The Rules of Fools ( from 2004)

Soft tide gliding in
Your hand upon my skin
It's as if your heart walked away
You broke the rules
Well, what rules were they?

And hour by hour we are holding here
On a shoreline rain's made unclear
As though the world is washing by
Your eyes too deep a place to hide
So why do you think you broke the rules?
I think they serve to make us fools

Soft tide gliding in
A letter, note or line to begin
I'd organise a whole page or two
And when it comes down to the rules
I'll leave those for other fools

Older poems revisited...

Feeling hugely uncreative at the moment but very reflective and so thought I'd visit some older pieces. It's always somehow horrific to read stuff I've written, trying to imagine what/where/how I have managed to find those words or (eeek!) that rhyme. I think I can only justify stuff on the concept that a poem is like a layer of skin...uhoh, I'm going to start talking about onions which will make Shrek fans laugh. Recurring themes sometimes pop up in older poems. One or two lines that I am happy with do too. So I'll start with some work from 2004.

In the crucible of nothing

In the crucible of nothing
Where there's only the night
And boredom leads to bottles
And the lonely broken flight
Where once were choirs of angels
A heart filled with empty cigarettes
In the crucible of nothing
You kid yourself you've no regrets

Magpie Billy winks at me
As I'm sitting under his tree
His words feel like wisdom
But beyond are blue skies

His song is beguiling
Enought to stop me smiling
I'm not one for optisim
But at least I try

Wayfarer

You turn to smile and the look in your eyes
Asks what is it that clouds my happy skies

It’s knowing you’re going to turn and walk away
Guess I’ll catch up with you, some day

finished! Horizontal Tides

I told myself any kind of promise
Is better than no promise at all
But what did I give in return
To be washed up on your unforgiving shores
It took an ocean of salt water
To open my eyes
Only to find
I'm still crying under horizontal tides

A walk over the hilltop and down to the sea
Vertical cliffs where the wind flies free
Above me the buzzards are circling round
But I’m keeping my feet firmly on solid ground

Well I was never one to make waves
But life shapes us by strange degrees
Cutting our dreams to the bone until
We change into windtorn trees
And I shouldn’t need to tell you
But it took a storm full of rain
To open my eyes
Only to find
I'm still crying under horizontal tides

First verse of Horizontal Tides...

I told myself any kind of promise
Is better than no promise at all
But what did I give in return
To be washed up on your unforgiving shores
It took an ocean of salt water
To open my eyes
Only to find
I'm still crying under horizontal tides

(possible chorus)
A walk over the hilltop and down to the sea
Vertical cliffs where the wind flies free
Above me the buzzards are circling round
But I’m keeping my feet firmly on solid ground

Horizontal Tides

Think this is the title for what I'm going to try and write next. Went for a walk in Dorset, along Stonebarrow and along Charmouth beach. There is nothing quite like a walk on a beach to clear your thoughts or a view across an empty sea and the clear, wide sky to give some perspective. It's how to distill all those walks, on all those beaches into a few lines of rhyme that's the tricky bit.

Vertical cliffs, horizontal tides, thoughts racing in the air, sharp as a gull's cry...