THE BLUE OPUS (circa 1985)

"Totally pretentious, it's like a bad MTV pop video"
A well known North East Poetry magazine

It is almost time, as the hour speaks. I was like a shelf hanging in space. The fingernail of each dream scratched the four years of my doorbell insanity.
The cruel spine of the balustrade took over the desire to sleep; the flames of our tallow candles misplaced the shadow of the railings. They made me lurk in dark doorways, with the razor blade of your lies. I found a book, on a page; there were ten scattered lines and four staircases. Cautiously I picked out the scrambled letters. It was a poem entitled “Herberts Grave”.

It was hard to believe that the Sun didn’t rise, as I walked through the music of a dream. Beyond the hall a drum could be heard from the musicians sleep. My fingers burst into tears, crying for the chapters of an automobile race, tearing holes in the memory of a friend.

The long tailed morning joined the wheel to its early morning rise. It was cloudless July, the words of a black coat faded. The dangerous street numbers cheering themselves deaf, became the fearsome brides of the cutter. I broke from the ten cards and cheap jugglers to a room of a castle. The other people became farewell poisons. How glad I was to escape the aeroplanes. The heavy face of a sloping meadow covered half in Natures watering can, between two deaths, costumed my poems of the prayer stool. Moving to the draping carpets I swallowed the photographs of the period… one leg and an inch of flying beauty. The mirror sang its water song in the wisdom of a shaking bough… the air became sweeter almost a strange farm of conversation.

It was a race against time, avoiding my silhouette I brushed by the window ignoring the burning barn. On the drawbridge a car had fallen from its desires. Paring knives, the fifty convicts of my schizophrenia, momentarily lost their hours. The paralysis of a train cornered itself into a cremation; fires were red soup of a pledge. I stood motion less, forgetting the pronouncement of the wicked springboard of Luck. The daytime smoke became an insane carnival. The proud hunt for the passengers became the absurd illusion of statues.

Standing in the rosewood frame of noon the cruel blade of a goddess transformed the scene into the five-minute eye movement of fascination. Snowflakes descended their silken ladders making inscriptions on the grey jaws of the platform. The labourers hanged themselves, combing orphan sleep with a lament of a gifted sculptress; I leaned on the nearby sound of a sobbing limb, counting the old rooms of the station. Finding some with storms in them.
The right leg of my Sunday afternoon flesh listened and tapped the dagger roses of a waking clock. The girl in the nearby village folded her black shoes, hiding them from the tiptoeing phantom. A guitar was the suitcase of your smile; a gentle clarion of glass made the chill of my daytime dance a blind window calling gold as a Sabbath.

The nearest pond bounced a few times… a homocentrical figure with wrists, gave me the orchestra of the paperweight glassy world. I had grown too young for the skies hollow hand, murdering the raspberries of a nerve I abandoned the Castle for the forest. Rushing with the flirtations of silence, the esoteric flower elves gave me the sermon of a sawmill, where the logs injure the steep expression of ruined screams. I shatter the wall, darkening the water, with my skeletal eyes, knuckling into an arm of boredom. The cold-cropped hair of Venus swooped her whistling dress into the two colours of my surrendered bird. I, the king of candles and shadows, burdened the tin drums of the ruffling Moons. Crowded pavements were the lips of the harmonica, clanging their girlfriends bottles on the heart of a hand.
I followed Herbert to the streetcar with the human soundtrack of crying. We glanced through the pictures of a cupboard. Your winter overcoat inherited the rigid wrinkles of a kiss; her lips implied the blades of a lament. With grace and carelessness you told me the frost of horses in your six month Celtic bard voice, how the sleepy windows of laughter and love always were the same door to the cellar. Tearing his Crow costume I hid the anchor of the car and ran to the harbours mouth. The Captain and the Brick maker grinned the fragments of a helpless butterfly. The cemetery trumpet queued to the tray of my ears.

