living poems: some new and alll original work

 davidgoulding84@interpoems.com

TRIUMVIRATE

Ignorance

He is for freedom,
unless it forces him to think.
He is for seeing
but the sky is flat-blue, other colours are himself.
He is for loving
but he needs: reflections are the rest.
He is for dying
but imagination fails this easy test.
He is for ever
And nothing ends never.

Insincerity

He is a slave
but perches on an iridescent throne.
He is skin
but, scraped, just skin, no flesh or bone.
He is rock
as solid as the shifting sponge of estuary mud.
He is diamond
reflected in a mirror with no image.
So many lives,
he cannot be defined:
one aspect right:
he’s only seen by blind.

Scepticism

He is the chaos of a million doubts

         nursed on an ocean.
He is a hundred hell-bound angels

         on a needle of devotion.
He is one tortured torturer fussing

         by the  spoilers’ barbed wire chair,
  who peels brains down to their finite cells.
To find an answer he will stare, strip, stare
  and stare again at life, till embarrassed,

          living squirms.
Still no answer – and defeat

          turns knowledge useless there;
and in unlearning another failure tells:
He distrusts suicide,

           and death for him

                    will lecture rusty bells.

RETURN PLUS ONE 

From the city to the country

  I’ll drive you through grey secrets

                            to the sunlight.

  But it won’t start quite so easy

  with staccato conversation

  as the keyboards and the numbers

                           hurtle all in chaos,

  disappearing into recent history

  and fading into kaleidoscopic tarmac.

  With each mile the knots untighten;

  as the just-gone past slips further

  the long-nursed and practised words

           get closer to each other.

 

We’ll go to and through the country

and I’ll ask you to join the searching:

For pre-historic pictures

Of my half-invented childhood –

With its creased and faded memories

Of a pined and acred mansion,

And truants on wet autumn leaves,

And the chase across the railways,

And an orchard, snakes

                     and giant gardeners.

To find nothing would not matter

If you listened to my well-digested        stories.

As in dreams there is no journey,

When you move from one scene to another,

So we, now, are near the river,

Past the pleasant ordered platitudes

                             called suburbia;

and you’ll wonder.

But have doubts that cool before

                                          the melting

and then freeze before the kissing

sends them shattering forever.

On through once virile dockland

that had green-black crumbling jetties;

where merchants’ serious quayside

                houses and Victorian alleys

mingled with sinking atmospheric       

                                                 slums,

but now are uniformly turned

                                           and tuned

to those boring blocks of docklands

                                     without docks.

Ignoring these and lightly on to where

the banks are opened to 

                   white-columned symmetry

of classic grandeur, backed by the first

                         green hill downstream.

My own and collective memories meet:

Pepys, Nelson, clippers,

           stars and kingly meetings.

All worthy background to another story

       If you let me take you…..

by the river.