent
I dissolved into a gentle haze

The world is too much with us, far too much
I drank every day so as not to see

II

Years passed. The pain of living was dulled
The quotidian ache of light and dark

Into a vague blur, far beyond all strife
Where the daily terror could not reach me

I suspended myself, because I could
In a bubble. Who can tolerate life?

It is too beautiful and too strange
It is much better when seen drunkenly