Off the rails.

Off The Rails.

This used to be a railway line,
though now that’s hard to tell.
It looks as if it’s always been
a shaded woodland dell.
The rails were ripped up long ago;
forty years or more.
How quickly nature moves
to reclaim the crown she wore.
Where creosoted sleepers lay
the Rhododendron flowers.
Beech leaves in a breeze, a-sway,
throw dappled sunlight showers.
The cutting looks for all the world
like the dried bed of a stream;
but it was gouged with picks and bars,
by some old navvy team.
Slim saplings of the mighty Oak
grow tall as several men,
and seem to silently mock the days
when trains ran through the glen.
Fallen stones gleam green with moss
and form a bulging ridge.
Now, Stoat clan, dart among the ruin,
of what was once a bridge.
Tansy, Fern and Holly bush
grow thick where Rabbits play.
Young Foxes frisk; upon what men,
once called, the ‘Permanent Way’.

Nebulous bliss

Nebulous bliss
is this.
Like fallen leaves
on a slow running stream
we drift apart
and then together,
until death us do part
or likely as not
until I break your heart.
Again.
Or you break mine
with a throwaway line,
or a sneer that is curt,
and heedless of hurt.
Misty ribbons
that curl,
in the dizzying swirl
of the rope maker’s art …
How the hell did that start?
What happened there
with her?
Well you noticed me,
and I noticed you,
so we thought we might
mingle.
What else
should we do?
But the currents
that bind us
are the same that
unwind us and
We.
Become Me,
and Me.
And free.
Of
this …
nebulous bliss.

Thoughts and dreams, colliding.

Between the folds of empty sleep,
where consciousness stirs to rising.
A space exists where dreams and thoughts,
ever, are colliding.
In that space, uncertain time
and distorted image obtain.
A stairway to nowhere, a gate never closed,
and a thunderstorm without rain.
The dead live on, there.
The unborn too,
in places well known, to sleeping eyes.
Although we have never seen them awake,
they are places, that we recognise.
A recurrence of dream or half dream?
A life gone or one yet to be?
Synchronistic parallels enfolding?
Flashing visions from Chaos’ sea?
The zone of the Locus Coerulus,
a darkened patch, deep in the brain;
accesses areas time out of mind,
which I visit again, and again.
So who is that maid with the raven black hair
and a skin that is ivory pale?
Where is that gallery hewn from old oak,
in the flames, with a broken rail?
Where are those streams through the flowers?
Those mountains of lilac and gold?
And why is that man in the post office van
so much younger, than when he was old?