Trace

trace these words
with your fingers
take them in you
let them linger
wherever you feel
that they must be
therein you’ll have
the best of me.

The Pier

let me share this sunset’s end
though not beyond the distant years
but now upon the ebbing sea
let me give these colours names
which dance like fierce tiger flames
across the bay they seek to capture me

CIMITERO ACATTOLICO

It was springtime
one of golden sunshine
the mists of time
had countless years
to save
and across these lawns
wandered cats
as metered verse
among the poets’ graves

Roma : April 2018

Ağlayan Kaya

for offending the gods
she became stone
cursed to cry tears
forever alone

Sketched Memory

I reminisce in watercolours running
as if fresh upon a new page stained
in a sketchbook I had once discarded
on a parkbench left out in the rain

those memories I painted with such nuance
now with each raindrop lose some line or form
like the years passed by as scattered pages
from forgotten sketchbooks roughly torn.

Corylus

fashion me my tombstone
of broken hazel boughs
that I may rest then under
this ground I lay on now
for above me ‘twixt the leaves
ever shines the sky
so set me under hazel trees
to hold me when I die.

THREE UNFINISHED BATHROOM PIECES (HASTILY TAPED TOGETHER IN THE FASHION OF SIDE 2 OF ABBEY ROAD, A LONG PLAYING RECORD BY THE POPULAR LIVERPOOL BEAT COMBO THE BEATLES)

Oh magic mirror on the wall
are you that magic after all?
I ask you questions every day
you never have a thing to say.

I lost time
attempting to recreate
the clockwise
Coriolis effect
in my plughole
I’m sure I witnessed
during my shower
this morning
and settled on
the thoughts
of tailors in
Australia
and inside legs
and has the
world tripped over?

If I had a bag of sherbet dip
big enough to sleep in
I’d want you as my lollipop
if you were up for lickin’
You could be my dib-dab
sweet as sweet could be
all sugared up from tip to toe
a candy treat for me.

A Shady Tree

I sat under a shady tree
it behaved suspiciously
like it wanted to eat me

so I made my leave shaking my head
and to myself I sternly said
I’ll climb into a bush instead

The Shell

she held a seashell to her ear
to travel back and time replay
the only sound though she could hear
was time itself slip soft away
in life’s blood running through her veins
echoed beats of entropy
merciless this faint refrain
the ebbing of mortality.

Fife, Scotland : 2018

Communion

grieving Dionysius
did so his love adore
he vowed his lifeless body
to restore
as red berried vine
of tangled wood
and make sweet wine
from Ampelos’s blood.