A Siren's Warning

If you are wise sailor, cover your ears,
Remembering the insight of the years
For I shall entice you with honeyed voice
Then you must forget you have no choice.
Your proud ship will founder and be no more
Becoming as driftwood on this strange shore.
A sad Nemesis for a man so brave,
The ocean shall claim you as its slave.
Tossed lifeless upon the boiling foam,
To see nevermore the fair shores of home.

*

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Puzzling

The strangest gift you ever received

Was a jigsaw puzzle.

Bits were missing; disappointing -

As if you were trying

To piece your back life together,

Finding the most important

Parts were never there.

It was a jigsaw of a horse.

The missing pieces were his eyes.

A majestic, white stallion,

Blindly galloping across barren plains,

Mane flaying against the wind;

Having no sense of where he was going

Or where he had been.

Separated from the herd,

He would battle on regardless

And never falter; fearless against the unseen.

Blindness can never defeat the brave,

Though they may be lonely in their quest.

You found the pieces that were his eyes,

Jammed underneath the lid;

They were brown eyes, warm and doleful.

You completed the puzzle so he could see the

Landscape unfolding before him.

If you have enjoyed this poem please click on the link below to see more of my writing. 

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Illusion

Walking around the walls of your incarceration,

I search for a breach in the concrete

(This could be the very antithesis of the little Dutch boy and the dyke).

The years erode slowly for you on your side;

Sifting through meaningless mountains of legal jargon,

In search of fresh evidence to clear your name.

The sun is shining and being in one of my more contemplative moods,

I imagine I'm encompassing the walls of Jericho.

I don't have a week, like Joshua, before my visit

To walk round these walls seven times,

So they crumble by the very will and wrath of God

But an appeal to him for divine justice passes my lips nonetheless.

This concept called freedom which we both hanker after,

Continues to elude us, you on your side of the wall and me on mine

Like Dr. Who and Rose separated by some technical loophole in time.

But we are coping, you and I; survivors with or without freedom.

These walls remain but so will our love and our fight against injustice

The system has not destroyed us or our creativity.

So what is it this freedom we desire so much?

Does it exist at all or is it just a fragile illusion?

People are born free like Joy Adamson's lions

But there the concept stops - mortgages, marriages, money

The trappings of life imprison us all.

Freedom is a mere figment of our imagination- incarcerated or not. 

*

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http://www.helium.com/items/1431945-illusion 

 

Then and now

Then, Costain built, in salubrious suburb of the thirties
With unshakable, firm foundations,
Grandma's house was constructed to last.
For little more than five hundred pounds
She bought a house in Greenford, Avoiding proverbial peasoupers,
Leaving urban grime an hour away,
Still near enough to shop at Swan and Edgars.
Delighted her nets would retain their whiteness

She swapped the blitz for sane suburbia.
Peaceful was her tree-lined avenue,
Family cars, a  future fantasy.
Constant birdsong interrupted rarely
By whirs and fizzes from the Piccadilly line.
A tranquillity almost rural; an ideal location.
Now, through grimy panes beneath Heathrow's flight path,
Grandma sees Jumbos release their landing gear.
She can almost shake hands with the pilot,
Sitting in her not so tranquil garden,
Birds only audible at dawn,
Sparrows no longer ubiquitous.
Her yellow canary dares to chirp
His unchanging melody from a prison
A world away from a life nature intended.
He sounds happy but is his song
A yearning for a life he’s never known?
Windows rattle to the din of congestion,
Walls reverberate; and pantechnicons
This road was never built for
Spew noxious fumes into the lounge.
An ambulance races to the IBM building
 At the crossroads, sirens blaring.
Whir and fizz of the tube train,
Compete with motorbikes and jet engines,
An orchestra of transport surrounds Grandma
But deafness in twilight years blinds her to reality.
Sometimes, startled, she'll turn up the TV in response,
When best china tea cups dance to the tune of the traffic.
Seventy years on, houses like Grandma's sell
For more than a quarter of a million pounds -
What price now for tranquillity?

*

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  http://www.helium.com/items/784125-the-surburban-semi-then-and-now

                    A poem about missed opportunity in love

Carpe diem... seize the day

 *

 Life

At the end of your life everything is supposed
To flash before your eyes - forwards.
Would backwards make any difference?
Suppose you could rewind your existence
Back to the point where it all went wrong
And edit out the disastrous bits like in a home movie
It might make more sense backwards.

'CUT!' You would shout,
Intervening at that crucial point
I could have made some changes there!
And prevented years of misery that followed.

To untangle a lifetime of negativity
As if it were some badly knitted pullover,
becoming an unblemished ball of wool again.
Then knit it up into something more useful.

Ink removed from register,flowing back into pen,
Golden band of servitude torn from finger
And white rolls reversing to the parental home
Where you would have remained in bed, that fateful day.

But the past is too complex,time is a continuum,
One event affecting all those to come
Life is too interwoven
to unwind like some misshapen jumper
Unravelling it isn't possible
Even going back to pick up dropped stitches is difficult.

*

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  http://www.helium.com/items/762551-unravelling-life

A poem about two children playing 'Cowboys and Indians'

Powwow in the park