Beyond the Breech

If he once knew the light, it has not been
Self-evident, since he first turned and ran
Headlong for some despite he caught alone
Against the loveless brick of Birmingham.

For somewhere in the swell and moan he heard,
Before the velvet sac was ever breached,
Some godhead shuffle by him at the groan,
And beat him at the tunnel, to the street.

And leave to him the darkness of the cloud
Each bomber wrought, to prove that life was vain,
His heart, a tiny echo of the sound
Their dull explosions patterned at his brain.

Until he turned in panic, at the tide
And breeched, before the nurse could stem the flood
To kick his way in terror at the slide,
And cringe in silence, smeared with foetal blood.

While circled by a thousand crystal fires
He lay awhile, pretending to be dead,
But caught the acrid odour at his eyes,
And felt the windows splinter at his head.

The scent of fear had drowned the mother's smell,
And then the rubber, at the Mickey mask
Some torturer had long designed to spell
And catch his breath, and turn his mouth to ash.

And years that fled still saw him move in fear
On any street that threatened to confine,
He kept his silence strictly, by the year,
And breathed his air, and sought his own define.

While 'who' and 'why' and 'what' he read as lies
To twist and chart some long-term disarray,
To set the furrowed frown behind the eyes
That caught the mother, fretful at the clay.

That saw the father age beyond his years
And stoop, and grey, and crumble at his dust,
Before the woman's iron glance of love
Could humble, with her every tradesman's lust.

While he would play each rubbled hole that sank
Its memories in one explosive burst,
And catch his breath in shelters, dark and rank
Where he could tilt at shadows of his dearth.

And so he grew, and caught the early hope
That given time, he might explain his need
To drive each explanation from his mind
Before the questions drove him from his creed.

But dark suspicion brooded at each lie
And paralysed his will to move ahead,
He sought a deeper shadow at the thigh
To tempt from some unlovely wanton's bed.

Where he might coven, safe within her kind,
The darkness mask his fear before the breech
That sent him panicked, at some shrapnel rhyme
To burrow at the sigh, and taste the heat.

And lend him to another's frantic need
To feel some other flesh against her kind,
While he would wheel, and turn within his creed
To catch some distant echoes in his mind.

Bur search as ever searched, there's not a key
To tempt from time the secrets of that room,
Where distant shades of faded memory
Would drift, unbidden, at my mother's womb.

Bleak northern skies, you lost me at the spell
I carried since I spent my rabid wail,
I dredged my answers at your turbid well
In some attempt to grieve my tarnished grail.

But now I wait each bomb that breached the womb
To rain its horror, stain your crystal fires,
To end whatever need I ever felt
To answer for your self-lit funeral pyres.

David Lewis Paget

Before the British Fleet

Before the British Fleet sailed out
At this despite
Like one last lonely, errant knight
For chivalry,
Three hundred years set all
This rabid world alight,
Then slowly faded,
Like some tainted tapestry.

Three hundred years hang all
Upon this lonely hour,
Each generation tugs its children
At the blood,
To whisper 'pride' at each and every
Listening ear
That every tide and time be caught
Before the flood.

But as the cynic world
Now stands aside
To see this final far-flung tilt
At mastery,
Who waits as breathless as
The autumn bride,
While time sits trembling at the edge
Of history?

David Lewis Paget

All Things Burn Slowly

All things burn slowly
Dim
And I
Like one whose sight
Is failing him,
Turn inward at the widening gyre
To moth-drawn brightness, and desire.

Each ragged impulse
Spurs
While we,
Caught up in life's
Enchanted verse
Score some soft lonely, passing beat
While dactyls trip each slim deceit.

'Til life has fled us
Long,
They may,
Who did but know
When right was wrong,
Find all is echoes and refrain
Where gods once tapped each window pane.

David Lewis Paget

2May82 - (The Falklands)

We, who may but sit and fret
In impotence, while you would dare
Would brave the battle with you yet
If only chance had set us there.

We each have Vulcans of the mind
To harbour some dark manhood in,
But like the bat that flutters blind
We trust in dreams we cannot win.

And when each day's short course has run
And dreams lie scattered at our feet,
We think of all we might have done
And join, at heart, your battlefleet.

David Lewis Paget

Vain Imaginings

We have grown old
Time will not wait
For us, who caught
Its drift too late,
Who spent like fools
And lent like Kings
Purblind with vain imaginings.

For though each cup
Would spill the brim
At every sup
Of every whim,
What fool could see
His own intent -
Each shallow draft the level spent.

And now, like beggars
Caught in need,
We hoard the dregs
Of every creed
And only taste
The waste of Kings
Purblind with vain imaginings.

David Lewis Paget

To An Artist

When I first saw your lady kneel
In self-content, before the glass
Some chord of long delight decreed
That I must see her maker's face.

And so we met, my friend, and then
Some alchemy was born in need;
Your art adds magic to my spell,
My words give meaning to your creed.

Now for each hour you spend alone
With painful themes that I have wrought,
Your art disturbs my very dreams,
Your figures rule each line I wrote.

In some unseen far future, they
May say we once brought long delight,
That we burned candles through dim hours
At either end of our midnight.

David Lewis Paget

Time Knows No Passages

Nights in white cottages
By the last of the flickered firelight,
Supping sweet pottages
To the wind-wail without,
With the water on the wet wall
And your shadow on the lattices
As you cold-come to comfort
In the red candlelight.

At the grey day's frail dawning
We walk the storm ravages,
We talk at the tattered sea shore
Where the tide night-high rips,
I kissed you on a grey sky
Where the shells turn to sea-sand,
For time knows no passages
At a warm woman's lips.

David Lewis Paget

Pas De Deux

Who can say when all this was begun,
The leaping shadows, darting at the dawn,
The silent moods, dispersing, one by one
And metal figures, straining at the sun.

Which birth was which, and who and how, you said,
And why and when; you name each nameless grief,
But will she dance the woodland once again
To pas de deux with every falling leaf?

For she, who bore you in some hidden mould
And beat her anvil silently within,
Who, restless, turned you out to meet the cold
And sought her own vast silences again;

This one has caught you tugging at the heart
And fled within to hide her disarray,
She spoke the psychic tongue of one apart
To set you questing, restless at the clay.

For you have forged and wedded at the flame
How many wings to help man into flight?
Each twisted, turned and engineered in pain
In some attempt to set his mind alight.

Your women, neatly halved between the thighs
Expose the rhyme that you could never win,
And bare the pristine agony of lies
You wrote, before you gave away the pen.

And thus the one that tears the living light,
That bares each sinew, clawing at the scream,
What distant horror fled you by the night
To lend your hand to some one other's dream?

What lifelong silence taught the child by rote
That all of life was bound in petty rape;
If harsh despair could catch us by the throat
In what would lie the seeds of our escape?

Escape from what - from time that lines each face
And limits every man upon his quest,
To cage the soul within each planet's trace
While she performs some careless Arabesque;

While she disturbs each beaten man of steel
Who burns to raise his wings against the spell,
For she has wrought the silence that you feel
And none may gauge the fathoms at her well.

David Lewis Paget