Crowds of Crows

Squat, rain-sodden, quick-eyed crows, as black as coke sacks

The odd corpse-scrounging so-and-so amongst hoards of grey-cowled jacks

Crouch in doom-laden rows

Chiming slights, inspiring spats

Gossips gossip and snipers snipe; always stirring

Spurring protesters to issue vendettas and thinly veiled threats of war

Parties parley, sneering and snarling, like bunting flags

Strung between trees, they stream back and forth

When crowds of crows gang together, they excite peer group pleasure

But in freedom there is open debate and inevitably some altercate

And by squawk of beak they create

A vaguely prophesied, state-despised dissenter

Who measure by measure, increases peer group pressure

Makes pacts and breaks contracts, attacks and back-tracks

Spins lies together with abstract facts

Even claims to be God’s ultimate successor

But in the clatter of harsh chatter, shrill chinks like splitting flints

They petition yet another contender

Create disquiet amongst the fickle, quarrel and squabble, chivvy and quibble

And then pronounce an even newer messiah…

And so it goes on, twixt sunrise and the twilight of yet another dimsy

Realigning their boundaries, reassigning their territories

For the ten millionth time

In the last thousand crow-blighted centuries

∞Ω∞

Butterfly

For what seemed like an age, I pensively waited, in the fading hope of change

And time went by and in its passing chose to rearrange

The scattered opaque splinters, of what, i did not know

Into a psychedelic sparkling coloured glass window

Through which in awe, I see somehow, the shining heavens so clearly now

And as the window opens wide

I realise

That I can fly

∞Ω∞

Sungazer

 

           As she passes we exchange highly charged glances 

                               And for one long, long instant 

                 I gaze amazed through her apple-green eyes

                        I’m struck silent and I’m struck blind

               By the immaculate beauty, the absolute purity 

                             Of the god star, fixed at the center

                         Of her breath-taking, reason-shaking

                                        Her infinite, everlasting

                                      Her light-brimming mind

                                                          ∞Ω∞

“Tell It Like It Is, Kid.”

“What the hell was that!” Helen demanded.

We’d both recoiled, whatever it was.

“Well I… I’ve no idea…”

A tiny, static-crackling, pitch-black orb

Had zoomed between us and exploded amidst a

Shower of sparks that briefly lit up the gloom.

“There it is!” Louisiana shrieked, pointing.

Helen, squinting into the near dark whispered,

“Oh yes, I see it, Darling… is it a speckley  bird?”

Louisiana’s toy camera clicked.

 “No! It’s the ghost of the fairy mermaid!

I told you she’d come back!”

Conceiving A New Idea

Across her mind, in next to no time

Arcing a sublime decline

A thought struck like sunrise, a meteorite of insight

Brighter than wise

She bit her lip, closed her eyes tight and sighed

“Oh, God yes! That’s so right!”

 ∞Ω∞

From The Mouths of Fishes…

Pink Floyd’s ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’, from their 1969 Ummergummer ‘Live at Mothers’ album, combined with Roscoe’s Ginger Wine, was proving a distinctly potent combination…

I was lying in the dark with volume ten blasting my stupefied brain through burning hot earphones, when my mind’s eye beheld a dishevelled man with a tall and dented stovepipe hat. He shuffled through a crowded cafe, pulling fish from a bucket and dropping them randomly on the floor amongst the barking, lumbering humans.

My stare seemed to tap him on the shoulder, for he turned and bore down on me with slow menace. With great deliberation he placed a fish upon my empty plate. “Especially for his Excellency, if it pleases…” the man hissed with fake sycophancy on a draught of foulest breath.

