Life, And All That

They grow up, and heaven save us
from sullen, moody-broody, ultra-sensitive
teen-age girls who suffer exquisite pains
of self-pity because their anguished selves
are so perfectly underestimated, under
imagined, under-represented and
misunderstood, as egoistic, self-absorbed
insensitivity. It is satisfyingly heart-breaking
to the self-pitying drama queen to persuade
herself that her angst, her quarrel with the
unfairness of it all - life and expectations
of conformity and moronic social mores and
anticipations and aspirational creative
achievement constraining pleasure and
leisure all too much to bear, coupled with
parental complaints of non-compliance and
the stress of school assignments transforming
simple existence into a miserable trial,
compounded immeasurably by peer cliques
and clashes. Life (sigh), is a distracted
bowl of uncompromising disappointment.
Is that all there is? Expectations turned to
ashes? Awaiting the ego-mollifying
observation: "You're divinely perfect."

Endurance

The sky, hugely dishevelled with bruised,
ragged clouds, wind whirling a high altitude
finally carries them off to release their
torrents elsewhere, leaving the valley without
its blast-furnace intermediary, the sun finally
blazing its long fingers of hydrogen radiation
baking all that lies below in a ferociously resolute
gathering of oppressively stifling heat to
dominate the mountain landscape.

The mountain stream embracing the stony
fissures that have carried it down the
mountainside for aeons, from the arid steam
of boiling contact, entices birds and insects to
its cool spray rapidly evaporating through
its passage, constantly renewed. Overhanging
trees, tenaciously clinging with shallow roots
to sparse soil embedded in bedrock, respire
and add restorative, inadequate shade
to relieve heat-exhausted wildlife.

Immense granite boulders, elephantine
in colour and size, long since tumbled in an
ancient rockslide, rest massively on the
granite ledges of the mountainside. Huge
fallen trunks bridge the gap from stream to
rocky bank. A northern thrush sings its
faith in tomorrow. The heat, intense in its
fiery fervour, meeting the stream, sends
vapour rising in a shimmer of distorting
waves of fantasized mountain imagery.

Elegy

Overnight, an amazing spark
of genius visited my mind at rest,
piquing my languid muse to suddenly,
feverishly prod me into an awareness
of the possibilities in time and
opportunity forfeited to the nightly
abandonment of creative impulse.

Awakening to the dark stillness of the
early hours, my mind captured
brilliant expression and the poetry of
languaged imagery spilled into being,
creating a lilting, lovely poem, destined
to be captured, ready-made for
proud collection on the morrow.

Morning came, and creative
genius dissipated, dissolved
into a perplexing, empty disclaimer.
I sit, confounded and forlorn, with
a bitter-sweet taste of triumphant
remembrance of joy, incapable of
dredging into recall the leading line
of perfect prose to link what followed
to proud conclusion. That perfect
poem, never to be retrieved.

Suffer The Children

Too young for words, the child's face,
within its craggy, over-sized skull, seated
on its scrawny neck emits a constant,
pained whine of dire needs unmet,
his pinched, dark features etched in a
rictus of pain. His mother, herself in a
state of starvation, can do nothing for her
severely malnourished infant. Her other
children, older, just as miserably
malnourished, are silent, their eyes
long since reverted from pleading to
deeply blank, expectations fled in the face
of their grim reality. They do her bidding,
lift one tired, swollen, bleeding foot after
the other in their desperately slow flight
from war zones, from the arid, persistent
drought, from their sickly cow's and goat's
fallen, bone-protruding carcasses.

The children's dull, dark skin, covered
with sores and the dust of their long journey
stretches over their swollen, starved bellies;
absent the merest padding of flesh on their
fragile limbs. Flies buzz about their hollow,
suppurating eyes, the children too languidly
disinterested to lift emaciated arms
to dispel the disease carriers.

Save The Children, Oxfam, UNICEF,
and Doctors Without Borders issue
daily condition updates on the plight
of these food-migrants, bemoaning a world
indifferent to their plight, sadly moved
but become immune to the recurring
misery, leaving the indigent so marginalized,
vulnerable to calamitous extermination;
a levelling of the world's population, of
those incapable of helping themselves,
succumbing to the Three Horsemen of
the Apocalypse: War, Famine and Death.

Primal Elements

First there was searing heat, the sky
an open, roaring crucible of flaming energy,
roasting everything below its pellucid throned
domain, in which swam few clouds, the
atmosphere dipped in humidity, rays of
powerful light and cell-destroying integrity
radiating relentlessly in an all-encompassing
arc of resolute majesty aloofly reigning.

While the sun flung its fierce flaming
fingers of hydrogen upon the Earth, violent
winds whipped themselves into a frothing
frenzy, darting about the landscape,
ushering through the incandescent sky a vast
procession of black, booming thunderheads,
creating a contusion of sound and action,
heat and humidity starkly illuminated through
the gathering darkness by lightning sheets
spread over the heavens, rife with
commotion and the strife of primal,
oppositional elements shattering peace.

The Corrupt Corrupted

And the latest news is that (of course)
news of the world is now the late
unlamented tabloid News of the World.
Its owner and trusted editors
dedicated to revealing all the news
unfit to print by means unfair and
decidedly foul, find it exceedingly
expedient to declare wholeheartedly
their most profound regrets: "sorry".

It has indeed been a sorry spectacle
to witness political, social and
security elite stumbling their way
to utterly unconditional,purple-prose
outrage at the immoral, illegal,
imprudent and horribly inconvenient,
irritating malfeasance undertaken
in the interests of scooping tawdry
sales worthily-shocking tidbits.

The corporation, a powerful influence
whose funding and support so many
relied upon to achieve success was
feared, feted and ferociously favoured
by Britain's movers and shakers
courting the influence that aided them
admirably to mount prominence, position.

Dissolved, all, in a scandalous series
of revelations, of ambition unloosed
and prattling lips unsealed to irrevocably
link their endeavours with shoddy,
shady morals condemning all in an
acid bath of public censure, gossip
gone berserk, breaking helter-skelter
into the conspicuous realm of reality.

Handle With Care

She has become a family heirloom.
No one remembers life without her.
Not least our 15-year-old granddaughter
whom she handily pre-dated in this
household by four privileged years
of devoted care and attention.

She is still herself, self-possessed,
distantly aloof, aristocratic,
highly intelligent, a living reproof
to those who insist awareness and
practical sense exists in limited-
to-absent quantities in our
prized canine companions.

These days of breathless uncertainty
she glides like a dark-hued wraith
through our shared abode whose
every crack and corner is seared into
her brain no longer dependent on neural
transmission of sight and sound.

Though her dark coat is now threaded
silver-grey she moves as elegantly as of
yore, needing only a guiding, gentle tug
on soft harness, as we lead. She is like
unto delicate porcelain, treasured for its
aged beauty, the pleasure taken in its
presence. A rare treasure, dearly held.