A collection of original, contemporary poetry, To Linger with Ghosts is an imaginative journey into a world of landscapes and supernatural forces. In a menagerie of colourful, free-form sketches lost in a no-mans land with religious undertones and existential philosophy, to adventures in travel, and love. From camping in Australia, working in the English Lake Districts or wandering through the Scottish Highlands, To Linger with Ghosts is a diary of moments captured over decades of a life explored. Yet rather than a coffee-table book labelled as a 'collection', the poetry is complimented by a story of a down-and-out actor who makes his way by performing in remote taverns and pubs. Written in creative prose, and in an atmosphere of the supernatural, To Linger with Ghosts is a tribute to the glorious era of theatre, where those who would aspire to be worthy of fame and knighthood. Those few, brilliant talents who could ensnare an audience with such magic, and hypnotically entice them into other worlds. And tonight at the remote Highland tavern of the Blood and the Hound, Alexander Dubious is going to give the performance of his life....
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
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