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.