Ha’pence cast by Nickers of my eyes,
the illusions shattered by those who know not.
To pierce what filtered;
the new scorching shafts sear my sight, and green scars haunt my visions.
Brittle ice, a graceful float yet a mask for cool, still waters.
The stone thrust through to free the chill truth.
Yet not without ripples.
A while then, before a new calm,
and the ice of our former blindness, now shattered, melts
and joins the greater whole, to swell its understanding,
to lap at new shores and turn with new tides.

Dervishing denial
spins a truthless trance,
needlessly flailing a cynical scythe
to endanger crop and compatriot.
You seek enemy in ally
and find malice to spite meaning.

The corvid choir’s dawnsong
summoning
light to ‘lid

Fool’s assayist marks
base behaviour
as the speculator’s panned-for purity
is lost to a plate costume –
proud, pretty
and burnished to black.

Now the Thames knows
it can come and tell.
For though you know,
re-telling will not stale
and may be,
maybe,
can show a-new
something of what seeds
in every utter
for you, enjoys.

Come here,
come swiftly,
come now,
for I long for a holding
long,
soft, warm, true.

For, while the Thames tells,
it does not bear back
for whom I care
into my arms.

A thousand sails testify to Grace in Troy
whose gilded gaze bears up the boughs on the balming,
casting shape not shadow here.
As a heart enfolded
unlocks
to a Love prefigured
in long-held longing looking,
a Word for a Meaning unsought
scrib’d across a Soul,
in the Angel’s healing hand of Truth and Honour –
Bliss

Seven stones-worth of unexpected loneliness.
An eternity in the making,
a lifetime in the breaking.
Diamond tears shed in prescient nagging
as my mending journeys proved fruitless as a ring sparkleless,
purchased with a labouring legacy vain;
so unlike that furnishing a roof for nurture
and the future’s true eternal – a lifetime.

Golden glow
from gilded gaze
glimpsed
as love penumbra
catching the light
casts the light
eclipsed by no shadow here
burnished
almost burning, bright
showing in glowing
englowing

Your butterfly care, kid,
some people catch unknowing, and a wing tears.

Such delicate balance too much to maintain, yet a flyer still.
Such rich‑hued aspect yet, colour‑blind, the careless deny
and turn their petals for moths of less an order.

Pollen for many blooms, yet a flower of his own?