Status Updates From Collected Poems

My senses see.
Speak, then, o body, shout aloud,
And break my only mind from chains
To go where ploughing’s ended.

Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they may be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
The lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

You shall go as the others have gone,
Lay your head on a hard bed of stone,
And have the raven for companion.

The wireless snarls on the hearth.

There in the sunset in sunrise
Joy lifts its head, wonderful with surprise.

Even among his own kin he is lost,
Is love a shadow on the wall,
Among all living men he is a sad ghost.

The lake’s voice and the rolling of mock waves
Make discord with the voice within his ribs
That thunders his heart thunders, slow as his heart slows.

I have long to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leaving me half blind.

Their faces shone under some radiance
Of mingle, moonlight and lamplight
That turned the empty kisses into meaning,

Overwhelmed by the sun, with a torn brain
I stand beneath the clouds’ confessional,
But the hot beams rob me speech,
After the perils of fools’ talk
Reach asking arms up to the milky sky,
After a volley of questions and replies
Lift wit-hurt head for sun to sympathise,
And the sun heals, closing sore eyes.

Praise that my body behold, I’ve limbs
Not stumps, after the hour of battle,
For the bodies brittle and the skin’s white.

Believe, believe and be saved, we cry, who have no faith.

We have grown weak before we could grow strong,

‘We who were young old. It is the oldest cry.
Age sours before the youth’s tasted in the mouth
And any sweetness that it hath
Is sucked away’.

What’s never known is safest in this life.

The bitter, the wicked, the longingly leisure,
Sleep punctured by waking, dreams
Broken by choking,
The hunger of living, the oven and gun
That turned on and lifted in anger
Make the hunger for living
When the purse is empty
And the belly is empty,
The harder to bear and the stronger.

After such fighting as the weakest know,
There’s more than dying;
Lose the great pains or stuff the wound,
He’ll ache too long
Through no regret of leaving woman waiting
For her soldier stained with spilt words
That spilled such acrid blood.

Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bless.

That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim at the end.

Being but men, we walked into the trees.

If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder if the unfailing stars.

Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.

I love and doubt, it’s vain, it’s vain,
Loving and doubting like one who is to die
Planning what’s good, though it’s a but winter,
When spring has come,
The jonquil and the trumpet.

On every hand the evil‘s positive
For death or live,
Froth or a moment’s movement
All hold the sum, nothing to nothing,
Even the words are nothing,
While the sun’s turned to salt,
Can be a but vanity, such an old cry,
Nothing never, nothing older
Though we’re consumed by loves and doubts.

There’s poison in your wine, drinker,
Which spreads down to the dregs
Leaving a corrupted vein of colour,
Sawdust beneath the skirts;

Never is nightmare,
Never flows out from the wound of sleep
Staining the broken brain
With knowledge that no use and nothing worth
Still’s vein to argue after death;
No use to run your head against the wall
To find a sweet blankness in the blood and shell,
This pus runs deep.

Iif it’s no beginning in our love
wise woman true for heat
it’s no end to us
or even interlude between the abstract
and the side or shell
hindering my knuckles or my knife
our modern formula
of death to sense and dissolution
where there is love there’s agony
Tthere’s sex where our mad hands rest
….
Of ever watching your light
Come to a point with mine
Your pity left me high and dry

Our boat is made to rise
By waves which grow again
Their own melodious height,
Into the rainbow’s shy embrace.
We shiver uncomplainingly,
And taste up on our lips, this minute,
The emerald caress,
And breath on breath of indigo.

We try to steer;
The stream’s fantastically hard,
Too stiff to churn with leaves,
A sedge of broken stalks and shells.

We sail a boat upon the path,
Paddle with leaves
Down an ecstatic line of light,
Watching, not too aware
To make our senses take too much,
The unrolled waves
So starred with gravel,
The living vessels of the garden
Drifting in easy time;