reducetoclear

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stroll with me, 

linger over our place-mat hearts

In this thousand room palace

Smothered in comforts like a musky craft

And ancient hallways that chat dying and rusty

The mechanical time of grandfather clocks

The bedrooms, memorable decorations

Of nameless friends, who once passed

to linger in the conservatory dens

And fireside lounges

The clatter of the bad that grow dark and dark

Warmed with the banquets of laughter

Their life-sized paintings 

hung high in the eaves…

Precious jewelry

for too many unspectacular marks

And then wander through 

these dawn-soaked gardens

The fields beyond of magnificent views

To look at those fogged-up windows

of other long ago worlds

So much in hard luck floor, yet so few, so few

The lofty safe balconies

And tickets for a visit to royal box seats

A home fondling and entombed with memories

To sit in reflection, so intensely peaceful

And with you I shall quietly feast

So soon I feel to be holding you close

To catch your whispers of breath in my shell-like ear

The way your hair smells of forever

The way your warmth soothes my fears

Like some impossible make-believe

That can overwhelm with incredible dreams

The mere mortal man that I found

Can barely be seen through the joy of relief

And such common drownings of grateful tears

Yet the times without you that so easily steal

Heavy and sullen and darkly fed

So desperate for time to be on its knees

With the salvation of a moment

lost to the incense that protects what’s said

and whatever will be…

The black lace enticements

Of such dark, dark excitements

When the nymphs come stroke me in vain

And make me hard, 

with the desperate whispers to take me

The way we preach lusted

Barely breathless and barely sane

Like parting silk stockings

And in such hard interlockings

Addicted to such sweet, sweet pain

The fantasy of you

Passionately dreadful

And the divine scenarios we create…

This midnight wind is as restless as me

The night is an hallucinogenic of time

Somewhere hypnotic with our thoughts

And in dreams of further events

The odd things that are vetted and left

Like the fragile wish of a falling star

Your smile is the richest wish sent

To preserve my beliefs, 

and the courage to love whatever is left…

For I think of you is to sense your touch

And distance is a solution of nothing

That place where the dark fades into dusk

And the dawn that bleeds 

in the colours of rust

And intimate things are of gentle persuasions

From somewhere far the impossibles flee

Like you who raise and so beautifully seize

Sent maybe to find the pathway to heaven

Sent maybe just to find me… 

As the rain falls and smothers this night

With such gentle alien weepings

I feel the sheets beside me set

With such emptiness 

and incongruent feelings

Of you long gone and vacancy

And nothing has logic or meaning

Yet if we could raise one more night

And make me the happiest in life

Anything to stop these silent screamings

That with you I become an endless sigh

And our desperate of imperfect dreamings…

 I love the seas titanic deep blues

Ruled by the moons demands

Her storms that break the giants backs

The dawn that calms them down

Like a force of nature within your eyes

The way you can relish the sun

Bend the wind with the will of your own

And love me for the man I become

Lost in the feeling, maybe a little undone

Lost in believing in the encryption of love

Lost between you, and the moon and the sun

I stand apart from the mountains ledge

As some god passes this ground

And watch as the trees bend and shake

Beneath winters cruelest command

That I too often am of such lesser things

And barely find room on the ground

In crowds of men who claim to bring

A charge with a thousand demands

The loss of too many as the beautiful sing

Beneath them and their slight of hand

Tangents?

Seconds on a calendar face

Shaped formworks passing with interest

Barely touching us yet preserving mistakes

As the year’s sly by some so naturally vibrant, 

others compassionate whether I believed it or not

to be found subtly draped in pure violence

while others forgotten, in a background of lust

of crossroads, intersecting the other

as always I too often, on others unjudged

or with a phone identity recovered

like that one warm train station

hidden from winters unholy night

strange tracks of occasion…

at once there and needed

like a thought on safe shoulders

a welcome grab of a hand

and the comfort from falling, 

…remembered at last from an awkward stance

as I made a stand, like it was yesterday

somewhere to land…our moments of time

or what needed to say, they align and define…

never truly forgotten, or given up for the dead

so many behind me, so many I called friend.

These places I have seen,

built like I from once youthful stone,

The turrets and cliffs and decayed castle seeds

Or maybe they are dinosaur teeth?

Or of open graves of the no-longer freed 

from their shallow lives 

and overturned headstones?

Or of puny escapes of alien wars

discarded chunks of fossilised keeps

or desiccated walls of giant honeycomb

some medieval language which was far too deep?

a tortured sentence carved deeply from Earths bone

embedded by spirits in talisman sects 

or Diviners of lead metal lakes…

what labours did you bleed upon 

what befell your cracked skull to break

the crumbling backs of an unwanted feast

the sacrifice stones for lonely old men

Is this the flavour of wizards?

did a dragons thunder rape your walls?

Or did you plate the Norse man lust,

the salvation of an evil princes trust?

what miracles did so many once shelter upon?

What fashionable seasons of hell had to come

or new age beginnings, 

did you toil, butcher or sweat?

Did you strike a witch’s bargain?

Were slothful soldiers the acid in your veins

who rinsed with insane passions, 

to rise before dawn and slew you?

This Highland and Royal wreck

or did the bleakness of this wilderness simply

and in a single dark night,

come alive and swallow you whole?

I am all that I am when you are without me

A rest and be thankful to season our time

In a place of magic where she releases her sirens

On the great highs and lows 

of a planet passing by…

The tragic that line the passage to safety

Where the shattered and wrecked 

lay dead on their sides

The lighthouse that guards 

her infamous tantrums

The Legends that haunt her factory lights

Fishing and men fill her docks in the evening

The stories they tell that cure their lives

of the un-naturals and impossible giants

The wild open seas and her monstrous fights

…with land beyond reach, yet in plain sight.

All that I am is all she’s conceding

An outline of age in a faint morning light

The love in her eyes now broken and needy

As the tide will turn, and she’s left high and dry

walk with me to the edge of her sea walls

wander the streets of her loneliest bars

as timeless as ghosts she left in their rafters

the harbour of loss, quietly soothing…

and moored with the past

Safer canyon, and sheep jamboree’s

Deeper into this fortress crevasse

Of towering, gentile leviathans

and gangs of brutal-spirits in mass

How frail I seem beneath your crowds

How frail I have become

force-filled with vanquished worlds

and roars that flush lightly

and tilt me dizzy, 

the falls of powder-whites

like fine Rapunzel cries

tangled by Grimm outcrops and rocks,

The felt greens of fur

Soften face, and black fossil sores

And forests that swollen your joints,

Rutted brows on ominous frowns,

chained by heavy fractures marbled

and exposed, corroded knuckles and feet.

A dormant crouch with a crooked track record 

to guide me, the elusive mouths of caves

That sweat deer hives and badger mines.

And sigh spectacular theatres of birds

And how the weather steams ill off your crowns.

These monstrous wars of storm atomics,

of Thor’s last passing…

that you now calmly send to man.

Dare I toss a stone 

into your prehistoric shadows

your high command

In a single minute and dangling coil

Rig like a spiked insect as if to subdue you.

such feeble efforts of men

A glimpse of vanity, a man-made tint….

in your peaceful and massive flints

that spark the skies and thunder defeat

and the leftovers to adore me