All the other customers in the cafe had fallen silent and all were glowering contemptuously at me . The fish, set upon the plate before me, then whispered on its last-gasped breaths, “Careful… careful… careful with that axe, Eugene…”

The fish’s many accomplices, each flapping and wheezing on the cafe’s floor, immediately set about spasming vigorously and screaming the house down…

And the dishevelled man in the tall and dented stovepipe hat began laughing… and he laughed and laughed and he laughed and laughed… whilst all the while fixing me with his cold beady-eyed stare, as my panic rose in a sudden cyclone…

∞Ω∞

The Hagge of the Orm

 

This photograph of a view across the narrowest share of the Vast, was taken at dawn this morning by Kate Tomlinson, a true daughter of Ormland…

‘If y’n be from beyond, t’s prob’ly impossible for y’n to imagine that to us Ormlanders it is an incontestable fact that The Hagge is a denizen of this treacherous expanse of water…’ 

So railed Autumnous Sourmire, an early 18th Century commercial-baron of Rook Town,  at an incredulous fly from beyond… who had somewhat foolishly scoffed at the notion that such a thing as ‘Sybiltane, The Hagge of the Orm’ could possibly exist…

But Jonah Jones, destined to become the psychic goalie of Rookwood Town F.C. not only knows that the risen Hagge is the physical embodiment of the magical and constant force flowing through Ormland… he sees her in his dreams, such as on the night she came to the aid of The Rooks in their bleakest, most beleaguered hour…

‘When told, Jonah humphed and his gaunt face stretched with a mirthless grin; at first he wouldn’t say how he knew but he was adamant that the grass and soil of Orm Park were clean… indeed, more than clean, positively reinvigorated…

When pressed he’d only say that the night the flood had receded for the second time he’d dreamt of The Hagge, risen and composed of the siltsome mire-sludge and manifold sunken junks of the Orm, the Vast and Waelhem Marsh… and that he’d felt her dismay and compassion… and that from the distance of his dream he’d seen her scour their holy land clean…’

∞Ω∞

 

 

Joss ‘Pepper In His Boots’ Reeves

‘The ball squirted out from between two fully committed challengers and came rolling towards Cyril. The tall sandy haired jacko with ‘pepper in his boots’, as it used to be called, came running towards him to retrieve it. Cyril felt suddenly very conspicuous and awkward not knowing how to react if the scruff was rude or aggressive about his watching them. 

He needn’t have worried; the scruff smiled a genuinely cheery smile at him and said, “Hello, Mr Cunningham!” before scooping the ball round with his left foot and hoofing it unerringly back to his mates and chasing after it.

“Hel..ugh..oh”, Cyril stammered by way of reply. He was suddenly gripped by a very powerful sense of recognition of someone whom five seconds previously he’d have sworn he had never set eyes on before. Slightly bewildered Cyril found himself thinking, ‘Yes, yes, I… I’ve definitely encountered that scruffish man-jack afore… but where?’ Cyril peered down the long gloomy galleries of his memory but saw no one even vaguely like him…’

∞Ω∞

 

Jonah ‘Skiver’ Jones

Jonah Jones, the psychic-goalie of Rookwood Town F.C. spent far too much of his morning sitting in numbed agony through an hour and ten minutes of double Physics… something about ticker-tape-timers and working out what gravity is in meters per second per second or some such nonsense…

Whilst staring out the window watching Second Year scruffs slog through the cold rain around the the rugby pitch towards the finishing line of their cross-country run, Jonah took to doodling a tree in the margin of his exercise book… it proved such an excellent distraction that he then set earnestly to work on the back cover of said exercise book drawing the wood grain of his work bench…

Doing so successfully killed the last twenty minutes before lunch break… but with the prospect of double Geography followed by Maths and French, Jonah knew there was precisely no chance whatsoever that he would be coming back for the afternoon’s entertainments… after all, skiving came so easily to him that it wasn’t second nature to him… it was the root and core, the tooth and claw of who he was…

∞Ω∞

 

I Clearly Dreamt

I CLEARLY DREAMT

Mauve scarlet-edged billowing thunder-heads

Boil and plume and fume out of the west

Cumulous nimbus columns fired and hell-bent

Promises of intent not mere idle threats

 

Pale orange orb setting spilling gold across the stream

Silver six-penny moon ascending cradled by a winter tree

That is a stark silhouette against this dark lowering sky

And dripping the last rains from her heaven-earthing heights

 

November winds stole her regal golden crown

And every single stitch of her gorgeous autumn gown

She now drapes forlorn before this january storm

That last night I clearly dreamt will bring her crashing down

∞Ω∞