Portrait of an Artist

The mirror mirrored
Time’s imprisonment
Pale green walls
One-bulb light

The sound of the decades
Counted tick bloody tock
Days already fading

Self Portrait

The walls in the mirror were pale green. He took it down and propped it on a chair, the better to see himself. A single bulb in the centre of the ceiling cast its harsh light in stark shadows across his face. He sat for a long time with the drawing board on his knee, searching his mirrored features for inspiration, looking for anything resembling soul.

Instrumental

Sun rising
Gone in a morning
Noon’s short-shadow light

Mid-day waning

Whispers in the afternoon

Till twilight comes

People Rise Up

People rise up.

The tide in your affairs
Is a full sea flooding
To fortune
Or misadventure.

Cold House

Time leached through these walls, left fragments of history traced
On scarred woodwork and the brittle rags of furnishings;
Time’s passing left echoes behind the skirtings, tiny noises
Like an infestation of lost days and dismembered moments.

One hundred and sixty years have been buried
In these stones, under these planks and boards;
The rafters and beams creak beneath the weight.

Plaster cracked and crumbled; door-frames buckled;
The doors themselves warped; locks loosened and the wind
Rattled them, then swirled in eddies round the empty fireplaces.