Martini Sonnet
Long dream of summer in short skirt of glass.
The glass as prism: multiplying all
colours that meet it, sunshine, a right eyeful,
rendering all beyond it meaningless
at least for now, for this moment, more or less.
The eye is blind to what the mouth will feel: Continue reading
The Projection
Tiresias models what he’s told.
What nostrum dramas then ensue
he neither sees nor seizes hold.
Someone else has the costs in view, Continue reading
Daedalus
Here at Camicos, you can be free, at least.
Back on that island, we were prisoners
at the request of the King: no way out.
But amazingly we found our way out,
and flew as fast as our feet would carry us.
Wings? No, you misunderstand ‘flight’.
We were on the run, after all. Continue reading
Underpass
Endemic dark indemnifies the night.
Much madness undermines the roundabout:
directions redirect the recondite
from hypogean lower-level, out
in ways that liberate but lose the art.
Give way: there is no artery without Continue reading
Sea Glass
This weathered jewel began as normal shards
of shattered glass, but given enough time
and natural persistence from the seaboards,
that sharp, translucent, brittle crystalline
material, just so much composite sand, is ground
from broken bottles or even distant shipwrecks
until sharp edges become smoothed and round.
This cocktail of colour, found among the rocks, Continue reading
Ariadne
It was amazing luck, to get that clue.
Threading between the darkened outer rooms
he sought escape, the bull’s head in his arms.
The bass was thumping as the blood within.
She, grateful for assistance, guided him
outwards, his half-drunk feet still holding true.
They bounced it past the guards. So they were free:
(not Crete but Mykonos) though the summer’s heat
and adrenalin made the whole street a haze. Continue reading
The Rough Guide to Croatia
There’s a black sphinx in the city of Split
from Diocletian’s time. Her granite face
has watched the world turn for more than three millennia
(her eleven siblings were all beheaded),
her Egyptian cradle now a thing of the past. Continue reading
Key Phrases
As one door opens, another closes. Bad things
come to those who wait. Time hales all wounds.
The world’s our oyster, sickly, most
of it unpalatable, waste.
He was the apple of her eye, rotten to the core;
she a peach, a stone for a heart. A real dead wire. Continue reading
Fell
The inhabitants of Samarah saw the tower on fire
and Carathis and Vathek sacrificed them. Light
guided them to where no fire was found.
Ivory’s great but is no match for steel.
Stone, even better. Blow the tower down.
Anthony Royal designed Canary Wharf. Continue reading
The Cashpoint
Transactions common passing strange.
Such buttons pressed may yield so much.
Coterminal a gift exchange.
Reciprocal presents as such.
Such buttons pressed may yield so much, Continue reading
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