The self-burnt string of happiness was far behind in the brow of the last accordions song.
I daydreamed on the clear open sea… scorning the palmed hues of the moonlight. The island was the spine of powder in the cherry pits of paradise. The broken arm of the sky shone its white bone. I wilted into my cabin for a good long rest. The dead flashlight of dreams hung like the pale breasts of laundry.
The portholes provided the Moon with a museum. I nightmared the figurehead; white gloves of the blue veined flock of demons, contorted mouths, revolving heads dripped their ice and sunburnt children in sleets of collected tombstones.
I jacked up my eyelids and the phantasms left a perished poem. Covered in trees of sweat, the piano stool flitted its lids; the old man dinted the whites… I left without saying goodbye.

My Judas decision conversed and twisted, as the milk glass would split its human company. I stood barefoot, my hand holding the impression of strong morning laughter; the damp air was the abortion of dead breaths. The philosopher dropped his marinal hammer, scraping the skin of the amen of a hymn. The fists and fins of my small eyes burrowed into the parachute silk of the woman’s flamed ballet, her church door faced the railway tracks of my waiting. The drawn-in-look of her cheekbones creased in tempo, the school desk voice chalk marked the evening, coal black eyes with nude backgrounds of a lanterns teeth… she smiled with cheap pornography. We spent the whole of the voyage in closed eyed dreams.
My zeppelin head skulked into the melancholy of a corner. Life was a portrait of flute mourners; their stone fingers oozed their little nightmares.
Avoiding the strokes of the asylum class I struggled from the eternal posture of Death. The soldier patterns of the blue clock dragged its three-minute hate machine into my room. I fled as a fleece of clockwork grass… engulfing the plague theatres and streets of granulated columns smelling of graveyard wine.
The helter-skelter of a cloud were vertical bamboos with the black touch of furnaced men. My top hat barricaded the Sun, bewitched by the museums attendants blood a beautiful fish invented its by darkening its saccharine canoe, being a thousand miles away from a pistol, it secured its oblong squad into its upper floor paint.
The freight cars gurgled; my flag stone legs ran by the field grey uniforms. They gave me the look of a schoolboys catapult… my mouth dripped a green pen with a needlework gesture to the skull-faced man, “shoot me, shoot me” he said, his throat confessed a horror novel. Neither of his hands reminded themselves of a key. He tried instruments, but only to axe dance screams.

I penetrated the corridors as a whip deprived of a victim. Inside the carriage the armour plated passengers, squealed like a house at six o clock.
I was ordered out by a summer night’s vision. I left the palace of valid torment with her cobwebs the necklace of the night, to pursue the lady of Egypt, singing cathedral sorrows with bashful eyes. But there was no one there; I had been given the lie fusion. So I left my murder behind like a dancing shape of emotions to intrigue the thin paladins.
I examined my leg batteries in the alcohol light and froze the whirlwind… the spiders gossamer kiss surpassed the devouring herds of the vampires… my dream wolves had returned to rattle-snake solitude in anthem swells.
Decomposing my trenched forehead to resume seated in the Scream Theatre. My eyes had their rudders stolen, so like the black horse of tomorrow’s dust I swooped in the sudden blood of sweat, across the clumsy fields, thirsting the sixty hours of camouflage.
A copper chariot of serpents pulled by the fairy tale stones, halted beside the cottage. They came with cardboard masks and drew their shark tails. The two streamed crash of the arched thunder, giggled war. Every picture had to be re-painted, the statues re-named and the certain signs of a winged book, were to be scarred on the cramped couch of sleep.
I thought of going back and opened my fist to find the education of a ticket that had been wiped clean by the hungry aquarium. Then with a sigh and a sidelong glance a monsoon of coloured stones rained into the grotto of a statues eye, hairs of scattered water danced upon the blazing postcard, reducing the buckled blue flames, into the paradox of smoke.
I left with my injured halo into the cloudbanks, wanting nothing of private miracles… dragging my charred wings behind…