Wishes tide away, carrying mum and dad off

With seagull blue’s touch in the dawn.

Through the opened window I hear a familiar voice

Whisper-weaved from long breakers and rain.

Salt light rubs its wings against the bedroom wall,

Sheds momentary melancholy on morning’s mirror.

Nearer the sea, mum and dad are gardening,

Locked fast forever inside a dream with fossil gates.

The sounds of fossils are soft sighs underfoot

As pebbles ring with waves.

A seagull floats by, alarmingly white,

Chalk flaked off the cliff face of the sky.

The sea will not leave the floating land alone.

Slowly Sue stoops to pick a fossil,

Within her kicks the baby about to be

And in mum and dad’s dream-distant garden

Shadowed buds are breaking into light.

In my mind’s garden, I stall above blossoming futures

As the fossils of the world hide under tides.

“Seagull Blue,” whispers a familiar voice.

“Everyone knows that there are only white seagulls.

You must discover soon our son

The laws by which blue seagulls live."

© David R Morgan

LAUGH, DAMN YOU LAUGH

In the Arndale everything is almost imitation;

Eggs and bacon - the chicken  involved, the pig commited;

A breakfast at the end of the punchline.

I fell deeply in love with the lotto girl; I lost !

Yet when she spoke I heard prayer bells,

Like faithful refuse  lorries reversing.

Confucians love their ancestors; Hare Krishnas generous

investors; many appear enlightened by dope,

Knowingly whispering; extolling chocolate in the dark.

Now, I’d like to extol that father over there

Chasing his children around the centre

Of the shopping centre with heavy power tools.

Is that Graham Greene and Richard Gere

At Sartre's Existential Buffet Bar, big plates in hand,

Helping themselves to cold sausages?

Neither created nor destroyed, check your aura,

Only changed from one form into another;

It’s the biography of loose ends; all will be named.

Apes gibber, bears growl, chickens cackle,

Dolphins click, Eagles scream, foxes yelp

And people pray, people pray.

Christians pray for grace, astronomers stare at Space;

Jews find truth in the Torah; Muslims bow to Allah;

Many believe in the Ark; physicists in the quark.

In the Arndale everything is almost imitation;

I hear refuse bells yin and yang, a  transcendental sound

And all the sausages are stale.

                                                                  ©  David R Morgan

SIMON MAGUS

          Simon Magus, whom some called the false and blasphemous

          Messiah, is said to have once been accompanied by a female

          Virgin, with whom he used to sleep, but not sexually.

Before the fat mad fingers fiddled the insane strings

That set atmosphere on fire that set Rome burning

And the false Dove failed to fly;

The stars in their glittering habitation shone on Simon Magus

Sleeping with his sweet disciple, a girl of 16;

A virgin with a face to worship.

Both lay naked together night after night;

Yet he who insisted on entering her mind let her body be;

Senseless devotion to spirit more decadent than flesh.

But one night as they both slept

And he dreamed of the cross of power in his hands;

His rising to Heaven to unseat the old order;

His terrible resurrection final and triumphant,

As his Simonians raised a huge golden tower to him…

Yes, one night as their naked flesh felt each other ;

The mathematics of desire worked out the sum of things.

She caught fire and he went coldly on alone,

Lolling with conceit, practicing wonders on the silly dead;

Cochineal face smeared and slapped

By the same Sun he claimed to own who had burned her up.

But as time passed increasingly her face besotted him-

Like a possession never valued until lost.

Some say Peter and Paul’s prayers

Cast Simon Magus down into a ditch to die.

Others say, though more quietly,

That Simon Magus died of Syphilis

Caught from a virgin false as his religion;

Another footnote of failed ambition,

As boring as another’s joy, as glorious as despair.

No-one ever mentioned the possibility

Of a lost and lonely heart at last broken.

Perhaps it was just as well.

© David R Morgan